llm/c92d54db-e3c8-419f-931f-0c3a686c0e4d/batch-4-4f6f713d-5adb-42a0-a153-6cfb59566e22-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 coding vs results
3. Parent/manager time constraints
4. Vibe coding criticism
5. Web development complexity
6. Learning with AI assistance
7. Code review burden
8. Frontend framework criticism
9. Solo developer challenges
10. AI as skill crutch
11. Hobby project completion
12. Cost of AI tools
13. Pattern recognition experience
14. Management skills transfer
15. Identity crisis for developers
16. Local vs cloud AI models
17. Unnecessary toolchain complexity
18. Code quality concerns
19. Generalist vs specialist debate
20. Mental model building
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46491595",
"text": "Perhaps it is a skill issue. But I don't really see the point of trying when it seems like the gains are marginal. If agent workflows really do start offering 2x+ level improvements then perhaps I'll switch over, in the meantime I won't have to suffer mental degradation from constant LLM usage."
}
,
{
"id": "46492302",
"text": "and what are those strengths, if you don't mind me asking?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493393",
"text": "- Providing boilerplate/template code for common use cases - Explaining what code is doing and how it works - Refactoring/updating code when given specific requirements - Providing alternative ways of doing things that you might not have thought of yourself YMMV; every project is different so you might not have occasion to use all of these at the same time."
}
,
{
"id": "46491277",
"text": "Username checks out"
}
,
{
"id": "46492434",
"text": "I think it depends what you are doing. I’ve had Claude right the front end of a rust/react app and it was 10x if not x (because I just wouldn’t have attempted it). I’ve also had it write the documentation for a low level crate - work that needs to be done for the crate to be used effectively - but which I would have half-arsed because who like writing documentation? Recently I’ve been using it to write some async rust and it just shits the bed. It regularly codes the select! drop issue or otherwise completely fails to handle waiting on multiple things. My prompts have gotten quite sweary lately. It is probably 1x or worse. However, I am going to try formulating a pattern with examples to stuff in its context and we’ll see. I view the situation as a problem to be overcome, not an insurmountable failure. There may be places where an AI just can’t get it right: I wouldn’t trust it to write the clever bit tricks I’m doing elsewhere. But even there, it writes (most of) the tests and the doc"
}
,
{
"id": "46493644",
"text": "Mmm, I do a lot of frontend work but I find writing the frontend code myself is faster. That seems to be mostly what everyone says it's good for. I find it useful for other stuff like writing mini scripts, figuring out arguments for command line tools, reviewing code, generating dumb boilerplate code, etc. Just not for actually writing code."
}
,
{
"id": "46494229",
"text": "I’m better at it in the spaces where I deliver value. For me that’s the backend, and I’m building complex backends with simple frontends. Sounds like your expertise is the front end, so you’re gonna be doing stuff that’s beyond me, and beyond what the AI was trained on. I found ways to make the AI solve backend pain points (documentation, tests, boiler plate like integrations). There’s probably spaces where the AI can make your work more productive, or, like my move into the front end, do work that you didn’t do before."
}
,
{
"id": "46491202",
"text": "> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better."
}
,
{
"id": "46491318",
"text": "I would never suggest that only I know better. Plenty of other people are observing the same thing, and there is also research backing it up. Maybe shocked is the wrong term. Surprised, perhaps."
}
,
{
"id": "46493081",
"text": "There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case."
}
,
{
"id": "46493653",
"text": "It's all talk and no evidence."
}
,
{
"id": "46491587",
"text": "We’re seeing no external indicators of large productivity gains. Even assuming that productivity gains in large corporations are swallowed up by inefficiencies, you’d expect externally verifiable metrics to show a 2x or more increase in productivity among indie developers and small companies. So far it’s just crickets."
}
,
{
"id": "46492143",
"text": "My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. It’s pure drudgery, and is mentally taxing. Unless you’re vibe coding, you’re now doing a lot of code review. It’s almost all you’re doing outside of the high-level planning and guidance (which is enjoyable). I’ve settled on reviewing the security boundaries and areas that could affect data leaks / invalid access. And pretty much scanning everything else. From time to time, I find it doing dumb things- n+1 queries, mutation, global mutable variables, etc, but for the most part, it does well enough that I don’t need to be too thorough. However, I wouldn’t want to inherit these codebases without an AI agent to do the work. There are too many broken windows for human maintenance to be considered."
}
,
{
"id": "46492997",
"text": "Worse, you’re doing code review of poorly written code with random failure modes no human would create, and an increasingly big ball of mud that is unmaintainable over time. It’s just the worst kind of reviewing imaginable. The AI makes an indecipherable mess, and you have to work out what the hell is going on."
