llm/fa6df919-50f4-440a-804d-6a9d3e9721d8/batch-2-4fa60ada-8826-42fa-a645-2e9c4a30b9be-input.json
The following is content for you to classify. Do not respond to the comments—classify them.
<topics>
1. Returning Developers and Parents
Related: People who moved into management or became parents finding AI enables them to code again in short time windows without needing hours to ramp up on forgotten details
2. Productivity Claims Skepticism
Related: Debates over whether 10x productivity gains are real or exaggerated, with critics noting lack of controlled studies and potential for gambling-like dopamine hits from prompting
3. Learning vs Efficiency Tradeoff
Related: Tension between using AI to get things done quickly versus the value of learning through struggle, friction, and hands-on experience with tools and concepts
4. Craft vs Results Orientation
Related: Division between developers who enjoy the process of writing code as craft versus those who see code as means to an end and value outcomes over process
5. Code Review Burden
Related: Concerns that AI shifts work from enjoyable coding to tedious reviewing of AI output, with questions about maintainability and technical debt accumulation
6. Vibe Coding Quality Concerns
Related: Skepticism about code quality from AI assistance, fears of slop, hidden bugs, and unmaintainable codebases that require experienced developers to fix
7. Web Development Complexity
Related: Discussion of whether modern web development is unnecessarily complex with frameworks, bundlers, and toolchains, or if complexity serves legitimate organizational needs
8. Personal Project Renaissance
Related: Stories of developers completing long-postponed side projects, building tools for personal use, and feeling creative freedom with AI assistance
9. Skill Atrophy Fears
Related: Worries that relying on AI will cause developers to lose skills, never develop expertise, and become unable to debug or understand their own systems
10. IKEA Furniture Analogy
Related: Debate comparing AI-assisted coding to assembling IKEA furniture versus carpentry, questioning whether using AI constitutes real development
11. Historical Tech Parallels
Related: Comparisons to printing press disrupting scribes, calculators replacing mental math, and compilers abstracting assembly, debating if AI is similar
12. LLM Usage Skill Requirements
Related: Arguments that getting value from LLMs requires skill, experience to recognize good and bad output, and knowing what questions to ask
13. Simplicity vs Framework Culture
Related: Advocacy for vanilla PHP, plain JavaScript, and avoiding unnecessary complexity, arguing tools exist by choice not necessity
14. Cost and Subscription Concerns
Related: Practical questions about whether $20/month subscriptions are sufficient versus $200/month, and fears of future price increases or feature gating
15. Hallucinations and Reliability
Related: Frustrations with LLMs producing non-existent functions, incorrect code, and requiring extensive verification and correction
16. Race to Bottom Economics
Related: Fears that everyone having access to AI coding will flood markets with competitors, devalue software development, and reduce wages
17. Executive Dysfunction Aid
Related: Theory that AI productivity gains come partly from helping developers overcome starting friction and maintain focus through context switching
18. Boilerplate Liberation
Related: Appreciation for AI handling tedious setup, configuration, documentation, and scaffolding while humans focus on interesting problems
19. Fun Definition Debate
Related: Fundamental disagreement about what makes programming enjoyable - the process of writing code versus seeing results and solving problems
20. Manager Coding Concerns
Related: Criticism of managers using AI to write production code without proper skills, causing incidents and requiring real engineers to fix issues
0. Does not fit well in any category
</topics>
<comments_to_classify>
[
{
"id": "46493586",
"text": "Neat summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding!"
}
,
{
"id": "46491382",
"text": "I yearn for the mindset where I actively choose to accomplish comparatively little in the brief spells I have to myself, and remain motivated. Part of what makes programming fun for me is actually achieving something. Which is not to say you have to use AI to be productive, or that you aren't achieving anything, but this is not the antithesis of what makes programming fun, only what makes it fun for you."
}
,
{
"id": "46491493",
"text": "Ultimately it's up to the user to decide what to do with his time ; it's still a good bargain that leaves a lot of sovereignty to the user. I like to code a little too much ; got into deep tech to capacities I couldn't imagine before - but at some point you hit rock bottom and you gotta ship something that makes sense. I'm like a really technical \"predator\" - in a sense where to be honest with myself - it has almost become some way of consumption rather than pure problem solving. For very passionate people it can be difficult to be draw the line between pleasure and work - especially given that we just do what we like in the first place - so all that time feel robbed from us - and from the standpoint of \"shipper\" who didn't care about it in the first place it feels like freedom.\n\nBut I'd argue that if anyone wants to jump into technical stuff ; it has never been so openly accessible - you could join some niche slack where some competent programmers were doing great stuff. Today a solo junior can ship you a key-val that is going to be fighting redis in benchmarks.\n\nIt really is not a time to slack down in my opinion - everything feels already existing and mostly already dealt with. But again - for those who are frustrated with the status-quo ; they will always find something to do.\n\nI get you however that this has created a very different space where past acquired skill-sets don't necessarily translate as well today - maybe it's just going to be different to find it's space than it was 10 years ago.\n\nI like that the cards have be re-dealt though - it's arguably way more open than the stack-overflow era and pre-ai where knowledge was much more difficult to create."
}
,
{
"id": "46491512",
"text": "If you only get one or two half-hours a week it's probably more fun to use those to build working software than it is to inch forward on a project that won't do anything interesting for several more months."
}
,
{
"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": "46500068",
"text": "LLMs are really showing how different programmers are from one another\n\ni am in your camp, i get 0 satisfaction out of seeing something appear on the screen which i don't deeply understand\n\ni want to feel the computer as i type, i've recently been toying with turning off syntax highlighting and LSPs (not for everyone), and i am surprised at the lack of distractions and feeling of craft and joy it brings me"
}
,
{
"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": "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": "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": "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": "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": "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": "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": "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": "46505105",
"text": "I don't agree. I've recently started using claude more than dabbling and I'm getting good use out of it.\n\nNot every task will be suitable at the moment, but many are. Give claude lots of direction (I've been creating instructions.txt files) and iterate on those. Ask claude to generate a plan and write it out to a file. Read the file, correct what needs correcting, then get it to implement. It works pretty well, you'll probably be surprised. I'm still doing a lot of thought work, but claude is writing a lot of the actual code."
}
,
{
"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..."
}
]
</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