Disagree completely. I started using Astra from Sol the day it was released, and was a virtually imperceptable difference and made lots of mistakes and shit architecture decisions from day 1 of release.

They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades. Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there.

Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.

If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.

Yeah seems like most programmers just do it for the money. I imagine only like 20% of us do it just because we enjoy it.

I feel like the number is higher for software work where I'm at, and lower for every other profession. Scary when you think that your doctor is in it for the money

You can be a software developer without any formal training and without any licensure. Not so for an MD.

It's going to attract more people who have the mentality of artists or musicians, i.e. people who do it for the love of the craft and as a creative outlet.

> You can be a software developer without ... any licensure.

Don't jinx it. We are extremely lucky in this regard, and it actually looks like a rare exception.

hopefully the MD that passes all the tests is still worth his salt even if he only chose the profession for the paycheck.

but as one of the nearby professors is famous for saying: "C students gotta go somewhere."

( and since this is HN - he didn't mean the programming language :D )

idk, a lot of American doctors I've met seemed to be in it because they like school and stability. Though perhaps a similar scary.

There are plenty of easier ways to make money than becoming a doctor.

They tend to be higher risk though. If you've got the capacity for memorizing all the stuff you need to become a doctor, there's not much risk involved in attaining your doctor salary.

I'd just say there are scores of people who like programing. But that's about it.

It's an awesome profession for those of us who love it.

Tbf coding with ai is still super fun though. I am hoping that engs who hate it like you will finally get kicked out as productivity increases from ai and it will finally go back to just us nerds.

It's kinda soul-sucking being around all you guys that just hate this work, please get out and go do farming or something lol.

> It's an awesome profession for those of us who love it.

Yes, by definition of "love" and "awesome".

> Tbf coding with ai is still super fun though.

Agree, it could be entertaining.

> I am hoping that engs who hate it like you will finally get kicked out

Ain't gonna happen, as I am pretty good at it.

> please get out and go do farming or something lol.

I thought about, but it is not well paid. I make money mostly from investments though, still do occasional coding stuff - for money.

Damn, you think Ikea furniture is great?

Useful, or passable, sure. Great though?

"The only thing it lacks is weight." You must be being a bit hyperbolic no? Have you ever looked at artisanal/quality goods in comparison to IKEA? You can't see any quality difference?

I varies widely on piece, but even some (not all) of the cheapest wood stuff they have are pretty remarkable quality (or maybe I should say durability, the design side is still super simple for flat-packing optimizations). The non-entry-level stuff is quite good in my opinion.

But on some other stuff I tend to agree, their sofas are pretty bad in my opinion. The beds are okay, but even the non-cheap ones aren't "great".

I'd actually be curious to read an award winning ai book, all the ai books/interactive story generators I've tried have been... Ok at best... Do you know what novels have been written by ai and award winning?

Japanese isekai might not be your cup of tea, but one example is [1] which was way back in Jan, and models have improved a lot since then.

My sneaking suspicion is that there are a lot more cases than get reported, because authors are disincentivized to disclose AI usage, and readers by and large feel icky about reading AI work for reasons unrelated to quality.

I can totally see a weird future where a lot of what people like is AI generated, and everyone lies to each other about it. So it's hard to do research on this phenomenon.

[1] https://0115765.com/archives/165655

Not completely surprising that AI could do well generating manga. It's very formulaic in general and by nature devoid of a lot of the relatable character development from most other writing. I have no problem reading an AI story if it's done well, but it typically just isn't. What I find annoying though is AI generated content that is only interesting if it's actually real. Like a historic photo or a video of some shocking event.

I’d be ok reading AI-written stories if it’s only “AI assisted” (I.e. there’s a skilled human driving it). If it’s just a prompt and then the AI does all the writing, I know there’s just no intention behind it as LLMs don’t actually “think”- they just (in a very sophisticated way) pattern-match against an existing corpus.

I’ve experimented using AI to prototype game ideas and inevitably once I succumb to the temptation of handing the AI the game design reigns it starts devolving to meaningless slop with a silhouette of a meaningful design. The only way to get something meaningful (that ive found) is for the human to stay in the driver’s seat.

So a website AlphoPolis, awarded a cheap online romance manga some sort of award because it got a lot of likes on social media?

My Unassuming Skill, 'Tidying Up,' is the Strongest! ~A Corporate Slave Office Lady Accidentally Reforms a Country in Another World, and Now She's Doted on by the Knight Commander and His Majesty the Emperor!?~"

I guess I thought you were talking about real awards for great literature not webtoon style romance manga slop.

Whenever people compare ai to a one real world tool always surprises me tbh.

The only equivalent tool in wood working would be a robot that can build an entire table from scratch and you just sit there and tell it what to do and what kinda table you want and watch it autonomously build everything.

1 saw type is not really even remotely equivalent to what ai is to software.

Yeah, AI is a general purpose technology, on a par with the introduction of the computer itself. Analogies to tools seems inappropriate.

My comment wasn't about the tool, it was how people are treating the new tool. Much as they would when they learn other new tools. They tend to have a preference and apply it where they maybe shouldn't. Do people really need to ask AI everything like simple math problems or what goes best with this dress? Is that really a good use for early generation, water hungry, huge datacenter AI?

Just one shot in Claude if you have it or deepseek flash for free.

I don't know, my vibe coder friends always talk about wanting a visual programming language so they can understand the systems they make.

So I feel like your last sentence doesn't really track - yes they are like you , just telling specifications to the machine, but they can struggle for hours trying to get those specific instructions right because they can't understand what their systems are doing.

I think most of us know why they're doing it. We are just very pleased with it regardless.

1. I get great products for nearly free 2. Anthropic/openai/etc will hopefully be destroyed since they stole everyone's work and are trying to capitalize on pure theft.

Win-win. The why of it is not really that relevant.

>We are just very pleased with it regardless

You don't trust the multi-billion dollar behemoth, but you trust the militarized multi-trillion dollar behemoth to play 'robin hood'?

i can't get my brain around the mental loops here.

If you don't think Anthropic and OpenAI are multi-trillion dollar militarized behemoths you need to catch up on some news.

Both are planning $trillion+ IPOs this year. OpenAI is collaborating with the Department of War, and Anthropic is under intense pressure to do the same and their top model is being held hostage right now. This week, the Department of War wrote a statement that xAI should not be held accountable for environmental laws because Grok is a vital weapon system of the US and was used to fire over 2000 missiles at Iran. The pentagon's statement mentions there are 3-4 such models so you may be able to guess which they are.

> You don't trust the multi-billion dollar behemoth, but you trust the militarized multi-trillion dollar behemoth to play 'robin hood'?

Nobody's trusting anyone, we're just enjoying the benefits of true competition much like the working middle class gained benefits between the ideological competition of the Cold War.

I don't get it? I use the open weights deepseek on opencode Go hosted in the us/etc.

What are the mental loops here?

I would genuinely like to know if I'm missing something.