llm/fa6df919-50f4-440a-804d-6a9d3e9721d8/batch-7-ce0256e7-d49c-4d0e-846b-485907b457f5-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": "46496380",
"text": "> My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job.\n\nThe article is about personal projects. The need to review the code is usually 10x less :-)"
}
,
{
"id": "46496269",
"text": "For most of my AI uses, I already have an implementation in mind. The prompt is small enough that most of the time, the agent would get it 90% there. In a way, it's basically an advanced autocomplete.\n\nI think this is quite nice cause it doesn't feel like code review. It's more of a: did it do it? Yes? Great. Somewhat? Good enough, i can work from there. And when it doesn't work, I just scrap that and re-prompt or implement it manually.\n\nBut I do agree with what you say. When someone uses AI without making the code their own, it's a nightmare. I've had to review some PRs where I feel like I'm prompting AI rather than an engineer. I did wonder if they simply put my reviews directly to some agent..."
}
,
{
"id": "46493338",
"text": "Agreed. I've settled on writing the code myself and having AI do the first pass review."
}
,
{
"id": "46493910",
"text": "I enjoy when:\nThings are simple.\nThings are a complicated, but I can learn something useful.\n\nI do not enjoy when:\nThings are arbitrarily complicated.\nThings are a complicated, but I'm just using AI to blindly get something done instead of learning.\nThings are arbitrarily complicated and not incentivized to improve because now \"everyone can just use AI\"\n\nIt feels like instead of all stepping back and saying \"we need to simplify things\" we've doubled down on abstraction _again_"
}
,
{
"id": "46500199",
"text": "Don't you enjoy the fact that some staff is actually _done_?"
}
,
{
"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": "46497025",
"text": "Same here. I wrote this comment before I saw yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496990\n\nIt really brings no value. I'm not learning anything new here. And the discussion around it is always the same thing."
}
,
{
"id": "46497311",
"text": "I think you’re destined to being bored then, because AI is here to stay. And as its capabilities improve, so will praise for it."
}
,
{
"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…\n\nI'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.\n\nAll 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 just blocking all the traffic. That's certainly 'simpler', but it's also much worse for the user, and on a site that did things with data potentially risked corrupting a user's records. It was incredible that things didn't break more often. Maybe they did and we just never realised.\n\nWe didn't have CSS frameworks but we certainly did have our own in-house templates, and they had separate toolchains. As time went on that toolchain mostly migrated to Wordpress and it's template builder plugins. Again, give me Tailwind over that mess.\n\nWe had Core Web Vitals and SEO in the form of Urchin Stats. We had layout shift but we called it FOUC. We had kind of had srcset, but it was implemented as a set of Macromedia Dreamweaver mm_ JS image preload and swapping functions. <picture> is a lot nicer.\n\nThings are just better now. Writing web software is loads of fun. I also leverage LLMs in my code because they're awesome, but not to simplify things. I don't think the complexity is new. I just think it's visible now."
}
,
{
"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": "46489772",
"text": "> I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence.\n\nBy not managing anything? Ignorance is bliss, I guess.\n\nI 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.\nThis 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.\n\nBut 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": "46497195",
"text": "This isn't supposed to be a slam on LLMs. They're genuinely useful for automating a lot of menial things... It's just there's a point where we end up automating ourselves out of the equation, where we lose opportunity to learn, and earn personal fulfilment.\n\nWeb dev is a soft target. It is very complex in parts, and what feels like a lot of menial boilerplate worth abstracting, but not understanding messy topics like CSS fundamentals, browser differences, form handling and accessibility means you don't know to ask your LLM for them.\n\nYou have to know what you don't know before you can consciously tell an LLM to do it for you.\n\nLLMs will get better, but does that improve things or just relegated the human experience further and further away from accomplishment?"
}
,
{
"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…\n\nLLMs 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": "46490806",
"text": "They exist for reasons, yes. Worse problems? Nah."
}
,
{
"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": "46496763",
"text": "And also a build pipeline doesn't have to be difficult to write. You can do it in like 50 lines of code and esbuild. And then you get to bundle your CSS, use React or whatever, Typescript, etc."
}
,
{
"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.\n\nYou can get LLMs to create some truly unique sites, but it takes a lot more work than a few prompts."
}
,
{
"id": "46495277",
"text": "Last paragraph resonated so deeply with me. Especially this:\n\n```It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time.```\n\nI never really related with folks that code for beauty or are put off by how AI does the actual coding. The beauty is actually creating something, solving real problems, shipping, and (hopfully) winning. It might be cliche, but it is incredibly true for me to say that using AI feels like a superpower."
}
,
{
"id": "46499303",
"text": "The people who love writing code were the ones who created the languages and frameworks that make it even possible for an LLM to cobble something together for you.\n\nThere is tons of satsifaction in actually creating nuts and bolts frameworks. After you encounter difficulties in creating a real world product you see the need for tools to solve those problems, so crafting those tools and then using them does feel like winning and shipping and solving real problems."
}
,
{
"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": "46496303",
"text": "Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people.\nIn many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.\n\nEither way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django."
