Comment by Arisaka1

Comment by Arisaka1 3 days ago

3 replies

>Interesting how many people in a hacker forum

I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".

People commiting to the hacker ethos that consists of, among many other things, resistance to the established tools, embracing knowledge and code sharing, and exploration for its own sake are the minority.

The fact that there are many commenters who will claim that they finally build something they weren't able to build before and it's all thanks to LLM's is evidence that we already sacrificed the pursuit of personal competence, softly reframing it as "LLM competence", without caring about the implications.

Because obviously, every kid that dreamt of becoming a software engineer thought about orchestrating multiple agentic models that talk to each other and was excited about reviewing their output over and over again while editing markdown files.

The hackers are dead. Long live the hackers.

sph 3 days ago

> I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".

This is a mentality I am working extremely hard to get rid of, and I blame HN for indoctrinating me this way.

That said, these days I don't view this place as filled with "product-oriented engineers", but it's become like any other internet forum where naysayers and criticism always rises to the top. You could solve world hunger and the top comment would be someone going "well, actually..."

It's not HN that killed the hackers, it's the Internet snark that put the final nail in the coffin.

brabel 3 days ago

I consider myself a hacker as I spend many evenings and weekends writing code for no commercial purpose but to create cool stuff and sometimes even useful stuff all in the open. I have no idea why I should be against using LLM. Just like I use an IDE and wouldn’t want to write code without one, sometimes an LLM can quickly write some drudgery that if I had to write completely myself would likely stop me from continuing. It’s just another tool in the toolbox, stop regarding it as some sort of evil that replaces us! It doesn’t and probably never will, we will always have more important things to do that will still require a human, even if that does not include a whole lot of coding .

  • f_devd 3 days ago

    > I have no idea why I should be against using LLM

    It highly depends on your own perspective and goals, but one of the arguments I agree with is that habitually using it will effectively prevent you building any skill or insight into the code you've produced. That in turn leads to unintended consequences as implementation details become opaque and layers of abstraction build up. It's like hyper-accelerating tech-debt for an immediate result, if it's a simple project with no security requirements there would be little reason to not use the tool.