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▲ antirez 9 hours ago

I believe we will see a new huge wave of useful open source software. However don't expect the development model to stay the same. I was finally able to resurrect a few projects of mine, and many more will come. One incredible thing was the ability to easily merge what was worth merging from forks, for instance. The new OSS will be driven not much by the amount of code you can produce, but from the idea of software you have, how the software should look like, behave, what it should do to be useful. Today design is more important than coding.

▲m000 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The real question is how much of the new wave of vibe-coded software will be able to graduate from pet project to community-maintained project.

It feels that vibe coding may exacerbate fragmentation (10 different vibe-coded packages for the same thing) and abandonment (made it in a weekend and left it to rot) for open source software.

▲antirez 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe the process of accumulation of knowledge / fixes / interesting ideas will be still valid, so there will be a tons of small projects doing things that you can replicate and throw away, but the foundational libraries / tools will be still collaborative. But I don't agree with the idea of fragmentation, AI is very good at merging stuff from different branches, even when they diverged significantly.

▲koakuma-chan 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't trust software that has .claude in its GitHub repo.

▲echelon 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up.

I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews.

Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements.

On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done.

Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI.

In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort.

If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity.

I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do.

But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Edit:

Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.

I'm not lying about this.

I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.

The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code.

I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records."

And it does it in a minute.

I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there.

Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile.

This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids.

I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation.

I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine.

Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.

I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.

▲koakuma-chan 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use AI.

There was a submission to a blog post discussing applications of AI but it got killed for some reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750927

I remain convinced that if you use AI to write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess. I think this will remain the case until they figure out how to make a proper memory system. Until then, we still have to use our brains as the memory system.

One strategy I've seen that I like is using AI to prototype, but then write actual code yourself. This is what the Ghostty guy does I believe.

I agree that AI can write decent Rust code, but Rust is not a panacea. From what I heard, Cursor has a lot of vibe-coded Rust code, but it didn't save it from being, as I said, a buggy mess.

▲bugglebeetle 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> I remain convinced that if you write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess.

FYFY

▲volkercraig 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah the level of depraved code I've had contractors ask me to review... I don't think people realize how low the bar is.

▲nicoburns 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening. > > I'm not lying about this. > > I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.

There are lots of people claiming this. Many of whom have a solid background. Every now and then I check out someone's claim (checking the code they've generated). I've yet to find an AI-generated codebase that passed that check so far.

Perhaps yours is the one that does, but as we can't see the code for ourselves, there's no way for us to really know. And it's hard to take your word for it when there are so many people falsely making the same claims.

I expect a lot of HNers have had this experience.

▲simonw 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Have you looked at antirez's code?

https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c

▲koakuma-chan 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Generating code from scratch and modifying existing code are two different things, obviously the latter being where AI doesn't do great. Carefully managing and compressing context can somewhat help, but that is far from being a perfect solution.

▲joks 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here"

What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

> "I don't get the sour opinions."

The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.

▲matkoniecz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

large part of formerly done by humans graphics is now autogenerated

▲echelon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.

We'll probably start seeing this in software development this year. The tools finally feel ready for prime time.

> This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.

I am familiar with the most common arguments in opposition - stealing training data, hallucinations, not understanding logic (this is why "engineers in the loop" matters), big corps owning the tech (I really agree with this one), power usage, etc.

It feels as though the downvotes are from people that "dislike AI" for any of the aforementioned reasons. In the face of the possibility of losing jobs to engineers that leverage AI to get more quality work done, however, I don't know why HN engineers downvote anecdotes about real world usage. This is vital to know and understand. I would think one would want more evidence to consider about the state of things.

This is a quickly developing story. Your jobs are or will be on the line.

It doesn't matter what your personal misgivings are if your job will soon require the use of AI. You can hate it all you want, but if people are getting 10x more work done than you, you really don't have a choice.

This will be the same in every career sector with AI models that can be deployed to automate work -- marketing, editing, film, animation, VFX, software, music production, 3D modeling, game design, etc.

I don't think the jobs are going away, but I do think they're going to change. Fast.

No sense in sour grapes.

▲bloomca 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.

You claimed that it already happened to illustrators and artists, and while I am sure they use it one way or another, I don't think it transformed the industry. Now, I am not saying that it won't amount to anything in software, I just don't think it is ready as of right now outside of greenfield projects, mostly because the scope is limited.

I am pretty positive that at some point we'll have a tool which will automate the generation -> code review -> fixing (multiple loops) -> releasing without people. Currently people are the bottleneck and imo a better way is to exclude people completely outside of initial problem statement and accepting the result. Otherwise it is just too janky, that 10x comes with a huge asterisk that can unironically slow you down after all said and done.

▲echelon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I can write, unit test, code review, and QA test new HTTP endpoints in all of 15-30 minutes. It's good code.

I really don't know what else to say.

▲bloomca 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think fundamentally this approach is flawed for anything more complex than a simple endpoint. AI is already really good for throwaway code, that is very clear, it is also decent if you watch it like a hawk.

However, the complexity is still not handled super well, as you need to spend more time in code review and testing to make sure all edge cases are covered and the general module interconnection is decent. Ideally we want to modularize and make the breaking surface very small, but often it is not possible.

I think the next step is to fully remove people as accepting changes manually is just too brittle; I also think it is probably possible to do with the current tools but needs a very different approach from the current meta of highly specific docs.

▲koakuma-chan 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.

I gave you an upvote FWIW, after all, I mean, my job's codebase is already a buggy mess, so it doesn't hurt to throw AI on it, which is what I do.

> You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.

Wasn't this the case before AI as well?

▲gegtik 5 hours ago | parent [-]

right, but the productivity boost provides further leverage

▲blibble 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I've been

so not now, then?

▲jen20 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

“I’ve been alive for fifty years” does not imply one is dead.

▲ 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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▲GuinansEyebrows 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"i used to do drugs. i still do, but i used to, too."

▲avaer 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We need a new git. (could be built on the current git)

> One incredible thing was the ability to easily merge what was worth merging from forks, for instance

I agree, this is amazing, and really reduces the wasted effort. But it only works if you know what exists and where.

▲mg74 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More we need a new GitHub.

▲avaer 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also this.

But IMO the primitives we need are also fundamentally different with AI coding.

Commits kind of don't matter anymore. Maybe PR's don't matter either, except as labels. But CI/hard proof that the code works as advertised is gold, and this is something git doesn't store by default.

Additionally, as most software moves to being built by agents, the "real" git history you want is the chat history with your agent, and its CoT. If you can keep that and your CI runs, you could even throw away your `git` and probably still have a functionally better AI coding system.

If we get a new Github for AI coding I hope it's a bit of a departure from current git workflows. But git is definitely extensible enough that you could build this on git (which is what I think will ultimately happen).

▲pietro72ohboy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

May I recommend SourceHut (https://sr.ht/)

▲fc417fc802 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or for those more inclined towards the original fully distributed spirit of git: https://radicle.xyz/

▲reactordev 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or codeberg (https://codeberg.org)

▲the__alchemist 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are a pile of alternatives which have similar UIs.

▲forgotpwd16 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Jujutsu?

▲jdiff 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Jujutsu has been the tool that actually got me into making full use of version control software. Before, through multiple attempts at grasping at the deeper fundamentals, I only learned the bare minimum git commands I needed to make commits and branches, and very careful merges. Jujutsu maps to a much clearer and simpler mental model. Blockchains are nifty and all, but awfully inconvenient to work with as meatbags.

▲wasmainiac 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds a little extreem, why not just a new auto merge feature?

▲ 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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