I would agree with you generally, but in this particular case, the distinction seems important because a significant percentage of the world population believes that agents can be self-aware, a-là Terminator etc.
Please explain how it is "unclear" that agents "can be self-aware"? As Wikipedia would say, citation needed. Just because an agent can write convincing enough to convince you that it's "self-aware" doesn't mean it really is, in fact, self-aware.
Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness, (2025) — "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness, (2023) — "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.
So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.
Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
I see your point but I'm not sure there is much more to say on the matter: apart from having fun, learning stuff and taking pride in your work, what other reasons do you see for "doing things the hard way"? You could argue that it makes you more competitive because you'll be better at babysitting a coding agent, but this feels less and less true with every new model. Unless you're seeing something else to take into account here?
> Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.
Pretty much this. There was a lot of build up in the first paragraphs, only to conclude something that, at least in my view, is remarkably uninteresting.
I personally went through the authors dilemma but came out different. I personally don’t care for the writing by hand, but absolutely do read every line produced by AI, because I take pride it a well designed and easy to understand system; well designed abstractions. I’m able to build better and easier to understand software (with better tests!) then I ever was before.
AI is a great editor; I can finally do all the refactors that I wanted to do that were much harder before; would have taken a long time.
AI is great at writing tooling, I love a good tool that gets the task at hand done; encodes a task that others will need to do. Couple that with a skill file and now a fuzzy tech debt migration can actually be completed across many teams at there pace.
I focus on the cheapest model/fastest model (been using Luna). I use pi and don’t try to multiplex my time, and stay in flow on a specific task till it is done. And I’m very happy with this, actually enjoy this more. Vim skills stay useful for editing the prompts/module structure/fixing slop code during review/ and review.
The volume of code is high so reading a diff is suboptimal for review; so I tend to review from local checkout using vim (LSP tooling important during review, go to def, etc).
In fact, in various parts of the text, DHH is actually trying to distinguish between a "simple" view that it's a "far right" political agenda, and instead the fact that people feel loss of identity, and lack of security.
I don't know enough about DHH to state for sure that he is, or he is not, a right wing or fascist supporter, but in my view that blog post isn't proof of that. I've read it and found it to be an attempt at reframing the problem with a fresh view.
Incorrect. He doesn't blame non-natives. He blames native politicians for allowing incompatible (sic!) non natives in, in way too large numbers. He tells about the problem, the cause of it, and describes how there has been an increased awareness of the problem in many countries and how the political winds changed.
Ah, yeah, sorry, the problem is not about rats, it's the people letting them in. Oh, how racists can decoy. The people he supports are for remigration, which is another way to say deportation. And btw, wasn't he a migrant in the US he loves?
Who is at fault for an infestation of rats in NY? Rats or the environment (trash system)? And what is the best way to solve it - try to change rats (read: change people's individual culture, which might be fine by itself somehere else, but is problematic in NY) or to change the environment (trash collection)?
Rats do what they do, nobody is blaming them per se. They are just not welcome in places they are a nuisance.
Not really a device or a service, but I'd recommend learning the names of the notes and then just tinkering around. If you notice some patterns or wonder about specific things that come up in the course of that, look it up. If your hand starts to hurt, look up what to do differently. Etc. You'll manage it quite well with that method.
Your comment is a good reminder of why I love the HN community so much. Having acccess to knowledge in specific domains, like in this case, is truly a gem.
The biggest one was probably 2 years back, the dispute with WP Engine, a hosting provider for WordPress. He used WordPress infrastructure to force all instances hosted there to break, then removed the extensions they built from the plugin store, and then replaced them under the exact same name and identifier with his own.
He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers. These comments were then of course used in subsequent lawsuits, which so far he's been losing.
He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.
> He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers.
As I recall, some of his posts indicated he was knowingly posting against the advice of his lawyers. Although he probably didn't discuss individual posts.
> He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.
It was actually a pretty nice offer. iirc it was a pretty decent severance, no questions asked.
The whole WP engine thing. I think it’s private equity buying a wordpress thing, but things got weird and it starting getting bad press. There was the hijacking of a plugin from them if I recall among other things (checkbox in login saying you weren’t affiliated with Wpengine)
Talking to a few Wordpress consultants they were getting questions from their clients which isn’t good.
Matt has seemed erratic from a casual outside view. If he’s having issues hope he pulls it together. The WP community is pretty good.
I have done so with all my devices since ~15 years ago. It's incredibly refreshing. When I see others reacting monkey-style to any notification or vibration from their phone or watch, I secretly smile inside.
Same here, but I want to add that you can easily do this for all apps BUT one or two. For example, I have my messaging and personal emails allowed to send me notifications, because almost all messages I get there are important and usually urgent enough (and rare enough, or it's my partner, so either way it's not annoying).
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