llm/fa6df919-50f4-440a-804d-6a9d3e9721d8/batch-4-c700cecb-0ac3-49b4-8664-a0322f8a88fb-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": "46496072",
"text": "Possibly which means devs will have to pivot ... I dont know where though since it would mean most jobs are over and a new economy must be invented"
}
,
{
"id": "46491122",
"text": "Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with."
}
,
{
"id": "46491177",
"text": "I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become."
}
,
{
"id": "46493156",
"text": "‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods."
}
,
{
"id": "46493936",
"text": "some long term projects were due to the tons of details in source code, but some were due to inherent complexity and how to model something that works, no matter what the files content will be"
}
,
{
"id": "46491591",
"text": "anything nontrivial is still long term, nothing has changed"
}
,
{
"id": "46496650",
"text": "I'll also argue that level of skill depends on what one can make in those two days... it's like a mirror. If you don't know what to ask for, it doesn't know what to produce"
}
,
{
"id": "46493305",
"text": "I think everyone worries about this. No one knows how it's going to turn out, none of us have any control over it and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do to prepare ahead of time."
}
,
{
"id": "46491916",
"text": "As a customer, I don't want to pay for vibe-coded products, because authors also don't have a time (and/or skills) to properly review, debug and fix products."
}
,
{
"id": "46499391",
"text": "They do with AI, that's the point."
}
,
{
"id": "46491964",
"text": "> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: \"my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers\", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.\n\nWhat opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway .\n\nAnd even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives.\n\nWhen every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?"
}
,
{
"id": "46493100",
"text": "That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.\n\nVibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a \"working product\", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.\n\nWill everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money."
}
,
{
"id": "46496313",
"text": "> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.\n\nI'm hearing what you are saying, but the \"business as usual\" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!\n\nIOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).\n\nYou're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.\n\n> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?\n\nThe cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.\n\nYou're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.\n\nThere's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.\n\nThe market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job."
}
,
{
"id": "46498772",
"text": "All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.\n\nMy Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people."
}
,
{
"id": "46499387",
"text": "I dunno about the Glad bag analogy, and now I'm not sure that the artist analogy applies either.\n\nI think a better analogy (i.e. one that we both agree one) is Excel preadsheets.\n\nThere are very few \"Excel consultants\" available that companies hire. You can't make money be providing solutions in Excel because anyone who needs something that can be done in Excel can just do it themselves.\n\nIt's like if your mum needed to sum income and expenditures for a little side-business: she won't be hiring an excel consultant to do write the formulas into the 4 - 6 cells that contain calculations, she'll simply do it herself.\n\nI think vibe coding is going to be the same way in a few years (much faster than spreadsheets took off, btw, which occurred over a period of a decade) - someone who needs a little project management applications isn't going to buy one, they can get one in an hour \"for free\"[1].\n\nJust about anything you can vibe-code, an office worker with minimal training (the average person in 2026, for example) can vibe-code. The skill barrier to vibe-coding little apps like this is less than the skill barrier for creating Excel workbooks, and yet almost every office worker does it.\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------\n\n[1] In much the same way that someone considers creating a new spreadsheet to be free when they already have Excel installed, people are going to regard the output of LLMs \"free\" because they are already paying the monthly fee for it."
}
,
{
"id": "46496444",
"text": "You're overestimating people's willingness to write code even if they don't have to do it. Most people just don't want to do it even if AI made is easy to do so. Not sure who you're talking to but most people I know that aren't programmers have zero interest in writing their own software even if they could do it using prompts only."
}
,
{
"id": "46491081",
"text": "> AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.\n\nThat fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour."
}
,
{
"id": "46492916",
"text": "I experienced the exact same thing: I needed a web tool, and as far as I could tell from recent reviews, the offerings in the chrome extension store seemed either a little suspicious or broken, so I made my own extension in a little under an hour.\n\nIt used recent APIs and patterns that I didn't have to go read extensive docs for or do deep learning on. It has an acceptable test suite. The code was easy to read, and reasonable, and I know no one will ever flip it into ad-serving malware by surprise.\n\nA big thing is just that the idea of creating a non-trivial tool is suddenly a valid answer to the question. Previously, I know would have had to spend a bunch of time reading docs, finding examples, etc., let alone the inevitable farting around with a minor side-quest because something wasn't working, or rethinking+reworking some design decision that on the whole wasn't that important. Instead, something popped into existence, mostly worked, and I could review and tweak it.\n\nIt's a little bit like jumping from a problem of \"solve a polynomial\" to one of \"verify a solution for a polynomial\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46492406",
"text": "The good thing about AI is that it knows all the hundreds of little libraries that keep popping up every few days like a never-ending stream. No longer I need to worry about learning about this stuff, I can just ask the AI what libraries to use for something and it will bring up these dependencies and provide sample code to use them. I don't like AI for coding real algorithms, but I love the fact that I don't need to worry about the myriad of libraries that you had to keep up with until recently."
}
,
{
"id": "46492459",
"text": "what \"AI\" are you speaking of? all the current leading LLMs i know of will _not_ do this (i.e web search for latest libraries) unless you explicitely ask"
}
,
{
"id": "46496377",
"text": "I'll sometimes ask Claude Sonnet 4.5 for JS and TS library recommendations. Not for \"latest\" or \"most popular\". For this case, it seems to love recommending promising-looking code from repos released two months ago with like 63 stars."
