llm/122b8d72-a8a3-4fcf-8eca-6a52786d1a8b/batch-1-20afd6bc-7108-4bcd-8a3f-2959e1d15de0-input.json
The following is content for you to classify. Do not respond to the comments—classify them.
<topics>
1. Lack of Concrete Evidence
Related: Commenters repeatedly criticize the article for providing no examples, code, projects, costs, or specifics about what was actually built, calling it empty hype and platitudes without substance or proof of claims
2. Author Credibility Concerns
Related: Multiple commenters point to the author's previous blog post praising the Rabbit R1 as evidence of poor technical judgment and tendency toward unfounded enthusiasm for new technology
3. AI Coding Tool Limitations
Related: Discussion of how AI tools work well for simple, repetitive, or locally-scoped tasks but fail with complex systems, large codebases, and non-trivial problems requiring significant human guidance
4. Greenfield vs Legacy Projects
Related: Observations that AI coding excels at new projects under 10,000 lines of code but struggles maintaining consistency and avoiding regressions in larger, established codebases
5. Astroturfing Suspicions
Related: Multiple commenters suspect pro-AI posts are marketing campaigns or astroturfing given the billions invested in AI, with some noting suspicious voting patterns and repetitive promotional content
6. AI-Generated Content Detection
Related: Many suspect the blog post itself was written by AI, citing lack of specifics, excessive em-dashes, and generic promotional language characteristic of LLM-generated slop
7. Manager Fantasy Critique
Related: Skepticism about the desire to become a 'super manager' rather than hands-on developer, with some viewing it as CEO cosplay or escapism from actual technical work
8. Productivity Illusion
Related: Discussion of whether AI tools create actual productivity gains or merely the feeling of productivity, with some noting impressive-looking output that lacks substance or quality
9. Security Concerns
Related: Significant worry about OpenClaw's security vulnerabilities, prompt injection risks, and the danger of giving AI agents access to production systems, emails, and sensitive data
10. Skills and Learning Curve
Related: Debate over whether effective AI tool usage requires significant skill development, with some arguing poor results indicate user skill issues while others see fundamental tool limitations
11. Real World Use Cases
Related: Commenters share legitimate use cases including utility scripts, exploring unfamiliar codebases, setup automation, and learning new tools, distinguishing these from transformative claims
12. Cost and Accessibility
Related: Discussion of the financial barriers including expensive subscriptions, Mac Mini hardware, and token costs that contradict claims of democratizing technology
13. AI Hype Cycle
Related: Observations that we're at the apex of AI hype, with predictions the bubble will pop and more realistic assessments will emerge over time
14. Context Window Problems
Related: Technical discussion of how AI agents lose coherence as context grows, with compaction causing confusion and requiring human redirection
15. Testing and Verification
Related: Emphasis on the need for humans to verify AI output, run tests, and maintain quality control since AI cannot reliably check its own work
16. Language-Specific Performance
Related: Observations that AI performs better with some programming languages like Python and JavaScript compared to Java, Scala, or enterprise frameworks
17. Engineering vs Management
Related: Philosophical debate about why engineers want to become managers, whether it's about power, career progression, avoiding obsolescence, or building bigger things
18. Model Selection Matters
Related: Discussion of significant quality differences between AI models, with frontier models like Opus and GPT-5.2 performing notably better than cheaper alternatives
19. Workflow Integration Tips
Related: Practical advice including using AGENTS.md files, breaking tasks into smaller chunks, brainstorming with agents, and having separate contexts for review and implementation
20. Vibe Coding Skepticism
Related: Criticism of fully autonomous AI coding without understanding the output, with warnings about technical debt, logical errors, and unmaintainable code accumulation
0. Does not fit well in any category
</topics>
<comments_to_classify>
[
{
"id": "46939718",
"text": "“Emperor wore no clothes” moment.\n\nGiven time AI will lead to incredible productivity. In the meantime, use as appropriate."
}
,
{
"id": "46940411",
"text": "I like to call it Canadian girlfriend coding."
}
,
{
"id": "46940855",
"text": "From what I get out of this is that these models are trained on basic coding and not enterprise level where you have thousands and thousands of project files all intertwined and linked with dependencies. It didn’t have access to all of that."
