llm/5888b8dc-b96e-4444-9c3c-465dde409e92/batch-2-928159af-d95a-4002-b8a1-b5749647d523-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. AI productivity claims skepticism
2. Joy of programming vs shipping products
3. Skill atrophy concerns with AI
4. Experienced vs inexperienced developer AI gains
5. Web development complexity is optional
6. Code review burden with AI
7. Vibe coding quality concerns
8. Learning while using LLMs
9. Time-constrained developers benefiting
10. AI for boilerplate and scaffolding
11. Frontend framework fatigue
12. Managing AI like junior developers
13. Return to simpler web stacks
14. AI as autocomplete evolution
15. Side project enablement
16. Technical debt from AI code
17. Cost and pricing of AI tools
18. Pattern recognition and code quality
19. Parenting and hobby coding time
20. AI hallucinations and reliability
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46496575",
"text": "I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying \"you\" instead of \"I\". This is how I read your post:\n\n> I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. I don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where I'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If I have a half an hour, I tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then I continue when I have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because I can't make myself stop.)\n\nReading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy."
}
,
{
"id": "46494536",
"text": "For me it automates a lot of the boilerplate that usually bogs me down on side projects. I cal spin up all of the stuff I hate doing quickly and then fiddle with the interesting parts inside of a working scaffold of code. I recently did this with an elixir wrapper around some Erlang OTP code o wanted to use. Figuring out how to clue together all of the parts that touched the Erlang and tracing all of the arguments through old OTP code would have absolutely stopped me from bothering with this in the past. Instead I’m having fun playing with the interface of my tool in ways that matter for my use case."
}
,
{
"id": "46492469",
"text": "I enjoy coding for the ability to turn ideas into software. Seeing more rapid feature development, and also more rapid code cleanup and project architecture cleanup is what makes AI assisted coding enjoyable to me"
}
,
{
"id": "46497863",
"text": "Is the manual coding part of programming still fun or not? We have a lot of opinions on either side here.\n\nI think the classic division of problems being solved might, for most people, solve this seeming contradiction.\n\nFor every problem, X% is solving the necessary complexity of the problem. Taming the original problem, in relation to what computers are capable of doing. With the potential of some relevant well implemented libraries or API’s helping to close that gap.\n\nWork in that scenario rarely feels like wasted time.\n\nBut in reality, there is almost always another problem we have to solve, the Y%=(1-X) of the work required for an actual solution that involves wrangling with mismatches in available tools from the problem being solved.\n\nThis can be relatively benign, just introducing some extra cute little puzzles, that make our brains feel smart as we successfully win wack-a-mole. A side game that can even be refreshing.\n\nOr, the stack of tools, and their quirks, that we need to use can be an unbounded (even compounding) generative system of pervasive mismatches and pernicious non-obvious, not immediately recognizable, trenches we must a 1000 little bridges, and maybe a few historic bridges, just to create a path back to the original problem. And it is often evident that all this work is an artifact of 1000 less than perfect choices by others. (No judgement, just a fact of tool creation having its own difficulties.)\n\nThat stuff can become energy draining to say the list.\n\nI think high X problems are fun to solve. Most of our work goes into solving the original problem. Even finding out it was more complex than we thought feels like meaningful drama and increase the joy of resolving.\n\nHigh Y problems involve vast amounts of glue code, library wrappers with exception handling, the list in any code base can be significant. Even overwhelm the actual problem solving code. And all those mismatches often hold us back, to where our final solution inevitable has problems in situations we hope never happen, until we can come back for round N+1, for unbounded N.\n\nAny help from AI for the latter is a huge win. Those are not “real” problems. As tool stack change, nobody will port Y-type solutions forward. (I tell myself so I can sleep at night).\n\nSo that’s it. We are all different. But what type of acceleration AI gives us on type-Y problems is most likely to feel great. Enabling. Letting us harder on things that are more important and lasting. And where AI is less of a boost, but still a potentially welcome one, as an assistant."
