llm/c92d54db-e3c8-419f-931f-0c3a686c0e4d/batch-5-143792f2-f481-404c-8820-8539cf6bb85f-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": "46489103",
"text": "I remember missing the fun with webdev, when everything got complex. That's when I tried Rails again, it's truly a joy."
}
,
{
"id": "46489753",
"text": "Tailwind CSS has also been super useful. A vocabulary for style colocated with the elements works far better than an ever growing list of continuously overidden rules."
}
,
{
"id": "46492871",
"text": "I really agree with this. For me it just feel so much more fun and rewarding to build my weekend projects, especially those projects where I just want to produce and deploy a working mvp out of an idea. If trying out a new framework or whatever I find it quite the opposite though, that AI removes all the fun parts of learning (obviously)"
}
,
{
"id": "46493834",
"text": "so is it fun because you had fallen behind and now you think you can fit with the people with more experience? well, I have news for you, the people with experience are also using AI too and they can still produce better and more than you do."
}
,
{
"id": "46490832",
"text": "As someone who always dabbled in code but never was a “real” developer, I’ve found the same thing. I know the concepts, I know good from bad — so all of a sudden I can vibe code things that would have taken me months of studying and debugging and banging my head against the wall. If you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion, I also wrote some brief thoughts on my Adventures In AI Prototyping: https://www.andrew-turnbull.com/adventures-in-ai-prototyping..."
}
,
{
"id": "46489659",
"text": "Going in 2026, the frontend has many good options, but AI is not one of them. We have many typesafe (no, not TypeScript!) options with rock solid dev tooling, and fast compilers. AI is just a badaid, its not the road you want to travel."
}
,
{
"id": "46489135",
"text": "Meanwhile, I've been feeling the fun of development sucked away by LLMs. I recently started doing some coding problems where I intentionally turned off all LLM assistance, and THAT was fun. Although I'll be happy to use LLMs for nightmare stuff like dependency management. So I guess it's about figuring out which part of development you enjoy and which part drains you, and refusing to let it take the former from you."
}
,
{
"id": "46491702",
"text": "What are we all using as assistants? I tend to copy-paste my code into Gemini. I tried some VS-code assistants, but I can't get them to do the thing I want (like look at selected text or only do small things)..."
}
,
{
"id": "46491711",
"text": "Before I clicked on this I was optimistic and thought this was going to be about how we've turned a corner and the web stack pendulum is now swinging back to the easier days before frontend frameworks."
}
,
{
"id": "46491256",
"text": "If you have front-end and back-end separate, you're doing web development wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46494250",
"text": "But what if it isn't just a basic website? Most sites I've worked on required things like content management, or auditing stuff, a bunch database stuff, SAML single sign on etc. Most languages end up being better at some parts of the stack, like Java for overcomplicated enterprise BS backends. It seems bad to \"fight\" that trend."
}
,
{
"id": "46494315",
"text": "A full stack framework like Next.js is, at the end of the day, still a server running on Node.js, so there is nothing that prevents you from doing anything that you could be doing with a regular express.js server. Is there anything that prevents you from implementing content management, auditing stuff, or database stuff in your Next.js project? Nothing comes to my mind."
}
,
{
"id": "46493528",
"text": "Can we post a single phrase as a HN article? This is one of the main problems with web development nowadays, nobody gets this right... to the point that it's popular to criticize a company trying to hire a single person for both holes as \"cheapening out\". Also, this is a really obvious thing. It's unbelievable how the main way people organize is the other way around."
}
,
{
"id": "46491819",
"text": "Totally agree. I've been using blazor server + Claude for project and it just removes all the stupid complexity of having react + a rest API."
}
,
{
"id": "46492892",
"text": "I know right? You can share types, you don't need to glue API, etc etc. Why don't people realize that."