}
,
{
"id": "46494962",
"text": "I don't like it. It lets \"management\" ignore their actual jobs - the ones that are nominally so valuable that they get paid more than most engineers, remember - and instead either splash around in the kiddie pool, or go jump into the adult pool and then almost drown and need an actual engineer to bail them out. (The kiddie pool is useless side project, the adult pool is the prod codebase, and drowning is either getting lost in the weeds of \"it compiles and I'm done! Now how do I merge and how do I know if I'm not going to break prod?\" or just straight up causing an incident and they're apologizing profusely for ruining the oncall's evening except that both of them know they're gonna do it again in 2 weeks).\n\nI really don't know how often I have to tell people, especially former engineers who SHOULD KNOW THIS (unless they were the kind of fail-upwards pretenders): the code is not the slow part! (Sorry, I'm not yelling at you , reader. I'm yelling at my CEO.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46494246",
"text": "Now we ALL be project managers! Hooray!"
}
,
{
"id": "46495908",
"text": "Amen to that!"
}
,
{
"id": "46488921",
"text": "Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades."
}
,
{
"id": "46488976",
"text": "Only it’s a bit like me getting back into cooking because I described the dish I want to a trainee cook."
}
,
{
"id": "46489239",
"text": "Depends on how you're using the LLMs. It can also be like having someone else around to chop the onions, wash the pans and find the ingredients when you need them."
}
,
{
"id": "46489046",
"text": "The head chefs at most restaurants delegate the majority of details of dishes to their kitchen staff, then critique and refine."
}
,
{
"id": "46490599",
"text": "This approach seems to have worked out for both Warhol and Chihuly."
}
,
{
"id": "46489060",
"text": "As long as you get the dish you want when before you couldn’t have it — who cares?"
}
,
{
"id": "46489388",
"text": "Sure, as long as you don’t expect me to digest it, live with it, and crap it out for you, I see no problem with it."
}
,
{
"id": "46489414",
"text": "My expectations don’t change whether or not I’m using AI, and neither do my standards.\n\nWhether or not you use my software is up to you."
}
,
{
"id": "46490621",
"text": "So you're saying that if you go to any famous restaurant and the famous face of the restaurant isn't personally preparing your dinner with their hands and singular attention, you are disappointed.\n\nGot it."
}
,
{
"id": "46492580",
"text": "Are you even cooking if you did not collect your own ingredients and forge your own tools??"
}
,
{
"id": "46489126",
"text": "Flipping toggle switches went out of fashion many, many, many years ago. We've been describing to trainees (compilers) the dish we want for longer than most on HN have been alive."
}
,
{
"id": "46489333",
"text": "Actually, we’ve been formally declaring the logic of programs to compilers, which is something very different."
}
,
{
"id": "46489417",
"text": "(Replying to myself because hn)\n\nThat’s not the only difference at all. A good use of an LLM might be to ask it what the difference between using an LLM and writing code for a compiler is."
}
,
{
"id": "46489428",
"text": "Equally a good use for a legacy compiler that compiles a legacy language. Granted, you are going to have to write a lot more boilerplate to see it function (that being the difference, after all), but the outcome will be the same either way. It's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day."
}
,
{
"id": "46489500",
"text": "Sorry friend, if you can’t identify the important differences between a compiler and an LLM, either intentionally or unintentionally (I can’t tell), then I must question the value of whatever you have to say on the topic."
}
,
{
"id": "46492577",
"text": "The important difference is the reduction in boilerplate, which allows programs to be written with (often) significantly less code. Hence the time savings (and fun) spoken of in the original article.\n\nThis isn't really a new phenomenon. Languages have been adding things like arrays and maps as builtins to reduce the boilerplate required around them. The modern languages of which we speak take that same idea to a whole new level, but such is the nature of evolution."
}
,
{
"id": "46496803",
"text": "No, when we write code it has a an absolute and specific meaning to the compiler. When we write words to an LLM they are written in a non-specific informal language (usually English) and processed non-deterministically too. This is an incredibly important distinction that makes coding, and asking the LLM to code, two completely different ball games. One is formal, one is not.\n\nAnd yes, this isn’t a new phenomenon."
}
,
{
"id": "46499565",
"text": "It's different in some ways (such is evolution), but is not a distinction that matters. Kind of like the difference between imperative and declarative programming. Different language models, but all the same at the end of the day."
}
,
{
"id": "46489381",
"text": "The only difference is that newer languages have figured out how to remove a lot of the boilerplate."
}
,
{
"id": "46489073",
"text": "Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it."
}
,
{
"id": "46489231",
"text": "Work harder!\n\nNow I’m a life coach because I’m responsible for your promotion."
}
,
{
"id": "46496036",
"text": "Ok, maybe my analogy wasn't the best. But the point I was trying to make is that using AI tools to write code doesn't meant you didn't write the code."
}
,
{
"id": "46492048",
"text": "Very apt analogy. I'm still waiting for my paycheck."
}
,
{
"id": "46490829",
"text": "I would argue that you technically did not cook it yourself - you are however responsible for having cooked it. You directed the cooking."
}
,
{
"id": "46489160",
"text": "> If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did \"cook\" it.\n\nThe person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the \"catalyst\" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work.\n\nOtherwise you could say you \"cooked a meal\" every time you went to MacDonald's."
}
,
{
"id": "46489181",
"text": "Why is the head chef called the head chef, then? He doesn’t “cook”."
}
]
</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