}
,
{
"id": "46494616",
"text": "I have nearly two decades of programming experience which is mostly server side. The other day I wanted a quick desktop (Linux) program to chat with an LLM. Found out about Viciane launcher, then chalked out an extension in react (which I have never used) to chat with an LLM using OpenAI compatible API. Antigravity wrote a bare minimum working extension in a single prompt. I didn't even need to research how to write an extension for an app released only three to five months ago. I then used AI assistance to add more features and polish the UI.\n\nThis was a fun weekend but I would have procrastinated forever without a coding agent."
}
,
{
"id": "46491292",
"text": "> There are two sorts of projects (or in general, people): artisans, and entrepreneurs. The latter see code as a means to an end, possibly monetized, and the former see code as the end in itself.\n\nMe from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391392#46398917"
}
,
{
"id": "46496606",
"text": "Some people build because they enjoy the mechanics. Others build because they want to use the end product. That camp will get from A to B much more easily with AI, because for them it was never about the craft. And that's more than OK."
}
,
{
"id": "46493709",
"text": "I think it just depends on the person or the type of project. If I'm learning something or building a hobby project, I'll usually just use an autocomplete agent and leave Claude Code at work. On the other hand, if I want to build something that I actually need, I may lean on AI assistants more because I'm more interested in the end product. There are certain tasks as well that I just don't need to do by hand, like typing an existing SQL schema into an ORM's DSL."
}
,
{
"id": "46492806",
"text": "I too have found this. However, I absolutely love being able to mock up a larger idea in 30 minutes to assess feasibility as a proof of concept before I sink a few hours into it."
}
,
{
"id": "46496079",
"text": "I derive the majority of my hobby satisfaction from getting stuff done, not enjoying the process of crafting software. We probably enjoy quite different aspects of tinkering! LLMs make me have so much more fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46494612",
"text": "Historically, tinkerers had to stay within an extremely limited scope of what they know well enough to enjoy working on.\n\nAI changes that. If someone wants to code in a new area, it's 10000000x easier to get started.\n\nWhat if the # of handwritten lines of code is actually increasing with AI usage?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494656",
"text": "The problem with modern web development is that if you're not already doing it everyday, climbing the tree of dependencies just to get to the point where you have something show up on screen can be exhausting, and can take several of those half hour sessions."
}
,
{
"id": "46493920",
"text": "On top of that there's a not insignificant chance you've actually just stolen the code through an automated copyright whitewashing system. That these people believe they're adding value while never once checking if the above is true really disappoints me with the current direction of technology.\n\nLLMs don't make everyone better, they make everything a copy.\n\nThe upwards transfer of wealth will continue."
}
,
{
"id": "46491404",
"text": "I do have productivity goals! I want to spend the half hour I have on the part I think is fun. Not on machine configuration, boilerplate, dependency resolution, 100 random errors with new frameworks that are maybe resolved with web searches."
}
,
{
"id": "46493849",
"text": "Which is fine, because those things are what makes programming fun for you. Not for others."
}
,
{
"id": "46494750",
"text": "What about the boring parts of fun hobby projects?"
}
,
{
"id": "46492231",
"text": "I enjoy noodling around with pointers and unsafe code in Rust. Claude wrote all the documentation, to Rust standards, with nice examples for every method.\n\nI decided to write an app in Rust with a React UI, and Claude wrote almost all the typescript for me.\n\nSo I’ve used Claude at both ends of the spectrum. I had way more fun in every situation.\n\nAI is, fortunately, very bad at the things I find fun, at least for now, and very good at the things I find booooring (read in Scot Pilgrim voice)."
}
,
{
"id": "46495514",
"text": "Look, yeah one shotting stuff makes generic UIs, impressive feat but generic\n\nits getting years of sideprojects off the ground for me\n\nnow in languages I never learned or got professional validation for: rust, lua for roblox … in 2 parallel terminal windows and Claude Code instances\n\nall while I get to push frontend development further and more meticulously in a 3rd. UX heavy design with SVG animations? I can do that now, thats fun for me\n\nI can make experiences that I would never spend a business Quarter on, I can rapidly iterate in designs in a way I would never pay a Fiverr contractor or three for\n\nfor me the main skill is knowing what I want, and its entirely questionable about whether that’s a moat at all but for now it is because all those “no code” seeking product managers and ideas guys are just enamored that they can make a generic something compile\n\nI know when to point out the AI contradicted itself in a code concept, when to interrupt when its about to go off the rails\n\nSo far so great and my backend deployment proficiency has gone from CRUD-app only to replicating, understanding and superpassing what the veteran backend devs on my teams could do\n\nI would previously call myself full stack, but knowing where my limits in understanding are"
}
,
{
"id": "46491636",
"text": "I think there can be other equally valid perspectives than your own.\n\nSome people have goals of actually finishing a project instead of just \"tinkering\"... and that's ok. Some say it might even be necessary."