}
,
{
"id": "46939758",
"text": "I think it’s just very alien in that things which tend to be correlated in humans may not be so correlated in LLMs. So two things that we expect people to be similarly good at end up being very different in an AI.\n\nIt does also seem to me that there is a lot of variance in skills for prompting/using AI in general (I say this as someone who is not particularly good as far as I’m aware – I’m not trying to keep tips secret from you). And there is also a lot of variance in the ability for an AI to solve problem of equal difficulty for a human."
}
,
{
"id": "46939041",
"text": "Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not managing to get LLM work for them."
}
,
{
"id": "46940263",
"text": "I definitely think it's language specific. My history may deceive me here, but i believe that LLMs are infinitely better at pumping out python scripts than java. Now i have much, much more experience with java than python, so maybe it's just a case of what you don't know.... However, The tools it writes in python just work for me, and i can incrementally improve them and the tools get rationally better and more aligned with what i want.\n\nI then ask it to do the same thing in java, and it spends a half hour trying to do the same job and gets caught in some bit of trivia around how to convert html escape characters, for instance, s.replace(\"<\", \"<\").replace(\">\", \">\").replace(\"\\\"\").replace(\"\"\"); as an example and endlessly compiles and fails over and over again, never able to figure out what it has done wrong, nor decides to give up on the minutia and continue with the more important parts."
}
,
{
"id": "46939268",
"text": "I think LLMs have a hard time with large code bases (obviously so do devs).\n\nA giant monorepo would be a bad fit for an LLM IMO."
}
,
{
"id": "46939958",
"text": "With agentic search, they actually do pretty well with monorepos."
}
,
{
"id": "46939887",
"text": "I think the main thing is, these are all green fields projects. (Note original author talking about executing ideas for projects.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46939473",
"text": "I remember when Anthropic was running their Built with Claude contest on reddit. The submissions were few and let's just say less than impressive. I use Claude Code and am very pro-AI in general, but the deeper you go, the more glaring the limitations become. I could write an essay about it, but I feel like there's no point in this day and age, where floods of slop in fractured echo chambers dominate."
}
,
{
"id": "46939752",
"text": "I'm curious what types of tasks you were delegating to the coding agents?"
}
,
{
"id": "46940401",
"text": "Frankly, it sounds like you have a lot to learn about agentic coding. It’s hard to define exactly what makes some of us so good at using it, and others so poor, but agentic coding has been life changing for myself and the folks I’ve tutored on its use. We’re all using the same tools, but subtle differences can make a big difference."
}
,
{
"id": "46940219",
"text": "The pattern matching and absence or real thinking is still strong.\n\nTried to move some excel generation logic from epplus to closedxml library.\n\nClosedXml has basically the same API so the conversion was successful. Not a one-shot but relatively easy with a few manual edits.\n\nBut closedxml has no batch operations (like apply style to the entire column): the api is there but internal implementation is on cell after cell basis. So if you have 10k rows and 50 columns every style update is a slow operation.\n\nNaturally, told all about this to codex 5.3 max thinking level. The fucker still succumbed to range updates here and there.\n\nTold it explicitly to make a style cache and reuse styles on cells on same y axis.\n\n5-6 attempts — fucker still tried ranges here and there. Because that is what is usually done.\n\nNot here yet. Maybe in a year. Maybe never."
}
,
{
"id": "46940062",
"text": "Completely agree. However I do get some productivity boost by using ChatGPT as an improved Google search able to customize the answer to what I need."
}
,
{
"id": "46939552",
"text": "The crazy pills you are taking is that thinking people have anything to prove to you. The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the \"I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad\" sense. There's fundcli and nitpick on my GitHub that I created using Claude. fundcli looks at your shell history and suggests places to donate to, to support open source software you actually use. Nitpick is a TUI HN client. I've shipped others. The obvious retort is that those two things aren't \"real\" software; they're not complex, they're not making me any money. In fact, fundcli is costing me piles of money! As much as I can give it! I don't need anyone to tell me that or shit on the stuff I'm building.\n\nThe \"open secret\" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect.\n\nThe crazy pills are thinking that HN is in any way representative of anything about what's going on in our broader society. Those projects are out there, why do you assume you'll be told about it? That someone's going to write an exposé/blog post on themselves about how they had AI build a thing and now they're raking in the dollars and oh, buy my course on learning how to vibecode? The people selling those courses aren't the ones shipping software!"
