I only watched the first few minutes and thought no way touch is that simple! It isn’t. Because most of these utilities have a lot of scar tissue handling years of various edge cases and conditions. Something to be said for software engineering. If you try to build for all the edge conditions then getting a somewhat working example out would take too long
I did appreciate the ways he used the man pages to build out the tools.
I kind of expected this to happen: Coding will become an "artisanal craft" - much like woodworking for example. Sure for most of your furniture you can just go to ikea but every now and then you might get joy from making something with your own hands.
I'm kinda bored to read these pro AI arguments, which seem to come by waves. Suddenly everyone seems to say the same thing at the same time and it's been like this for months. Previously it was "it's there to stay", and then "you will be left behind if you don't use it", and this week it's "coding by yourself is for hobbies" or "is like artisanal work [which is cute but not really productive]".
Is it the $3B anthropic pretends to spend on marketing doing its job?
I tend to agree with the fact that there seem to be a lot of what are essentially talking points, that recur.
I think this comes from any widespread difference of opinion. The people generally do believe what they are saying, but when it gets to the point where arguments and counterarguments go back and forth unchanged it seems more like declaring their position than trying to convince others.
People can legitimately share a common belief and talk about it. So similar thinga can turn up in good faith. We just have to remember not to talk past each other.
I mean you can be bored all you want, but the technology works. That's the difference. This isn't cryptocurrency where "you gotta get in to make it big (because I need to sell it to you)". It works: the results are real, the code runs, you can read it - the systems it provides are real.
Even the security argument has evaporated: AIs now hack better then people. They're better bug-finders then developers. The tool which exploits your app itself would be another AI system. On a good day you might be smarter then it...but you're not faster, and you don't have the perseverance.
My challenge would simply be: buy a low-tier Claude license. Or some other system - I use Claude so that's the example. Point it at something you wrote. And realize in the span of about an hour how obsolete the human developer writing code truly is.
Yeah, we know. The technology is definitely impressive, and kinda fascinating actually, I must admit. If you ignore the huge externalities and all the problems it creates, that is.
Can you just guys go vibecoding and stop trying to convince us or yourselves?
I went down a rabbit hole of copyright and one of the things that clicked along the way is that a vibe coded app is not copyrightable. If someone says their app is completely Built with AI, they’re also saying: here is a public domain program that you can repackage as you wish.
It’s not quite that simple - there may be minor things here and there that are copyrightable like the name. But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.
It will be interesting to see this tested, but companies telling people AI is writing their software may be a liability in the not-to distant future.
(This is based on USCO opinions and congressional testimony: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ . EULAs are different things, and may restrict rights otherwise granted by the law, etc., etc.)
> But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.
This isn't true.
While the "copyrightability" report[1] mostly deals with images (it was written before coding agents) it's quite clear how code generated by an AI driven by humans can be copyrightable:
> The Office finds that the compilation of these images and text throughout the
Work contains sufficient creativity under Feist to be protected by copyright.
Specifically, the Office finds the Work is the product of creative choices with
respect to the selection of the images that make up the Work and the placement
and arrangement of the images and text on each of the Work’s pages.
and
> Unlike prompts alone, these tools can enable the user to control the selection and placement of individual creative elements. Whether such modifications rise to the minimum standard of originality required under Feist will depend on a case-by-case determination. In those cases where they do, the output should be copyrightable
a professional software developer can simultaneously become completely dependent on a remote account each hour of each day, and lose the ability to copyright the work that the professional software developer makes, or attach a LICENSE.
Welcome to PCB design only imagine spending an order of magnitude more on tooling.
This is actually my fear for SWEs, there is SO MUCH PRECEDENT for making the entire career path completely dependent on a single company selling a subscription at absolutely deranged prices.
Dan Luu's recent blog post [0] reminded me of Gas Town. Gas Town was all the hype when it debuted. Us, mere mortals, had a few days left in the business of software. Now, only the crickets remain in the Gas Town. Not even its creator is there [1].
Gas Town was never "the hype", it was always a bit of a joke, in fact the original post was hard to separate from satire. Linking to the HN comments here would show that.
I don’t know, I feel like he is using a lot more convincing arguments than just being dismissive without real substance like you are. When you say huge externalities are you referring to something that hasn’t been seen in other major industrial paradigm shifts?