}
,
{
"id": "46491657",
"text": "You could make the same argument about the printing press. Some people like forming the letters by hand, others enjoy actually writing."
}
,
{
"id": "46493318",
"text": "Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now:\n\nFor centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat.\n\nJob Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for bans, fearing they would be driven into poverty.\n\nThe \"Purity\" Argument: Some critics argued that hand-copying was a spiritual act that instilled discipline, whereas the press was \"mechanical\" and \"soulless.\"\n\nAesthetic Elitism: Wealthy bibliophiles initially looked down on printed books as \"cheap\" or \"ugly\" compared to hand-illuminated manuscripts. Some collectors even refused to allow printed books in their libraries to maintain their prestige.\n\nSound familiar?\n\nFrom \"How the Printing Press Reshaped Associations\" -- https://smsonline.net.au/blog/how-the-printing-press-reshape... and\n\n\"How the Printing Press Changed the World\" -- https://www.koolchangeprinting.com/post/how-the-printing-pre..."
}
,
{
"id": "46494329",
"text": "I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions.\n\nI'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy."
}
,
{
"id": "46494715",
"text": "Exactly.\n\nWhat makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the \"providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration\" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of \"problem spaces\"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?).\n\nTo paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well."
}
,
{
"id": "46495382",
"text": "Having AI working with and for me is hugely exciting. My creativity is not something an AI can outmode. It will augment it. Right now ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. Soon, ideas will be more valuable and implementation will be cheap. The economy is not zero sum nor is creativity."
}
,
{
"id": "46495519",
"text": "The point being missed is the printing press led to tens of millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.\n\nSo far, when a new technology is introduced that people were initially afraid of, end up creating a whole new set of jobs and industries."
}
,
{
"id": "46496153",
"text": "But the world is better of with the scribes unemployed: ideas get to spread, more people can educate themselves through printed books.\n\nMaybe the world is better off with fewer coders, as more software ideas can materialize into working software faster?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494550",
"text": "Well the lesson is that for all of us who invested a lot of time and effort to become good software developers the value of our skill set is now near zero."
}
,
{
"id": "46495330",
"text": "Many of the same skills that we honed by investing that time and effort into being good software developers make us good AI prompters, we simply moved another layer of abstraction up the stack."
}
,
{
"id": "46492483",
"text": "This does seem to be what many are arguing, even if the analogy is far from perfect."
}
,
{
"id": "46492221",
"text": "Exactly! ...If the printing press spouted gibberish every 9 words."
}
,
{
"id": "46492638",
"text": "That was LLMs in 2023."
}
,
{
"id": "46492840",
"text": "Respect to you. I ran out of energy to correct people's dated misconceptions. If they want to get left behind, it's not my problem."
}
,
{
"id": "46492954",
"text": "At some point no-one is going to have to argue about this. I'm guessing a bit here, but my guess is that within 5 years, in 90%+ jobs, if you're not using an AI assistant to code, you're going to be losing out on jobs. At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done.\n\nI say this as someone who has been extremely sceptical over their ability to code in deep, complicated scenarios, but lately, claude opus is surprising me. And it will just get better."
}
,
{
"id": "46493937",
"text": "> At that point, the argument over whether they're crap or not is done.\n\nNot really, it just transforms into a question of how many of those jobs are meaningful anyway, or more precisely, how much output from them is meaningful."
}
,
{
"id": "46489792",
"text": "It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done.\n\nSo instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have."
}
,
{
"id": "46490615",
"text": "No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers.\n\nThey don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated.\n\nIf there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal was to confuse everyone, at which they succeeded magnificently."