}
,
{
"id": "46939805",
"text": "> The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software.\n\nI don't doubt that an LLM would theoretically be capable of doing these sorts of things, nor did I intend to give off that sentiment, rather I was more evaluating if it was as practical as some people seem to be making the case for. For example, a C compiler is very impressive, but its clear from the blog post[0] that this required a massive amount of effort setting things up and constant monitoring and working around limitations of Claude Code and whatnot, not to mention $20,000. That doesn't seem at all practical, and I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper. While it might seem like moving the goalpost, I don't think it's the same thing to compare what I was saying with the fact that a multi billion dollar corporation whose entire business model relies on it can vibe code a C compiler with $20,000 worth of tokens.\n\n> The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the \"I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad\" sense.\n\nYes, this is actually a good point. I do feel like there's a self report bias at play here when it comes to this too. For example, someone might feel like they're more productive, but their output is roughly the same as what it was pre-LLM tooling. This is kind of where I'm at right now with this whole thing.\n\n> The \"open secret\" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect.\n\nMy hand is definitely up here, shipping is very hard! I would also agree that it's an \"open secret\", especially given that \"buying a domain name for a side project that never goes anywhere\" is such a universal experience.\n\nI think both things can be true though. It can be true that these tools are definitely a step up from traditional IDE-style tooling, while also being true that they are not nearly as good as some would have you believe. I appreciate the insight, thanks for replying.\n\n[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler"
}
,
{
"id": "46939639",
"text": "If people make extraordinary claims, I expect extraordinary proofs…\n\nAlso, there is nothing complex in a C compiler. As students we built these things as toy projects at uni, without any knowledge of software development practices.\n\nYet, to bring an example for something that's more than a toy project: 1 person coded this video editor with AI help: https://github.com/Sportinger/MasterSelects"
}
,
{
"id": "46939751",
"text": "From the linked project:\n\n> The reality: 3 weeks in, ~50 hours of coding, and I'm mass-producing features faster than I can stabilize them. Things break. A lot. But when it works, it works."
}
,
{
"id": "46938874",
"text": "It's like CGP Grey hosting a productivity podcast despite his productivity almost certainly going down over time.\n\nIt's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity."
}
,
{
"id": "46939772",
"text": "I always find that characterization of Grey and the Cortex podcast to be weird. He never claims to be a productivity master or the most productive person around. Quite the opposite, he has said multiple times how much he is not naturally productive, and how he actually kinda dislikes working in general. The systems and habits are the ways he found to essentially trick himself into working.\n\nWhich I think is what people gather from him, but somehow think he's hiding it or pretending is not the case? Which I find strange, given how openly he's talked about it.\n\nAs for his productivity going down over time, I think that's a combination of his videos getting bigger scopes and production values, and also he moving some of his time into some not so publicly visible ventures. E.g., he was one of the founders of Standard, which eventually became the Nebula streaming service (though he left quite a while ago now)."
}
,
{
"id": "46941477",
"text": "> Which I think is what people gather from him, but somehow think he's hiding it or pretending is not the case? Which I find strange, given how openly he's talked about it.\n\nWell the person you're responding to didn't say anything like that. They're saying he's unqualified.\n\n> The systems and habits are the ways he found to essentially trick himself into working.\n\nAnd do they work ? If he's failing or fooling himself then a big chunk of his podcasting is wasting everyone's time.\n\n> videos getting bigger scopes and production values\n\nI looked at a video from last year and one from eight years ago and they're pretty similar in production value. Lengths seem similar over time too.\n\n> moving some of his time into some not so publicly visible ventures\n\nI can see he's done three members-only videos in the last two years, in addition to four and a half public videos. Is there anything else?"
}
,
{
"id": "46940749",
"text": "I think unpopularly there's some fake comments in the discourse led by financial incentives, and also a mix of some fear-based \"wanting to feel like things are OK\" or dissonance-avoiding belief around this thats leading to the opinions we hear.\n\nIt also kinda feels gaslightish and as I've said in some controversial replies in other posts, its sort of eerily mass \"psychosis\" vibes just like during COVID."
}
,
{
"id": "46940598",
"text": "You can see how the bubble is about to pop up, by the number of times\nJensen Huang has to show up on CNBC pumping the stock.\n\nHardly before, now its almost three times a week.\nAnd never gets any questions on GPU amortization..."