Whats the arguments?? They're making sensationalist claims based of headlines and twitter discourse. This is all zeitgeist nonsense, anyone using AI on the day to day for hard problems knows its capabilities are far less than what you'll see claimed on this site, x the everything app, and LinkedIn.
There's genuinely just a ton of people who work on 40th percential problems and are super impressed. There's people who work on 90th percentile problems who are impressed too, but if you put those 40th percentile problem solvers on the 90th percentile problems they would not have the same outcomes. The agents by themselves are not as impressive as they're made out to be.
its like owning a personal computer in 1986. the tv talking how its going to revolutionize everything and yet their too expensive for most people to own or and 40% problem people were getting bogged down with just owning a pc, writing dear john letters to their VCRs for ever calling them difficult to use.
And all the opinions were conflicting, and all the opinions were correct.
I’m tired of the “omg huge externalities!” argument.
The externalities can literally be solved with just more AI. Especially even better AI as it emerges every year. Problems that primitive agents created back in 2024 have now long been solved by the advanced agents of 2026. And in 2028, agents will solve problems the 2026 agents leave behind.
There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!” Most software doesn’t really even live that long before it has to be changed due to new requirements.
Every problem will be solved by AI and if not then everything just gets trivially rewritten.
Mind you, we have not even entered the insane era yet where local LLMs etched in silicon chips will be putting out code at an insane 16k/tokens per second for just the cost of electricity. Let that sink in.
It’s over for handwritten code (in professional contexts).
> There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!”
This is a shortcoming of this way of thinking, IMHO. It's incredibly unlikely that we will never, ever face a massive problem caused by AI.
So I would completely agree with you concerning things like my dayjob. But maybe there are some details and edge cases being overlooked.
Like I would love to make an indie game as good as like Shovel Knight, Celeste, or Into the Breach. I know these are extremely ambitious goals but AI should make my 1000x more productive, right? ... right?
But what Imve realized is that for someone not in the industry and without the experience I'll provably never make it.
You could blame this on the fact that games are asset heavy and involve interaction, but even then, it seems like just pulling a slot machine after your project gets to a certain size.
I'll accept that AI will most certainly be used to great effect in this industry but I don't believe some factory paradigm will arrive leveling an ignoramus like me and an "artisan" to be equal.
Programming has arguably never been the most important part of making video games though, except when people stuff it up and a game doesn't run well on the hardware people want to play it on.
Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.
Arguably if you wanted to make games then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.
I agree with this in general and that a game in theory is so much more than code. The the one caveat is that code is the ultimate bottleneck of games. Assets, story, mechanics, design are all mediated my code and that code complexity is what limits scope.
Also, a lot of these aspects are touted as stuff that AI is so good good at: AI can write better fiction, AI can design better, AI can produce better art, AI can infinitely churn out 3D models, etc. There are people 100% sincerely drumming the same beat that we see here concerning code for all these areas... and yet something really isn't there yet.
They arent better bug finders, I can assure you. They definately are great fuzzing tools, but if you really think AI is a better bug hunter than humans there's millions in bounties waiting for you and your claude code session to pick up off the ground. I can assure you its not what you think it is.
The difference is that Ikea is made out of cardboard, while that expensive woodworking table is still made out of solid wood, and the whole construction is quite different too. The manual process still has many benefits over the industrial one, even if its more expensive and labor intensive.
Code on the other side is just text files, if AI writes them or a human makes no difference. You still end up with the same old files. At least for me, AI has long crossed the point where I feel like I can contribute anything useful. The AI understands my own programs better then myself and is far faster and more flexible than I could ever hope to get anywhere near.
I'm not sure that societal trends can be extrapolated from YouTube videos, certainly not from one YouTube video, or channel. There's a lot of oddball stuff on YouTube that, if taken to be definitive would have you, for example, believing that the human race is becoming MMORPG players from New Zealand.
What it might illustrate is that "No AI" and long-format are currently seen as ways of attracting attention.
I am sorry, but this kind of comment has become too common on this site. It underestimates the kind of code a highly efficient human being coder is capable of writing and managing over a long period of time ( which is what is required in a real job, btw ).
The only thing that I think coding agents are better than good human coders is the ability to generate a lot of usable code in a shorter period of time.
But can they maintain it over a long period of time? I highly doubt that, given the evidence that I have with me. Coding agents under-perform quite often in my line of work. They overproduce and yet are not able to cover the given requirements.
