New things are made by cobbling together existing things.

They can think and reason better than most humans. Most problems they're pointed at are not in their training set, but in certain ways they resemble things that are—maybe there are a few different resemblances to different problems in its training set—so it's able to pull these disparate similarities together and apply the patterns it finds to come up with a solution. Much like human brains do.

What? This is a massive misunderstanding. It’s easy to get truly novel ideas from LLMs, unless your definition of “new things” is so strict that no human can do so either.

The training set is about patterns, not facts or specific configurations. Yes, it’s possible to extract (some) of the training set verbatim, but that doesn’t mean it’s all you can do.

I am not sure if claude had powerpc scripts in its training.

That "only" part used to be the hardest. Getting the ideas was never the hard part. I think someone here even wrote an essay on that.

It does not think at all. It vibes based on its training and any additional bolted on constraints. It is a quite simple automation that only works by huge amount of existing data.

Modern man has grown quite dumb. He only seems to be able to "invent" by massive scaling things that are decades or centuries old..

I take it that your training cutoff was early 2023.

I'm not giving up the career. And I certainly don't feel left behind: I'm good at programming, and I still have a substantial edge over non-programmers here in meaningfully using agents (as of June 2026). The terrible cost refers to sucking all the joy of the process as the mechanized activity makes the actual intellectual part of the work redundant, if you can understand.

Software development is now another fake job.

Carpenters would have cried if all their work was reduced to shoving the logs into CNC machines.

Yes there is still human input but it requires comparatively no skill or depth and it gets easier by the month. If I were lobotimized today I'd still be able to function as half-assed architect to AIs anyway.

When was the last time you read fighting distractions/getting "in the zone"/complaint about open space offices thread or comment? They used to be a weekly feature on HN frontpage.

I think carpenters might cry if a company went around shoving every single piece of carpentry they could find into a machine, and then when you press a button on that machine, a chair comes out, and then they go around saying that this machine will replace carpenters forever, and they made this machine with no help from other carpenters, and furniture makers all went "who needs carpenters anymore, lets just use the chair machine"

The real problem is we built the genie in the lamp or the monkey's paw: it's a machine that gives you what you ask for!

> Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering.

Why is that? Coding, for me, is kinda relaxing, and the fun part of developing software. Gathering requirements, especially in a corporate settings, is the tedious part and the most time consuming.

Accountability?!?! Outside medical software, and similar niches, I see little accountability in the software industry.