}
,
{
"id": "46494087",
"text": "People do realize that, which is why such frameworks have first appeared decades ago. It's just that you can't fully paper over the network gap and pretend that it doesn't exist; eventually, the abstraction leaks."
}
,
{
"id": "46494148",
"text": "Have they? I assume you are talking about PHP, which is not that kind of framework, because you would still have to write JavaScript. It lacks type safety too."
}
,
{
"id": "46494234",
"text": "I'm talking about stuff like GWT from 2006."
}
,
{
"id": "46494337",
"text": "Wow, I had no idea that existed. It looks like it is a Java library that abstracts over the web, and generates JavaScript under the hood? I never touched GWT, but it does sound like there would be issues if you wanted to do something that's not supported by the framework. But still, I don't think this is the same as modern full stack frameworks."
}
,
{
"id": "46491351",
"text": "I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to \"vibe code\" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46491705",
"text": "its also trading one problem for another. when manually coding you understand with little mental effort what you want to achieve, the nuances and constraints, how something interacts with other moving parts, and your problem is implementing the solution when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly. its a different kind of work, but its still work, and its more annoying and less rewarding than just implementing the solution yourself"
}
,
{
"id": "46492514",
"text": "> when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly This is a great way of explaining the issue."
}
,
{
"id": "46491313",
"text": "I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble getting started on a sub-task being a good trick to keep your brain engaged. I’ve personally seen LLMs be huge time savers on specific bugs, for writing tests, and writing boilerplate code. They’re huge for working in new frameworks that roughly map to one you already know. But for the nitty gritty that ends up being most of the work on a mature product where all of the easy stuff is already done they don’t provide as big of a multiplier."
}
,
{
"id": "46493482",
"text": "God created men, ~~Colt~~ LLMs made them equal..."
}
,
{
"id": "46491033",
"text": "More related to the title, i've found the same. I was always an aggressive pixel-pusher, so web dev took me AGES. But with shadcn + llms I'm flying through stuff, no lie, 5-20x faster than I was before. And i dont hate it anymore"
}
,
{
"id": "46489637",
"text": "Strong agree. The modern web world is clearly better but we traded a whole lot of complexity for a little bit of benefit (and frequently regressed on speed). The microservices and javascript framework wars were the dark ages."
}
,
{
"id": "46489151",
"text": "One thing is true: now I go to the bar with the other guys in the group, drink whatever and let Claude or Codex do the work while I supervise, then merge PR in the morning... I wish I was kidding, but for non critical projects this is now a reality"
}
,
{
"id": "46492961",
"text": "I work at most 3-4 hours a day, and my work is prompting Cursor. Certainly an improvement over suffering 8 hours a day, but still not quite what I'm looking for."
}
,
{
"id": "46489669",
"text": "And im off to the pigfarm showling pigshit and castrate bulls."
}
,
{
"id": "46488917",
"text": "Strong agree! Forget all those studies that say “but developers are slower” or whatever — I’m actually building way more hobby projects and having way more fun now. And work is way more fun and easier. And my node_modules folder size is dropping like crazy!"
}
,
{
"id": "46489691",
"text": "Really like using alpine with a classical JS server rendered stack too. Most crud apps don’t need a spa app and now you are working out of one code base again. Codex chews through this kind of code"
}
,
{
"id": "46492566",
"text": "Exactly. AI freed me from the boring character by character toiling"
}
,
{
"id": "46489123",
"text": "Of course its fun. Making slop _is_ very fun. Its a low-effort dopamine-driven way of producing things. Learning is uncomfortable. Improving things using only your braincells can be very difficult and time consuming."
}
,
{
"id": "46490737",
"text": "I have learned more - not just about my daily driver languages, but about other languages I wouldn't have even cracked the seal on, as well as layers of hardware and maker skills - in the past two years than I did in the 30 years leading up to them. I truly don't understand how anyone creative wouldn't find their productivity soar using these tools. If computers are bicycles for the mind, LLMs are powered exoskeletons with neural-controlled turret cannons."