}
,
{
"id": "46494259",
"text": "There's been so much pressure to use AI at work. My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of \"we're using AI cause they told us to.\""
}
,
{
"id": "46494210",
"text": "> The AI makes an indecipherable mess Humans are perfectly capable of this themselves and in fact often do it..."
}
,
{
"id": "46493338",
"text": "Agreed. I've settled on writing the code myself and having AI do the first pass review."
}
,
{
"id": "46491131",
"text": "I've come to realise that not only do I hate reading stuff written by AI. I also hate reading stuff praising AI. They all say the same thing. It's just boring."
}
,
{
"id": "46489396",
"text": "On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I've been making web stuff for a similar length of time as Mattias by the sounds of it. I started with Perl but moved to PHP 4 pretty soon after. I recognise this problem but I have different take. All the complexity was there 20 years ago, but we ignored it. That doesn't mean it was simpler. It just means we took crazy (with hindsight) risks. Sure, there were no build pipelines like today, but we had scripts we ran to build things. There was Adobe Pagemill for making site wide changes before we deployed a new version. Back in the day we made those changes, did a very brief check that things worked locally, and then manually FTP'd files to a server, breaking it in the process because a user would see the site change as they navigated. Some of us would put up a maintenance page during an update effectively jus"
}
,
{
"id": "46493789",
"text": "I have fond (?) memories of WebEdit, a code editor with FTP integration, so you could directly edit your PHP4 files on the server. (And no, we didn't have source control.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46489044",
"text": "> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… LLMs are successful in webdev because of unnecessary frameworks being piled on top of each other more in the name of job security than technical necessity."
}
,
{
"id": "46490447",
"text": "You're completely free to write software targeting the browser platform without a framework, build pipeline, and bundler. Those things exist for a reason though and running a large project without them quickly runs into worse problems."
}
,
{
"id": "46491109",
"text": "Those things exist because of eachother. If you’re not using a reactive framework, you probably have no need for a bundler and if you’re not using a bundler, you probably have no need for a build pipeline."
}
,
{
"id": "46490806",
"text": "They exist for reasons, yes. Worse problems? Nah."
}
,
{
"id": "46494109",
"text": "I kinda feel the same way, don't get me wrong, I'm a developer at soul level, I absolutely love programming, but I love more getting shit done, automating things, taking the human out of the equation and putting the computer to do it, AI lets me do that. I work in cybersecurity as a WAF admin, my job is 100% that, but I'm also the only developer so anything that needs to be scripted or developed I get to do it. One week I created 4 different scripts with Gemini Canvas to automate some tedious work, it took my I don't know, 3 hours? Instead of 1 or 2 weeks? Yeah sign me in."
}
,
{
"id": "46490610",
"text": "It's amazing to be able to try a bunch of ideas with very minimal cost. That being said, AI code assistants don't have eyeballs and they often make things that don't look very good. Craft, polish and judgement still matter."
}
,
{
"id": "46491085",
"text": "I find they can make some things look objectively \"good\", but they just look generic and it feels very easy to spot a site that was made without the vision, polish and judgement. You can get LLMs to create some truly unique sites, but it takes a lot more work than a few prompts."
}
,
{
"id": "46494012",
"text": "In particular, and speaking as a backend engineer with zero web design skills, building things with charts/graphs is amazing nowadays! You can literally just operate at the level of \"add another line representing the foo data\", \"add a scatterplot below it\", \"make them line up\", \"actually, make it a more reddish pink\" etc. In the past I've had opinions about d3 and vega-lite and altair and matplotlib etc and learned how to use those ones at a superficial level at least. In my last personal UI with charts I didn't even ask it what framework it had chosen (chart.js is the answer)"
}
,
{
"id": "46494371",
"text": "This sounds like the opposite of fun to me."
}
,
{
"id": "46493862",
"text": "Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA. If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love."
}
,
{
"id": "46493901",
"text": "So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests ? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493847",
"text": "Maybe it's just me, but the idea that the average web project out there is a complicated mess and thank God we have AI so we can finally think about the things that matter while AI deals with the mess... it makes me sad."
}
,
{
"id": "46489772",
"text": "> I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence. By not managing anything? Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I understand it. I've found myself looking at new stacks and tech, not knowing what I didn't know, and wondering where to start. But if you skip these fundamentals of the modern dev cycle, what happens when the LLM fails?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491481",
"text": "Then it fails and the world doesn't end. You fix it or delegate it and move on. Most people aren't working on code for power grids and fighter jets. There's room for failure. This same argument was used by the old timers when younger programmers couldn't code assembly or C on bare metal systems."
