> In July 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) alleged that Jane Street used multiple entities for market manipulation and barred it from accessing the market.
As I understand Jane Street they have done great things for OCaml and they also do their own web framework (I guess that big money bin needs a lot of dashboards).
I think the designer here takes a wrong approach and sort of falls into engineer envy where he wants to make prototypes as deep and realistic as possible. And that is not really the most important part of the design job.
The most important thing is that the right thing gets build (why do we need a JSQL input box? what do we actually want? what are other ways to do this?). And this is often better done with pen and paper sketches, meetings, observation, discussions ... rather than too quickly narrowing on a particular design and spinning into discussions on whether buttons should be on the left or on the right, LLM intricacies etc.
Taking it slow with paper and interviews works if you think about what you're doing. The other option now is shut down brain and press the slot machine lever one more time. One of the designs has got to be good soon.
This. LLMs helping implement many ideas is a curse and the results speak for themselves.
As a non-designer I want to see a thought through 1-2 ideas, not 10 ideas you coded with llm and now the burden of thinking which one is better and why is for some reason is on me.
(I’m the author) making ideas legible and testing them with users is part of the design process regardless of tooling. You can summarize this article as “I find LLMs more effective at making ideas legible vs figma - for the work I’m doing at Jane Street”. This has helped me iterate and it helps me test with users and get better feedback from them. I’m not just prompting “make no design mistakes” over and over.
No matter how nuanced your your workflow is, there are some people on HN that just hate AI and will see it as "slot machine go brr" no matter what you say. It is generally pointless to engage with such people.
People are much better at saying what they don’t want rather than thinking about what they do. It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.
>> It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.
Not really. Maybe its effective from designer side but from other side that has to review all those ideas it is exhausting and counterproductive. Especially when it is in code.
You really don't need a real prototype for most things. Simple visual is more than enough to present an idea and explain etc. In fact, it is often much better as you can see all flows in canvas at once.
With interactive prototype to see all flows of a feature you have to go through each one, which again is very uneffective.
Jane St's hiring bar is higher than 99% of the tech industry, maybe even 99.5-99.9%. Blog posts from companies like this are interesting in the same way that papers from well respected journals are interesting.
I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made.
Give it some time. We’ll figure out what LLMs are good and bad at. I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.
At least, that assumes AI models won’t keep improving by leaps and bounds. We’re in a transition period. It’s gonna be chaos.
> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made
But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone.
Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.
That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade. And since then, I haven't had any friends or family ask me for a simple site. The low-value work is already automated.
Your comment is valid, but not for the reason you think. What you should be talking about is the grunt work done in our field to non-trivial applications. Adding a search box to a table, or add an extra field to a form, etc.
So you think about a ticket that often might take a few hours, but in badly architected system might take a week, add a field to a class, edit the DB structure (maybe manually, maybe through via an ORM generated migration), add it to DTOs, add a validator, add it to the FE definitions, edit the page layout, etc..
Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees.
> That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade.
I think there's still a lot more custom work than you'd expect. A recent example: My mum is ex-president of a small international NGO. When I visited earlier today, she was bemoaning how the lady who runs their NGO's website charges them an arm and a leg for small changes. As a result, the website is constantly out of date. The current site is entirely built on top of wordpress. There is, of course, politics. This lady holds the login credentials to everything. And she holds them close to her chest.
I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes. I think LLMs aren't quite at the point that my mum could manage the website herself. You do need a little technical knowledge. My mum just doesn't know what to ask for. But we're really close. I've offered to be a human frontend to LLMs for them going forward, if she can wrest control from the "webmaster".
I suspect conversations like this are happening everywhere at the moment. There are an incredible number of small websites out there. Most of them, claude or chatgpt could reimplement in 5 minutes tops.
There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.
This is more a problem of your Mum mismanaging her contractors. She should be threatening hellfire down on this contractor for withholding the admin username + password.
Generating the site with Claude would be a pretty stupid choice for her right now, if she needs something more than a basic info site, word press is still king, but she should be able to do info updates herself.
OTOH, you might be able to ask Claude to do the changes for you.
> Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees
The current trend is a proliferation of internal tooling. I've honestly found quite a bit of it useful. The rest is the usual should-have-been-a-Google-form nonsense.
I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.
How is that relevant?
The convenience for restaurants owners is how easy, cheap, non-technical, and fast the process is.
You proceeded to make a point that does not match any of these four prerequisites
Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything."
Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive.
However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.
You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.
I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly.
I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.
> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.
What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?
It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.
My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.
Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money
It’s some Sun Tzu shit. Create a sense of inevitability such that they win the war for financial capital without any fighting, then hope the tech catches up before Capitalists realize they’ve been fleeced. The Dotcom bubble was the same scam.
In between some old family history and recent US politics, I think there are other things I'd rather reserve the weighty word "cult" for... However, should it arise, one of the features that might convince me is this:
In the name of "loyalty" or "faith" cults require members to burn their bridges, actively cutting off their own potential to escape to any other social support network. That may mean creating enemies out of former associates, humiliating rituals or blackmail material, or simply ruining their reputations through obvious lies.
I think I did quite enough to be vague and oblique on that context, so that it wasn't the focus, and any reader could avoid the topic... if they chose to.
The utility of current-era AI may well be overstated, and the business models of certain companies might be doubtful, but that doesn't make AI it a "cult".
If you blindly ignore all the drawbacks, preach that "future is now" and whoever is not using the slot machine "will be left behind", then you're in a cult.
An opinion held, in my estimation, by a tiny (but noisy) minority of people who have always existed; the trend obsessed rebuild-the-world types who probably think that AI will soon be able to write unaided a kernel in Rust superior in 100% of metrics to Linux.
It's also a huge ad for microprocessors. I mean don't people realize we did math before microprocessors? We even had mechanical machines which were much more elegant than these electronic abominations. /s
I'm not saying AI isn't a good tool. However the less you understand what you're using and what you're doing the further you stand to geopardize the business you're working for.
> In July 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) alleged that Jane Street used multiple entities for market manipulation and barred it from accessing the market.