}
,
{
"id": "46492559",
"text": "To extend the metaphor, which provides better exercise for your body? A bicycle or a powered exoskeleton with turret cannons?"
}
,
{
"id": "46492624",
"text": "I don't bike for exercise. I bike to get where I'm going with the least amount of friction. Different tools for different jobs. Also: I think we can agree that Ripley was getting a good workout."
}
,
{
"id": "46489146",
"text": "The rate at which I'm learning new skills has accelerated thanks to LLMs. Not learning anything while you use them is a choice. You can choose differently!"
}
,
{
"id": "46490887",
"text": "How are you using AI to learn? I see a lot of people say this but simply reading AI generated overviews or asking it questions isn't really learning."
}
,
{
"id": "46491454",
"text": "I'm using it to build things. Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it. I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout. It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim... - here's the shared transcript: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6958a2f131a081918ed810832f7437a2 I read the code it produced and ran it on my computer to see it work. What did I learn? - Codex can write, compile and test C extensions for Python now - The sqlite3_progress_handler mechanism I've been hooking into for SQLite time limits in my Python code works in C too, and appears to be the recommended way to solve this - How to use PyTuple_New(size) in C and then populate that tuple - What the SQLite C API for running a query and then iterating though the results looks like, inc"
}
,
{
"id": "46491837",
"text": "With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't. It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho."
}
,
{
"id": "46493631",
"text": "The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold. It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did. There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the \"Worked example effect\", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people \"worked examples\" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves."
}
,
{
"id": "46493692",
"text": "Ok but you didn't ask any questions in the transcript you provided. Maybe that one was an outlier? In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well."
}
,
{
"id": "46493026",
"text": "Disagree, it can be learning as long as you build out your mental model while reading. Having educational reading material for the exact thing you're working on is amazing at least for those with interest-driven brains. Science YouTube is no comparison at all: while one can choose what to watcha, it's a limited menu that's produced for a mass audience. I agree though that reading LLM-produced blog posts (which many of the recent top submissions here seem to be) is boring."
}
,
{
"id": "46489253",
"text": "The OP is not talking about making slop, he's talking about using AI to write good code."
}
,
{
"id": "46491222",
"text": "it is fun again because we can remove ourselves completely from it? seems like web enthusiast are always the first to drop ship huh. \"llms good because I no longer have to interface with this steaming pile of shit that web development has become\", not because the web ecosystem has improved by any metric."
}
,
{
"id": "46489207",
"text": "yeah, I think that too - for me the -Ofun comes from HTMX https://htmx.org and the HARC stack https://harcstack.org so I can server side code in a my preferred programming language hint: not JS (with a helping of LLM on the side)"
}
,
{
"id": "46491082",
"text": "You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks. I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness."
}
,
{
"id": "46493743",
"text": "> As a solo developer, you could manage everything. From idea to execution. Or at least, it felt that way It's still that way with Rails. Probably other stacks. Sad that the default nowadays is so unproductive that solo devs don't think they can do things."
}
,
{
"id": "46489205",
"text": "Agree with this. Like the author, I've been keeping ajour with web development for multiple decades now. If you have deep software knowledge pre-LLM, you are equipped with the intuition and knowledge to judge the output. You can tell the difference between good and bad, if it looks and works the way you want, and you can ask the relevant questions to push the solution to the actual thing that you envisioned in your mind. Without prior software dev experience people may take what the LLM gives them at face value, and that's where the slop comes from imho."
}
,
{
"id": "46492862",
"text": "Web development may be fun again but you aren’t developing. You order and became a customer. Maybe you can distinguish good code from bad code but how long will you check it? Auditing wasn’t the fun part ever. And I bet at some point you will recognize a missing feeling of accomplishment because you didn’t figure out the how, you just ordered the what. We wouldn’t call someone a painter who let AI do the painting."
}
]
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