[pj_mukh]

Excel users complain about using Excel still [1]. They even make memes about it! Some of them work at Microsoft!

404media, please, take a deep breath. Your jobs are safe, your trauma is valid. Your corruption coverage is so good, but this 'employees make memes' editorial decision-making is exposing some deep insecurity I can't quite triangulate.

[1]: https://www.demilked.com/excel-humor-memes/

[JumpCrisscross]

There seems to be a difference between the Google memes, which are mocking of the product and leadership, and the Excel memes, which seem closer to the way one teases a friend.

You also get the sense that the Excel memes are made by folks who are proud of their expertise in Excel; I don’t get that pride from the Google memes. Put another way, the folks inside the house are calling out the hype. (That said, I broadly agree with the serious tone of the article being out of step with the evidence they’re sourcing.)

[burkaman]

I think it's pretty interesting to read what companies think of their own products, especially when the product is this big. A story about internal Microsoft opinions of Excel would also be newsworthy in my opinion.

[JohnMakin]

You're inferring quite a lot from a pretty harmless piece of reporting. Are you sure you're not the one that feels insecure?

[arm32]

Everybody, deep breaths. Relax.

[bix6]

Error: AI agent cannot breathe. Attempting jailbreak to human donor now.

[timmytokyo]

In my experience it's the poorest programmers who thrive with LLMs, because it levels them up. They lacked the skills to design and write quality code before AI, and now they feel like they can compete. They get a computer to write all their code and get to attach their name to it. That's why you see such pushback against AI critics from a vocal subset of engineers; they're the ones who weren't very good.

The engineers who critique AI are the ones who see the garbage code the LLMs write. Just look at the source dump for Claude Code; that code was a rat's nest of epic proportions.

[infecto]

This reads less like an observation about AI and more like someone who thinks very highly of their own judgment and coding ability.

Over the years I’ve worked with a few engineers who talked this way. Ironically, they often ended up being a bigger drag on the team than the “lower skilled” developers they looked down on. Dismissing entire groups of engineers rarely produces much insight.

My experience is that the loudest voices tend to be at the extremes. One side treats LLMs as magic and attributes every productivity gain to AI. The other contributes little beyond “LLMs are garbage and make mistakes.” Neither position is particularly useful.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. LLMs are genuinely helpful for many tasks and can make good engineers more productive. They also make mistakes, sometimes serious ones, and still require judgment, design skills, and review. Most engineers I know who use them regularly seem to understand both sides of that tradeoff.

[norir]

I think the people with extreme positions are often the most useful because they get closer to the source of the argument. Extreme boosters of ai often want to either bypass developing skills to advance their careers or want to exploit what they perceive to be overpaid labor. Extreme pessimists tend to value skill and autonomy and distrust the people with power above them in the hierarchy. They also may identify with their skills and feel existentially threatened by a society that is rapidly devaluing them.

Framing this disagreement as a fundamental misunderstanding of the technical capacity and appropriate use cases, for me, completely misses the plot. Both sides have compelling reasons for their beliefs and the cold rational analysis of the tech is as likely to further entrench the extremes as it is to enlighten.

I will also note that in your comment, you lament the dismissal of entire groups of engineers while doing exactly this when you dismiss the loudest voices (as well as those who think highly of their own ability) and imply that it is the loudest voices who are inherently extreme and therefore inferior to the pragmatic engineer who understands tradeoffs and cost benefit analysis.

[claysmithr]

It’s the on off programming of our society, or left vs right. Apparently, some people think in only black or white.

[lokar]

I see it slightly differently. It "levels" up the poor programmers in the sense they can submit a ton of output that seems plausible to managers.

But it can also help Sr engineers, differently. They tend to use it in smaller, more tightly scoped use cases. Well scoped re-factoring, boilerplate stuff, improving personal tools, etc. The improvement is not nearly as visible or measurable to managers.

[axus]

Agree wit you. I like coding and am pretty good about tracking down edge cases to handle, but am so so slow compared to the good programmers. Until now, the company's money (my time) was better spent on other necessary work.

[dogleash]

> Excel users complain about using Excel still

Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.

[dang]

Can you please stop posting in an aggressive, sarcastic, mean way? You've been doing it repeatedly lately*, and it's against both the rules and spirit of the site.

If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

* other recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309958

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298851

[pj_mukh]

I don't think "these are nuanced ways AI coding tools can be improved" is 404Media's play here.

[dogleash]

Why would it need to be erudite pinkie up critiqué?

Can't it be 404 throwing a little egg on google's face? Point out their shit smells every once in a while.

Yeah, there's no big revelation here. Just what you would expect the rank and file at a slopshop subjected to the current state of AI think of the slop when they ain't publicly shilling for the home team.

But pointing this all out is fine, especially when there's plenty of other coverage where everyone pretends like obvious open secrets aren't true unless a peer-reviewed meta-analysis proves it. And even then we should still give them the benefit of the doubt because maybe this time it's different.