}
,
{
"id": "46940582",
"text": "Everyone claiming AI is great is trying to make money by being on the leading edge.\n\nAll AI-IS-WONDERFUL stories are garbage-trash written by garbage people.\n\nFuck AI. Fuck HN AI promoters. Hopefully you all lose your jobs and fail in life."
}
,
{
"id": "46939051",
"text": "> it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right\n\nI used this line for a long time, but you could just as easily say the same thing for a typical engineer. It basically boils down to \"Claude likes its tickets to be well thought out\". I'm sure there is some size of project where its ability to navigate the codebase starts to break down, but I've fed it sizeable ones and so long as the scope is constrained it generally just works nowadays"
}
,
{
"id": "46939131",
"text": "The difference is a real engineer will say \"hey I need more information to give you decent output.\" And when the AI does do that, congrats, the time you spend identifying and explaining the complexity _is_ the hard time consuming work. The code is trivial once you figure out the rest. The time savings are fake."
}
,
{
"id": "46939192",
"text": "That real engineer knows decent. This parrot knows only its own best (current attempt)."
}
,
{
"id": "46941646",
"text": "You must use the paid plans and get the pro / max subscriptions to get ultimate results\n\nThe free versions are toys"
}
,
{
"id": "46936348",
"text": "I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue.\n\nIs it really to escape from \"getting bogged down in the specifics\" and being able to \"focus on the higher-level, abstract work\", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.\n\nScience and the academic world\n\nI have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.\n\nIs it to escape from \"getting bogged down in the specifics\" and being able to \"focus on the higher-level, abstract work\", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.\n\nScience and the academic world suffer a comparable plague."
}
,
{
"id": "46936935",
"text": "Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year old has been using Y since its release three years ago?\n\nAnd when you're in an existing company, stuck in thing X, knowing that it's obsolete, and the people doing the latest Y that's hot in the job market are in another department and jealously guard access to Y projects?\n\nHow about when you go to interview, and you not ONLY have to know Y, but the Leetcode from 15 years ago?\n\nSo maybe I've given you another alternative to 'it has to be power, there's no other rational reason to go into management'.\n\nHere's a gentler one: if you want to build big things, involving many people, you need to be in management.\n\nDo you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals? They're different types of work, and it's not about 'power' like you are suggesting. Autonomy and decision-making power are more the 'power' engineers often don't get (unless they are lucky, very very smart or in a small startup-like environment)."
}
,
{
"id": "46937333",
"text": "N=1 but I do love constantly learning new things, and building small, purposeful, tailored products with small groups of people.\n\nI've gone back and forth across the lead and management lines many times now, and it is career limiting in many many ways. But it's too fulfilling to give up. And I swear there is magic in what small, expert groups are able to produce that laps large org on the regular."
}
,
{
"id": "46938225",
"text": "From my (limited) experience, that magic is incredibly linked to autonomy and ownership.\n\nSome research around British government workers found higher job satisfaction in units with hands-off managers. It resonates with my own career. I’m really excited and want to go to work when I’m on a small, autonomous team with little red tape and politics. Larger orgs simply can’t — or haven’t — ever offered me the same feeling; with some exceptions in Big 3 consulting if I was the expert on a case."
}
,
{
"id": "46938896",
"text": "As a manager, I love being hands-off - I like directs that take ownership and I try to give people projects and roles that they want. They use their creativity and I help unblock, expand, course correct or suggest as needed. It saves them from the politics and they get high level mentoring.\n\nThe worst manager is the micromanager - either because he's nervous about his job security, because he doesn't know how to delegate, or because he's been hands-on forever and can't let go."
}
,
{
"id": "46937531",
"text": "isn't that more a question of company size and industry (i.e. less regulated than healthcare and financial services) than whether management is good or bad?\n\nI don't see why it contradicts my little rant above. Of course I also prefer small, nimble teams with lots of autonomy, with individuals who thrive being delegated only extremely broad tasks. The only part where I think there's a difference is the constantly learning.\n\nI love constantly learning. My issue isn't that. It's that I don't want to HAVE to constantly be practicing at home and on the weekend. I did this in my 20s and I can't/won't do this anymore. I just have no time or energy now as an Old."