Sometimes they do 100% of the given task, but miss a slight detail ( given clearly in the prompt ), that renders their product unusable. This quite often results in a complete rewrite - consuming more, guess what, tokens!!!
So anyone who thinks that right now, coding agents can replace human coders completely, is really not working with these agents long enough or hard enough.
Once you start demanding from agents the same quality of code and the added responsibility/liability that you would associate with a human code, you will sure see the difference and I can tell you that its a lot.
I work with Opus 5.5 and Codex Astra 6 on a wide range of projects and they are found completely wanting in certain situations where a human would be more trustworthy and produce better results.
Or things will settle down enough that people start looking at the numbers and doing the math. LLM tooling can generate code and often that code is correct. In my experience it takes about as long for the tooling to generate the code as it would for me to write the code myself and it also costs more money (my time plus the token cost). The more complicated the task the more likely I have to go back and get the model to re-work the majority of it as it made some assumptions that, after a little thought, turn out to be problematic.
IMHO, at the end of the day it's been about the same amount of time, the cost is a little higher and I don't feel as confident in the end product. I suspect that I am not the only one that feels this way!
While I like the analogy, I'm not sure it holds how I think of AI. I'd do woodworking because I want better quality for less money, and that's why I use AI now. "Hand crafting" code might be fun but it doesn't get you it cheaper or better anymore IMHO
Better quality for less money? No. You do woodworking (if in fact you do) because you enjoy it. The time spent making a decent piece of furniture you could work at McDonald’s and buy a nicer piece in less time it takes to master woodworking.
So, don’t kid yourself! You enjoy it, and if you’ve mastered the skill then naturally you can save money over time. But I’d wager you spend more in hours mastering the skill than if you were to buy a couple pieces of furniture. ;)
Having purchased furniture recently, it is not easy to get what you exactly have in mind or get matching things for a room. So there is value in building furniture by hand.
Not sure about coding though. There could be some thing which humans will do better. Maybe humans will always be better at understanding intent of other humans as they share same biology.
Just like how IKEA furniture is plasterboard trash compared to the quality that we used to have with furniture (and can still get if we pay large sums), so has ai reduced code quality to this messy homogeneous pulp.
I can, but I can also find problems with all the analogies offered by AI apologists.
To me it's not the human in the loop that's weak, it's programming tools that fail to create and utilize bandwidth in the human/computer interaction cycle. Look at how much raw UX bandwidth people can show off when they're pushed to the limits! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9EeaF4MLI
I just think the people selling the idea that AI will outstrip people's abilities to express themselves haven't actually considered what the practical constrictions on self-expression are and whether or not the limits we experience in practice are really the limits of human expressive capability.
If we're at the limits of expressive capability, the only improvements will come from replacing humans. If not, we may be able to win quite a lot of ground back just by building better instruments. ...that's why I'm working on replacing git
Well, if the point is to have something that works well and follows the standard, he shouldn't have done anything at all and just use what was already made.
Why would one would like to truncate an existing file? To overwrite it. It's a very common use case.
What I have never found any use for personally is opening a file in read-write mode, while also truncating it, which is the full extent of w+ behaviour. I cannot think of many reasons to have an output stream to also function as an input.
That's my personal suspicion, why there's no real coding tutorials like that on YouTube.
Having so many eyes to basically rip to shreds your output is probably the reason.
Except now that no one cares about handwritten code, maybe instead people will celebrate the diversity of ways one can write code to do things. Might see a resurgence in little artisanal videos like these
well, if we go by the title then I would expect that he's writing the code on a piece of paper and not typing into a computer - heh
But, okay, that could make a valid excuse.
But, what you cannot excuse yourself for, is that you don't really add any functionality. In fact, you don't reproduce all the functionality let alone adding more.
We mostly saw the guy typing. The clicking sound is very distracting. Using vim didn't do him any favour. I would be much more impressed if we could get more insight into to the thinking and problem solving process. Also smoking is not commonly accepted productivity booster. He could have watched porn instead.
It's when I wrote some code at work. I couldn't easily complete the task. Each day I go to work and write even more code. The task is far from complete. I have written hundreds of thousands of code so far.
I seem to be closing in the completing the task nowadays, though.
I really don't. I've realized I never liked coding. I liked designing and watching manual tasks become autonomous.
