[anon373839]

The writing style, if not AI, is at least a bit tryhard.

Turning to the substance of the article: why do people feel the need to run this fast? I have certainly experimented with letting coding agents run amok. The first few times you try it, it feels like a superpower. Then you start examining the icky choices they made in a codebase that is now a dense forest. Then you have to expend a bunch of effort beating it back into submission. Or I guess you can YOLO and throw more AI at it, but then I agree with the person quoted saying "at that point, what am I still doing here?" This is not a satisfying or sustainable way to build, and there really is no reason other than hype and FOMO to do it.

[matltc]

I am with you but I inevitably think it's a skill issue. Some devs put a lot of work into the harness. I tried doing this, felt like running in place to me. the lack of RFC-tier standardization and ever-shifting api is demotivating as well since you might have written a harness that will be obsolete with next model gen/version bump

There probably is a correct way to do this, but your average "vibe coder", or even a competent solo dev just yoloing a project, are not implementing such harnesses. In the former case, they may not be able to; in the latter, you're probably better off in 1:1 human to agent workflow due to indeterminate/bad outputs and the amount of back-and-forth in prompts/specs/reviews required to get high-quality work

Then again, I saw Matz harness for his compiled ruby project was just like perms.allow find and grep. No skills, no agents.md or anything like that. Would love to see those prompts! I'm sure the fact that it was Matz had a lot to do with that working, though

[bluefirebrand]

> why do people feel the need to run this fast

Because if they don't they feel like they will be replaced by someone who will

[Schlagbohrer]

This attitude gets people to willingly engage in abusive crunch practices such as in the games industry. I think the people who are like this are the ones who later talk about crunch like it was good in some way or necessary.

Basically a bad relation to labor and sustainable lifelong work.

[bluefirebrand]

I agree with you completely and I push for saner work-life balance anywhere I work. Unfortunately this unhealthy work culture is really entrenched most places

[discreteevent]

This happens all the time, even before LLMs. And it happens even when there is no threat. A lot of the time the race to the bottom is driven by anxious people running from imaginary threats. Which is why its often useful to have a person in a group who tells people not to panic (this is often an older person).

But of course the AI guys are preying on this anxiety in order to dominate. They are all over HN, either personally or with their bots. Which is why HN is no longer a place that you could go to get mainly unbiased anecdotes and experience. That is still available but it is being drowned out by FUD because the average HN user is now the mark.