}
,
{
"id": "46493685",
"text": "> I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers.\n\nBefore 2017, the web had no page layout ability.\n\nThink about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout.\n\n> They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners.\n\nCSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1].\n\n> It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation.\n\nIf you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2].\nAny editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc.\n\n> It's not meant to be generated.\nSays who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS.\n\nLots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5].\n\n[1]: https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/\n\n[2]: https://stylelint.io\n\n[3]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice\n\n[4]: https://github.com/vunguyentuan/vscode-css-variables\n\n[5]: https://every-layout.dev"
}
,
{
"id": "46499348",
"text": "Developers can learn a new programming language in a few weeks to months of just using it. If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed."
}
,
{
"id": "46499959",
"text": "> If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed.\n\nIt's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.\n\nFrankly, it's not a priority for most of them to learn CSS; they don't see it as a \"real\" programming language; therefore it's not worth their time."
}
,
{
"id": "46500135",
"text": "> It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.\n\nIt's not like blaming the bicycle, that's the whole point of my analogy to programming languages. Like I said, learning a new programming language in a few weeks of regular use is a common experience. This also happens with bikes, because you can try a few things, lose balance, make a few intuitive adjustments, and iterate easily.\n\nThis just doesn't work with CSS. There are so many pitfalls, corner cases and reasoning is non-compositional and highly contextual. That's the complete opposite of learning to ride a bike or learning a new programming language.\n\nYou literally do need to read like, a formal specification of CSS to really understand it, and even then you'll regularly get tripped up. People just learn to stick to a small subset of CSS for which they've managed to build a predictable model for, which is why we got toolkits like Bootstrap.\n\nEdit: this also explains why things like Tailwind are popular: it adds a certain amount of predictability and composition to CSS. Using CSS was way worse in the past when browser compatibility was worse, but it's still not a great experience."
}
,
{
"id": "46489953",
"text": "Hah, centering divs with flexbox is one of my uses for this too! I can never remember the syntax off the top of my head, but if I say \"center it with flexbox\" it spits out exactly the right code every time.\n\nIf I do this a few more times it might even stick in my head."
}
,
{
"id": "46494467",
"text": "> Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done.\n\nThese days I use display: flex; so much that I wish the initial value of the display property in CSS should be flex instead of inline;"
}
,
{
"id": "46489838",
"text": "Try tailwind. Very amenable to LLM generation since it's effectively a micro language, and being colocated with the document elements, it doesn't need a big context to zip together."
}
,
{
"id": "46490918",
"text": "Surely searching \"centre a div\" takes less time than prompting and waiting for a response..."
}
,
{
"id": "46491174",
"text": "Search “centre a div” in Google\n\nWade through ads\n\nSkim a treatise on the history of centering content\n\nSkim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow\n\nFind some code on the page\n\nTry to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout\n\nRealize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind\n\nKeep searching\n\nTry some stuff until it works\n\nOr…\n\nAsk LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on to the next thing."
}
,
{
"id": "46493176",
"text": "The middle step is asking an LLM how it's done and making the change yourself. You skip the web junk and learn how it's done for next time."
}
,
{
"id": "46493367",
"text": "Yep, that’s not a bad approach, either.\n\nI did that a lot initially, it’s really only with the advent of Claude Code integrated with VS Code that I’m learning more like I would learn from a code review.\n\nIt also depends on the project. Work code gets a lot more scrutiny than side projects, for example."
}
,
{
"id": "46494592",
"text": "> Search “centre a div” in Google\n\nAaand done. Very first result was a blog post showing all the different ways to do it, old and new, without any preamble."
}
,
{
"id": "46494130",
"text": "Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for \"center div\" and get a How To article ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo... ) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete.\n\nGiven how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material."
}
,
{
"id": "46496358",
"text": "LLMs work very well for a variety of software tasks — we have lots of experience around the industry now.\n\nIf you haven’t been convinced by pure argument in 2026 then you probably won’t be. But the great thing is you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.\n\nThis isn’t crypto, where everyone using it has a stake in its success.\nYou can just try it, or not."
}
]
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
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50