Many popular dependencies suffer from feature creep. Instead of doing one thing and doing it well, they do five different things, one of them is the one you need, another one introduces horrible vulnerabilities. Next version fill fix an existing vulnerability, but add a new feature with another horrible vulnerability... so all the versions except for the latest one are flagged as dangerous to use.
I agree, especially the juxtaposition of "we have still have no idea how all of this is going to work when the dust settles" and "hype". If we don't know, then there is a chance it isn't a hype.
For example, now it may seem that the models are becoming mere infrastructure, and the value moves up to apps and data. But if the models of tomorrow become able to write the apps themselves, then the value moves back. I won't need to pay some to write me a wrapper for the LLM, if the LLM will be able to write the same wrapper, maybe even better because it will be customized for my needs. The app providers are currently profiting from the gap between "what a software company can do using the AI" and "what the AI can do unaided", but that gap is going to shrink, possibly to zero.
> The solution was going to be for everybody to write positive stories in which the LLM is good and relinquishes control, which then made it's way into the LLM's training data
> As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.
I guess this means that you have some good instincts or habits that would be good for a programmer, even if you didn't choose that path.
Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of the programming language and the APIs you want to use. It also requires clear communication and clear thinking, checking things, etc.
There is no reason why a non-programmer couldn't also think clearly or carefully. It's just a fact about humanity that most people don't; and many people have jobs that do not require this, so they never develop the skills. Some people develop them for job-unrelated reasons.
Now we are at the moment when the LLMs can do the syntax and APIs for you, but they still fail at clear thinking and proper caution. That elevates a good potential programmer to a good vibecoder.
Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).
At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.
I can absolutely say that "I couldn't answer the question first" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened.
I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always "trying to be the first to answer your question" were, overwhelmingly, the ones trying hardest not to let anyone ever close anything, even harder than the most aggrieved newbies asking questions and not caring about the underlying community. Nobody sits around answering multiple questions a day for years on end, purely on intrinsic motivation. I joined in late 2010 and posted answers all the way until mid-2023, but fully half of those were before the end of 2012. There are reasons for that. Meanwhile, there are people with reputation scores in the seven digits, even though the site awards no further privileges past 25,000. The obvious conclusion is that we're primarily talking about people primarily motivated by Number Go Up, and closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up, so it must be prevented at all costs.
Questions get closed for the reasons that are listed in the interface for closing questions, which are also described in the Help Center and also explained in detail on meta (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476). When questions don't meet the expected standards, it's important to close them as quickly as possible; because when people answer questions that should be closed, they are actively making the site worse (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). And since there will always be people around who are motivated by Number Go Up, there was value in preempting them.
Really the system was poorly designed. The Staging Ground was the one shining beacon of hope, because it inherently prevented answers by default, providing only a comment thread with the explicit purpose of fixing issues with the question so that it could meet site standards.
The Anti-Intellectualism of the Hacker News Elites.
AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.
(Just kidding, I know what happens... they will fire you and hire someone who doesn't have kids.)
reply