}
,
{
"id": "46492211",
"text": "In the context of \"fun again\", debugging slop, finding imaginary dependencies, and discovering unimaginably fragile code isn't fun , even if it's not important. But past bad output, I worry for our creative fulfillment. The old timers are right. That feeling of accomplishment, a keystone of happiness is a product of work. Probably beyond the scope of the thread."
}
,
{
"id": "46493784",
"text": "And even more fun with tools/services like exe.dev! Also apparently the combined of Google Antigravity/$20 Google AI plan/Opus 4.5 is blowing up the AI community lately in Reddit. Apparently the limits right now of Opus thru Antigravity are insanely generous/incredible value. Obviously this could change at any time but perhaps Google has the funds/resources to continue to provide value like this in an attempt to capture the dev userbase / win the AI war."
}
,
{
"id": "46489142",
"text": "AI makes finishing projects easier. But I would steer away from starting them. In order for me to be comfortable with a code base and consider it mine I need to have written the foundation, not merely reviewed in. Once the pillars are there, LLMs do make further development faster and I can concentrate on fun details (like tinkering with CSS or thinking about some very specific details)."
}
,
{
"id": "46489581",
"text": "> But I would steer away from starting them. I find just the opposite. Before, starting from nothing was a huge impediment. Now you can have a working prototype and start iterating right away. If you figur e out that you've gone down the wrong path, there's little remorse in tossing it out and starting over."
}
,
{
"id": "46493155",
"text": "Setting up build system and prototyping sure. As a replacement for Figma it’s great. But I would throw away all the code and start from scratch if I wanted to be able to maintain the code in the long term."
}
,
{
"id": "46488876",
"text": "Ironically I'm thinking the exact opposite. Now I can build stuff without dealing with the chaos in the frontend frameworks ecosystem..."
}
,
{
"id": "46488914",
"text": "theres a fun \"K-shaped\" optionality with LLMs: on one hand, its possible to deal with otherwise large API surfaces. but on the other hand, you can 'go oldschool' but with the hot new tools: install ubuntu, launch claude with yolo mode, and just tell it what you want as if it were a sysadmin from the early 2000s/late 90s. both roads very reasonable, but that the old way of doing things is new again is interesting."
}
,
{
"id": "46494072",
"text": "And it's not an either-or. For example, I found that a quick way to get a web frontend for a console app is to prompt it to turn that into a CGI app. But said CGI app can still serve HTML with fancy JS and what not, and use modern frameworks for that if desired."
}
,
{
"id": "46489116",
"text": "Yes! I've been having a great time prompting \"vanilla JavaScript, no react\" and building neat things that use browser APIs exclusively (including modern stuff like web audio APIs and Web Components and WASM) because I don't need to learn a bunch of boilerplate stuff first anymore. Feels like coding in the 200xs and I'm enjoying every minute of it."
}
,
{
"id": "46489147",
"text": "As someone that only has sporadic pockets of deep time in my free time the thing that has been immensely helpful from an LLM coding point of view is mental model building. I can now much more easily get \"into the flow\" after being away from a codebase for a period of time by asking questions. For example, remind me where all the integration points for that API route is located. Or give me a rundown on this file. Etc.. It gets me back up to speed so much more quickly and makes me productive with limited amounts of time. It also means I don't have to try to carry this context around with me or I'll forget it."
}
,
{
"id": "46492391",
"text": "> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people: backend developers, frontend developers, marketers, leaders, and more. I can lean on those experiences, fall back on how they did things, and implement their methods with AI. Will that really work? You interacted with the end product, but you don't have the experience and learned lessons that those people had. Are you sure this isn't the LLM reinforcing false confidence? Is the AI providing you with the real thing or a cheap imitation and how can you tell?"
}
,
{
"id": "46492325",
"text": "Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced."
}
,
{
"id": "46492046",
"text": "My guess is that the amount of total software people use will significantly increase, but the total amount of money made from SaaS will significantly decrease I've replaced almost all of the App subscriptions with stuff I built for my self. The only subscriptions I pay for are things that are almost impossible to replace like online storage (iCloud) or Spotify"
}
,
{
"id": "46492610",
"text": "Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try: What is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev. I am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter."
}
,
{
"id": "46492620",
"text": "Google Gemini has a generous free tier. You could start by experimenting in AI Studio - https://aistudio.google.com/ - then have a go at coding agents using their Gemini CLI or Antigravity tools. For what you're describing the free tiers of the Claude and ChatGPT web apps would probably work fine too."
}
,
{
"id": "46492639",
"text": "Cloudflare has a ~zero cost hosting service if all you need is static web page."
}
]
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