}
,
{
"id": "46937750",
"text": "I don't really think management is good or bad, just different, and not really for me. The management career ladder though I do feel goes higher in large organizations than small.\n\nFor myself it is the hands-on work I find most fulfilling unfortunately. I have some sort of brain worm that makes me want to practice all the new things at home/weekend if work isn't letting me. I'm sure it'll burn me out at some point, but to paraphrase a famous creep: I keep getting older, my brainworm stays the same age."
}
,
{
"id": "46938243",
"text": "I don't think having to practice at home and at weekends is necessarily a part of engineering though. Every place I've worked at, there have been ample opportunities to keep up-to-date on paid hours, be that in conferences, learning materials, trying out side projects or weird ideas in more niche technologies, etc."
}
,
{
"id": "46939075",
"text": "I think if you have a job that gives you the chance to expand your skills, pick new tech with the ability and time to learn onsite, and offers you that grace, that's a great company to work for.\n\nWithin my power I try to do that with my directs, making sure new interesting things are cycled in so their CVs become stronger. But me, personally, I've had really bad luck with this. I always had to study on the weekends for something that either isn't used in my company or someone else jealously guards because it's hot on the market."
}
,
{
"id": "46939272",
"text": "> only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later\n\nNot really. There aren’t as many fundamentally new ideas in modern tech as it may seem.\n\nWeb servers have existed for more than 30 years and haven’t changed that much since then. Or e.g., React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI - invented some time in ~1990. Before Docker, there were Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. TCP/IP is 50 years old. And many, many other things we perceive as new.\n\nMoreover, I think it’s worth looking back and learning some of the “old tech” for inspiration; there’s a wealth of deep and prescient ideas there. We still don’t have a full modern equivalent of Macromedia Flash, for example."
}
,
{
"id": "46941240",
"text": "Yep; nothing genuinely new since Xerox Alto in 73. Mouse, GUI, TCP/IP, Smalltalk 72."
}
,
{
"id": "46939392",
"text": "> React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI\n\nI can't tell if this is sincere or parody, it is so insufferably wrong. Good troll. I almost bit."
}
,
{
"id": "46939533",
"text": "Why is it wrong? Please elaborate. For more substance, here’s a discussion from 2015:\n\nhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10381015"
}
,
{
"id": "46938381",
"text": ">only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later\n\nAlmost nothing goes obsolete in software; it just becomes unpopular. You can still write every website you see on the Internet with just jQuery. There are perfectly functional HTTP frameworks for Cobol."
}
,
{
"id": "46938606",
"text": "obsolete in the software *industry"
}
,
{
"id": "46939521",
"text": "You might be right about a Leetcode effect and the difficulty to find new interesting positions. But OP wasn't stressing that at all but the desire to architect and manage. I might have put to much emphasis of the managing and too less on the urge to architect and see things from above. I agree.\n\nI am scientist and worked from time to time as a research engineer merely to pay the bills, so I may see things differently. I always like doing lab / field work and first-hand data analysis. Many engineers I know would likely never stop tinkering and building stuff. It may be easier for a scientist than for an engineer to still get trilled, I don't know."
}
,
{
"id": "46937732",
"text": "> Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals?\n\nThese are inherently different levels of power. I'm not sure how your example is supposed to be the opposite when you compare someone laying bricks to someone making hiring and firing decisions about groups of people. Your scenario is fundamentally a power imbalance"
}
,
{
"id": "46938407",
"text": "Some of us actually enjoy programming."
}
,
{
"id": "46938194",
"text": "Yea, I enjoy being the engineer"
}
,
{
"id": "46938476",
"text": "A rare occurrence these days. I suppose a lot of it has to do with shrinking attention spans and instant gratification and the lack of effort required to do so many things that required even a little bit of effort before"
}
,
{
"id": "46938710",
"text": "Same. The process (and all of its struggles) is an inseparable part of the satisfaction."
}
,
{
"id": "46938311",
"text": "In my opinion, time spent learning Perl or an outmoded framework still helped me learn new things and stretch myself. A lot of that knowledge is transferable to other languages or frameworks. After learning QuickBasic and REXX it was pretty easy to pickup Ruby and Python. ;-)"
}
]
</comments_to_classify>
Based on the comments above, assign each to up to 3 relevant topics.
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_3",
"topics": [
0
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices for matches
- Use index 0 if the comment does not fit well in any category
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
Remember: Output ONLY the JSON array, no other text.
50