we're at the hn front page people! :))
Any conversation
Overvalued, maybe. Extremely valuable, yes, though.
For sure. We're well past the point of being able to reasonably claim that the tools have no practical use.
But I share the article's skepticism that LLM-based AI will "produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers". Which it at this point has to in order to justify these companies' stupendous valuations.
Tomorrow no but there will always be the โhopeโ which is enough for the next 20 years before giving up. Which meanwhile would be replacing larger and larger chunks of the workforce so it wonโt really matter, weโll be adjusting our lives around it as well so we meet in the middle.
Tesla has been overvalued for over a decade with the promise of โfully autonomous carsโ and itโs still not losing its value, despite not meeting that (and probably never will, as the computation necessary to achieve it is bounded by physics).
I have a toddler.
I come home from work, cook, feed, clean, wash up. We read stories and play. I put him to bed.
Then I put something on the television and my wife and I scroll on our phones until she goes to bed.
I am not so careless with the little free time I have.
I continue to scroll until about 1 am.
The next morning I do it again.
On the weekends, I get to drink wine.
But maybe we'd all be a little saner if we remembered what we're actually doing: building tools to make our lives and the lives of others easier.
This resonated a lot. Iโm glad I read it now, before going totally insane lol. But I disagree that itโs just a glorified spreadsheet. The UI/UX matters, how you present the data, how they can change and so on, all of those things play a role. The good thing with AI is iteration is cheaper than ever, so you can experiment and process the results quickly. But yeah sometimes I just do things here because I just have to be doing something, I canโt leave it alone.
Agreed. The "just" makes the statement sound dismissive, but I do agree with the underlying sentiment that most software boils down to CRUD apps that help people organize information and complete tasks more efficiently. I think the path to developer enlightenment is realizing this truth without despairing over it.
What is the exact definition of an IDE? JetBrain's products are as good as ever, in my opinion, but people have definitely made non-IDEs into big, hulking behemoths with tons of plugins. If anything, maybe "just an editor" is dead?
I think they mean the transition that all IDE's are making towards an agentic interface, hiding the code completely as humans will not have to interact with it since the AI will be doing a better job at everything, even auditing it.