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ku1ik | on: An ode to houseplant programming (2025)
This is such a lovely article. It’s one of the few things posted to HN these days that actually feels human.
kubb | parent | next
I also feel this way. It’s a breath of fresh air. I love the Blomsterfönstret illustration too.
slopinthebag | parent
Yeah this place has been depressing lately. The hope is that AI could be used to automate the parts of our lives that bring us no joy or growth and help us become fully actualised human beings, but instead it seems like it's just used as a tool to boost profits while making the world a worse place.
pona-a | root | parent | next
It's the denigration of any and all intellectual pursuits that gets me. It's the myopic lead the blind, in a race to empty their brain fastest before the singularity can rupture them into the mainframe heaven.

Their irl counterparts at the university make me think it must be envy, the same as with AI art: they were never good programmers but have always envied the their prestige; and using this new wonderful machine, they can now live out their fantasy at the expense of others. For others it's just nihilism: why not cheat through your entire higher ed if it's now entirely possible?

But many AI-boosters here on HN were once respected programmers, so what else can it be? Fatigue setting in with age, exacerbated by too many levels of indirection in modern software, AI becoming a crutch to avoid noticing you're slowing down?

IanCal | root | parent
Or it’s just a useful tool that lets me build more stuff and focus on what I’m more interested in, and can use it to learn.
1stub | root | parent | next
AI becomes problematic when its exceeds the role of a tool.
slopinthebag | root | parent
It can be a useful tool to do all that, that's what I use it for. Unfortunately a lot of AI boosters have the sfba move fast and break things mentality and that leads to all sorts of slop being pushed.

I think broadly speaking, we need less software that's higher quality. Commercially at least, LLM's seem to be creating more lower quality software. Less software but much higher quality, and then let the gaps be filled in by houseplant programming. Instead we get half-baked vibe coded Cloudflare-isk slop being promoted, or CEO's of saas-slop providers salivating at the chance to fire half of their workforce.

I want to see more houseplants being posted here, LLM generated or not. At least they would tend to have more care and love put into them.

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sriram_malhar | root | parent
As someone said, "Machines were supposed to rid us of tedious work. Instead they write poetry and create art, and we fill captchas to prove to them that we are human"
zikduruqe | root | parent | next
I prefer a quote from Dune - "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
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