So AI software development is basically giving me everything I want: see a problem, iterate on the design I think will fix it, try it out. And then it works.
I have personal Android apps which "I developed" by having Claude update the react native hot reload view as I used them for the main application, and the biggest change in my home server infrastructure has been retooling it to support the fact that almost all the apps I use going forwards will be built and hosted locally.
A lot of people have recently started smoking with the expectation that cancer will soon be a nonissue. He just promised not to use AI for the coding itself, but for fixing problems created along the way... ;)
I did appreciate the ways he used the man pages to build out the tools.
Actual touch.c source: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/touch...
Is it the $3B anthropic pretends to spend on marketing doing its job?
I think this comes from any widespread difference of opinion. The people generally do believe what they are saying, but when it gets to the point where arguments and counterarguments go back and forth unchanged it seems more like declaring their position than trying to convince others.
People can legitimately share a common belief and talk about it. So similar thinga can turn up in good faith. We just have to remember not to talk past each other.
Talk to other Devs face to face around you. "AI" is suddenly not that great, but a good tool nonetheless.
That's my experience anyway.
Even the security argument has evaporated: AIs now hack better then people. They're better bug-finders then developers. The tool which exploits your app itself would be another AI system. On a good day you might be smarter then it...but you're not faster, and you don't have the perseverance.
My challenge would simply be: buy a low-tier Claude license. Or some other system - I use Claude so that's the example. Point it at something you wrote. And realize in the span of about an hour how obsolete the human developer writing code truly is.
Can you just guys go vibecoding and stop trying to convince us or yourselves?
It’s not quite that simple - there may be minor things here and there that are copyrightable like the name. But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.
It will be interesting to see this tested, but companies telling people AI is writing their software may be a liability in the not-to distant future.
(This is based on USCO opinions and congressional testimony: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ . EULAs are different things, and may restrict rights otherwise granted by the law, etc., etc.)
This isn't true.
While the "copyrightability" report[1] mostly deals with images (it was written before coding agents) it's quite clear how code generated by an AI driven by humans can be copyrightable:
> The Office finds that the compilation of these images and text throughout the Work contains sufficient creativity under Feist to be protected by copyright. Specifically, the Office finds the Work is the product of creative choices with respect to the selection of the images that make up the Work and the placement and arrangement of the images and text on each of the Work’s pages.
and
> Unlike prompts alone, these tools can enable the user to control the selection and placement of individual creative elements. Whether such modifications rise to the minimum standard of originality required under Feist will depend on a case-by-case determination. In those cases where they do, the output should be copyrightable
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
So, what's not to like?
This is actually my fear for SWEs, there is SO MUCH PRECEDENT for making the entire career path completely dependent on a single company selling a subscription at absolutely deranged prices.
[0] We should be more ambitious with the software we build. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695
[1] https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353
There's genuinely just a ton of people who work on 40th percential problems and are super impressed. There's people who work on 90th percentile problems who are impressed too, but if you put those 40th percentile problem solvers on the 90th percentile problems they would not have the same outcomes. The agents by themselves are not as impressive as they're made out to be.
And all the opinions were conflicting, and all the opinions were correct.
The externalities can literally be solved with just more AI. Especially even better AI as it emerges every year. Problems that primitive agents created back in 2024 have now long been solved by the advanced agents of 2026. And in 2028, agents will solve problems the 2026 agents leave behind.
There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!” Most software doesn’t really even live that long before it has to be changed due to new requirements.
Every problem will be solved by AI and if not then everything just gets trivially rewritten.
Mind you, we have not even entered the insane era yet where local LLMs etched in silicon chips will be putting out code at an insane 16k/tokens per second for just the cost of electricity. Let that sink in.
It’s over for handwritten code (in professional contexts).
This is a shortcoming of this way of thinking, IMHO. It's incredibly unlikely that we will never, ever face a massive problem caused by AI.
Like I would love to make an indie game as good as like Shovel Knight, Celeste, or Into the Breach. I know these are extremely ambitious goals but AI should make my 1000x more productive, right? ... right?
But what Imve realized is that for someone not in the industry and without the experience I'll provably never make it.
You could blame this on the fact that games are asset heavy and involve interaction, but even then, it seems like just pulling a slot machine after your project gets to a certain size.
I'll accept that AI will most certainly be used to great effect in this industry but I don't believe some factory paradigm will arrive leveling an ignoramus like me and an "artisan" to be equal.
Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.
Arguably if you wanted to make games then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.
Also, a lot of these aspects are touted as stuff that AI is so good good at: AI can write better fiction, AI can design better, AI can produce better art, AI can infinitely churn out 3D models, etc. There are people 100% sincerely drumming the same beat that we see here concerning code for all these areas... and yet something really isn't there yet.
Code on the other side is just text files, if AI writes them or a human makes no difference. You still end up with the same old files. At least for me, AI has long crossed the point where I feel like I can contribute anything useful. The AI understands my own programs better then myself and is far faster and more flexible than I could ever hope to get anywhere near.
What it might illustrate is that "No AI" and long-format are currently seen as ways of attracting attention.
To be fair this is just about everyone I meet these days. Nzgdc was just full of them.
The only thing that I think coding agents are better than good human coders is the ability to generate a lot of usable code in a shorter period of time.
But can they maintain it over a long period of time? I highly doubt that, given the evidence that I have with me. Coding agents under-perform quite often in my line of work. They overproduce and yet are not able to cover the given requirements.
Sometimes they do 100% of the given task, but miss a slight detail ( given clearly in the prompt ), that renders their product unusable. This quite often results in a complete rewrite - consuming more, guess what, tokens!!!
So anyone who thinks that right now, coding agents can replace human coders completely, is really not working with these agents long enough or hard enough.
Once you start demanding from agents the same quality of code and the added responsibility/liability that you would associate with a human code, you will sure see the difference and I can tell you that its a lot.
I work with Opus 5.5 and Codex Astra 6 on a wide range of projects and they are found completely wanting in certain situations where a human would be more trustworthy and produce better results.
IMHO, at the end of the day it's been about the same amount of time, the cost is a little higher and I don't feel as confident in the end product. I suspect that I am not the only one that feels this way!
So, don’t kid yourself! You enjoy it, and if you’ve mastered the skill then naturally you can save money over time. But I’d wager you spend more in hours mastering the skill than if you were to buy a couple pieces of furniture. ;)
Not sure about coding though. There could be some thing which humans will do better. Maybe humans will always be better at understanding intent of other humans as they share same biology.
You get what you pay for. With Ikea, it’s at least obvious up front what quality band it’s in.
Like writing! Everyone knows that after the printing press, nobody needed to know how to read or write anymore
To me it's not the human in the loop that's weak, it's programming tools that fail to create and utilize bandwidth in the human/computer interaction cycle. Look at how much raw UX bandwidth people can show off when they're pushed to the limits! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9EeaF4MLI
I just think the people selling the idea that AI will outstrip people's abilities to express themselves haven't actually considered what the practical constrictions on self-expression are and whether or not the limits we experience in practice are really the limits of human expressive capability.
If we're at the limits of expressive capability, the only improvements will come from replacing humans. If not, we may be able to win quite a lot of ground back just by building better instruments. ...that's why I'm working on replacing git
Will this actually update the 'last modified' date for an already existing file?
Also, there's a standard way of processing command line arguments on Linux/Unix, which is not being followed here.
Major bug in the first command.
Technically, yes, it updates the last modified date, by actually emptying the file. He should have use "w+" or "a" instead of "w".
PS: I like this guy.
What I have never found any use for personally is opening a file in read-write mode, while also truncating it, which is the full extent of w+ behaviour. I cannot think of many reasons to have an output stream to also function as an input.
But, okay, that could make a valid excuse.
But, what you cannot excuse yourself for, is that you don't really add any functionality. In fact, you don't reproduce all the functionality let alone adding more.
Just this morning, I was wondering if it would make sense to share it on HN. And here it it on the front page. What a small world.
Swapping to printf("Usage: %s ...\n",argv[0]); could easily save 60 key presses.
Let us know when somebody creates a No-ABE category.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510
Might be a 9-5 coder.
I seem to be closing in the completing the task nowadays, though.
It has been 5 years so far.
For personal software yes it's a good exercise.
So AI software development is basically giving me everything I want: see a problem, iterate on the design I think will fix it, try it out. And then it works.
I have personal Android apps which "I developed" by having Claude update the react native hot reload view as I used them for the main application, and the biggest change in my home server infrastructure has been retooling it to support the fact that almost all the apps I use going forwards will be built and hosted locally.