Consoles are quite expensive too these days. I think if not for the whole AI hypetrain and subsequent chip shortage, price for Steam Machine would have been more friendly.

The global inflation caused by the the AI wild ride is so underestimated. Also, so many consumer products that cannot exist in the current economy. Really looking forward for all of that hype to calm down

They've said as much.

I know people like that - the amount of inane, obsessive and just strange conversations they have with AI is concerning - there's never any actually useful result or information that they get out of these chats.

Furthermore, there are some clearly wrong questions where person asks AI to make some kind of numerical evaluation of some data. And evaluation is done entirely through inference - essentially a hallucination, instead of some one-off python script which can actually give deterministic calculated evaluation. Yet they accept the answer AI gives them.

I don't think offloading things that you "think" you don't need to know is a realistic thing. Instead this seems like some slippery slope of intellectual degradation where slowly you'll replace more and more parts of the thought process with AI which ends in some rather sad existence.

I agree, I suspect that when we say "oh, I don't need to know this", what we really mean is we have that unpleasant feeling behind our eyes that says this is not going to gratify my goal

The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things

I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself.

Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand.

As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.

You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.

This is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences.

Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.

Nothing new under the sun though. It's the barista-brication of the tech field. No crafting skills, to make anyone replaceable.

We saw it before AI. See ServiceNow university, teaching tailored abilities to run as technical consultant, for ServiceNow. That way good luck transitioning.

That's just business owners and C-suite pocketing the difference while they fire staff and replacing it with AI. At some point somebody would have to start asking "business" some tough questions.

They are firing artisans for cheaper labor who just use AI. They aren't replacing people with AI that's a fallacy.

You're not alone. This is the reason why I switched from VSCode to nvim (AstroNvim to be specific). It has all the things I need with the ability to add any extra plugins necessary while using less resources.

I can't tell how much less resources it uses - haven't really tested that. To be fair to VSCode often times biggest resource hog is various language servers.

Tried turning on greyscale mode and I am surprised by how effectively it works in making me not want to use the phone.

Not sure if it's the lack of color in general or because screens kind of turn into a black and white mush that's hard to navigate.

I think it is a mix of both. Grey scale reduces the vividness of everything, but also none of these apps are really designed with grey scale in mind.

Greyscale can be very cool and easy to use if built for it. Just look at Mac's before they went colour as an example.

I turned off all notifications, put the phone away upside down and same effect.

The desire to get rid of software engineers is bizarre - because at the root of it, developers were there not to just write the code, but to ask right questions and based on these question build right things.

I've met in my professional life some managers or other middlemen who would be profoundly incapable of producing correct software no matter how smart of an AI agent they have access to. One of those - you don't know what you don't know.

But, I guess this is the world we live in now. Going to be Mortal Kombat for positions in companies where software engineers are actually valued.

It depends a lot where you work because there are lots of companies in the world where the business analyst does all of that and the developers exist to mindlessly translate their docs into code.

That sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.

There's a reason I didn't stay in that domain, let me tell you.

Having worked in places across both extremes (software engineer doing lots of other things including BD, hardware, ops, etc. to just being a JIRA ticket machine monkey), I am suspicious that HN readership is biased towards the former and frankly the bulk of "software engineers" in the world _willingly_ exist in the latter category. I didn't experience the latter until later in my career and God Almighty was it uncomfortable, but I think if AI were to displace some subset of "software engineers" it would those (they also seem to overwhelmingly dislike writing any prose whatsoever, which to me is a major tell). Many, many software engineers outside of hotshot shops seem either incapable or profoundly averse to "asking the questions" as you say.

Most here on HN know sweatshops exists but seemed they think not people work there or use them. I have worked with (via clients who used them) programmers in enormous buildings in Bangalore, who have a camera behind them so you can watch your people 247 and who just mindlessly transform jira tickets into code; I keep saying; there is zero use for all those millions of people at all; seems HN does not believe that because they seem to not believe these people exist. I worked with many over the past 30 years and by far most have no real clue what they are doing so I also doubt they can be re educated for a new co existence with LLMs.

Don't think calling a PR written by AI is the same thing as using a "tool". If code is largely generated by AI means that AI was an author and not you with some tool.

At what point does it cease to be AI generated and become my own work?

If LLM generates some code but I edit it, does it become my own work? How much editing must be done?

How large is "largely" ? Exactly how many bits of information must come from my fingers tapping the keyboard in order for me to qualify for authorship? Be precise.

If I write something but the LLM polishes it up a bit, is it still my work? Or is it AI generated?

I don't have an answer about the stage when something should be considered authored by AI - we are in an uncharted territory on this.

There are some precedents and rulings related to copyright and AI, so we have at least some rubric by which "authorship" can be determined. But when it comes to AI doing polishing of existing code - that is less certain.

Consider the rules around copyright. If your part of it is substantive, then it's your own work. If it isn't, then it isn't.

I'm not going to define substantive for you. That's something you should feel obligated to research and learn about yourself; anything less is dishonest.

Copyright provides for works made for hire. You are the author, yet your employer owns it. Your employer owns your output and gets credit for it despite not having written even a single bit of it. You're essentially ghostwriting your employer's software.

So "consider copyright" isn't really strengthening your position.

I am in a process of upgrading fairly big Vue 2 app (technically 2 apps, where one is not traditional and the other uses Inertia) to Vue 3.

It is a fairly painful process - I am using Codex and Claude as a first pass for converting things, but everything has to be checked manually and often fixed or rolled back to try again. Too often instead of "removing" piece of code that is not necessary anymore, AI would try to add a 100 line workaround for it because it would really rather add things than remove them.

It is, however still a faster process than doing manual rewrite. Smaller components are a breeze to convert from older Vue 2 to Vue 3 composition API.

Rewriting entry point app.ts with bunch of custom plugins was a horrendous experience that eventually was done manually. Move from Vuex to Pinia was also 50/50. Some things were easy, some things were not and had to be done manually.

Then there's a process of switching from unsupported packages which is a whole other can of worms.

Overall - if not for AI I'm not sure I'd have gone with an upgrade at this point. Yes it requires careful review and testing, but a ton of trivial stuff was done very quickly.

It's a an all-in-one kind of system where you have p2p payments and traditional online payments (like what you would do when making payment for a product on some e-commerce shop).

Plus some additional features like payments through QR.