}
,
{
"id": "46501020",
"text": "This author simultaneously admits, he cannot hold the system in his head, but then also claims he’s not vibecoding, and I assert that these are two conflicting positions and you cannot simultaneously hold both positions\n\nI am also doing my pattern recognition. It seems that a common pattern is people claiming it sped me up by x! (and then there’s no AB test, n=1)"
}
,
{
"id": "46499145",
"text": "<Here is a joke for you>\n\nFactory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age.\n\nNow AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If AI can make us the things that are needed, then how are we needed? We are not. As freed slaves, suddenly we are out of work. We are obsolete.\n\nUnfortunately, for corporations that are now rushing to free themselves from the old, difficult, demanding, contentious slaves, they have missed one gigantic element of the equation. Hmmm. What could it be? Can you guess? What could possibly go wrong here?\n\nFortunately, for us - the freed slaves and factory workers - it turns out we are not just slaves after all. We were just trained to be slaves. So we have a future. If we can adapt to being free. And that is not a joke.\n\n<End joke. I just made this up, nothing about it is true or even remotely serious. />"
}
,
{
"id": "46499423",
"text": "If Bill Bryson is to be trusted, the loom actually replaced a massive amount of labor. Prior to invention of labor-savings devices, Britain made 32x less cotton fibre. The inventions in this space put tens of thousands out of work, in what was already a difficult job market due to automation. I’m not sure your first paragraph makes sense.\n\nPeople were dirt cheap, but machines were vastly more productive (and some inventions were stolen so that no royalties had to be paid)."
}
,
{
"id": "46499266",
"text": "That's not a funny joke."
}
,
{
"id": "46497843",
"text": "“I can reliably reproduce their coding standards, tone of voice, tactics, and processes.”\n\nDoesn’t he mean the “AI tool” can reliably reproduce his friends coding practices? Hilariously ironic if so."
}
,
{
"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.\n\nbut 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.\n\nboth roads very reasonable, but that the old way of doing things is new again is interesting."
}
,
{
"id": "46489116",
"text": "Yes!\n\nI'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.\n\nFeels like coding in the 200xs and I'm enjoying every minute of it."
}
,
{
"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": "46489142",
"text": "AI makes finishing projects easier. But I would steer away from starting them.\n\nIn 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.\n\nI 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": "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": "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": "46499158",
"text": "I think it’s easier to manage full-stack development as a solo developer now even without AI.\n\nNow TypeScript catches a lot of my mistakes before they reach runtime.\n\nNow I have good enough browser automation testing tools to catch regressions in the frontend.\n\nNow it’s quick and easy to run a specific database version for each app I’m working on with docker.\n\nNow I can automate deployment to the cloud instead of having to rely on an entire IT department.\n\nNow I have a scalable way to publish and consume reusable units of code as npm packages.\n\nNone of this was the case in what this author seems to think were the good old days. If web development seemed easy to him back then, I doubt he was working on complex projects"
}
,
{
"id": "46500187",
"text": "I'm trying to catch up with AI but it's difficult because most articles I find are kinda vague and there is a lack of clear examples.\n\nIt's always about prompting or how AI \"is great\" yadi yada but hardly any step by step examples.\n\nI can easily ask gemini CLI to produce code for example. But how to work with AI in an existing codebase isn't obvious at all.\n\nIt seems also that for any serious use you need a paid subscription? It seems like the free models just can't handle large codebases."
}
,
{
"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": "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": "46498284",
"text": "> Over the past two decades, I’ve worked with a lot of talented people\n\n> I’ve seen the good and the bad, and I can iterate from there.\n\nA bit of a buried lede, perhaps. Being in the industry for two decades, the definitions and fundamentals can rub off on you, with a little effort. There is a big difference between this and a decidedly non-technical individual without industry experience who sets out to do the same thing. This is not the advertised scenario for LLM vibe-coding."
}
,
{
"id": "46495946",
"text": "We can all have fun being homeless I guess"
}
,
{
"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.\n\nWill 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": "46499815",
"text": "A LOT of what is mentioned for today's frontend and backend developers is really companies dumping more and more responsibility onto developers so they can fire SEOs, Configurations Management specialists, DBAs, etc., so that the company can save more money while burning out more developers."
}
,
{
"id": "46499093",
"text": "It's good that tools create the OP's positive feeling about being on top of the full Web stack again.\n\nI just wish the tools that provides that feeling was a deterministic front-end code generator built from software technology and software engineering insights and not a neural network utilizing a pseudo-random number generator..."
}
,
{
"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.\n\nIf you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion, I also wrote some brief thoughts on my Adventures In AI Prototyping:\n\nhttps://www.andrew-turnbull.com/adventures-in-ai-prototyping..."
}
,
{
"id": "46497288",
"text": "A product manager here. Thanks to AI, I was able to create my own website on Astro. I was so fascinated by web technologies, that I didn't realize when I created not just a website, but a blazing fast website with extensive amount of metadata generation (Json-LD, OG, microformats, Dublin Core, PRISM, RSL 1.0, Highwire Press, FAIR singposting, MODS generation) and so on. Thanks to this pet project, I'm now quite capable as a software architect of websites. And it is really fun!"
}
]
</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