I made my 20 year career as a person who could do stuff with computers, software engineer etc. Every time I hear someone say, "my non tech friend who vibe coded an app got a bug he couldn't fix" etc, my response is they are using the wrong model and give it a few months. And I say this with great pain, I am in no way an AI booster, just a realist.
As long as we do not hand over our collective decision making power to the machine god, which I don't think is a good idea and am not sure is even possible, the world out there is at this moment still shaped by humans, with other humans, for humans.
I have this feeling that there is more about society and economics than efficiency. I have right now people I know that work in jobs that could have been automated for many years to a very high degree. That is even without AI.
Counterpoint: This is not only possible but has effectively already happened. From the outside, the current trajectory is indistinguishable from humanity serving the AI, pulling all possible resources out of literally everything else in order to burn them on AI R&D, training and inference.
Big companies though, are more concerned with value and risk. Say some data model provides $5 million in value, hiring a data person to check "everything is kosha", even if in theory someone could vibe code it by prompting an LLM, is a pretty good investment if it derisks the process.
What makes that quote so special that it is worth pointing out as "the best" in 11/2026?
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50438318
Edit: by "semi-auto", I mean auto mode + lots of manual involvement, as opposed to an agent loop or other yolo strategies
I'm also working on transitioning from a classic SWE to a small independent team doing our own products.
Sure I won't make as much money for doing bullshit changes in some old legacy system but I will actually deliver things people will like using, and I'll be in touch with other people on a daily basis.
I.e the reality has so far been ~2 years behind the hype.
I'm not saying I like these companies, or that I think the economics of any of them is sane. Just saying LLM's are capable.
edit. For some context, I only use open weight models these days and rather hope that big closed firms go bust.
AI still needs lots of guidance, and might seem like a genius that does everything on its own, until you give it to people who can't guide it and things begin spiraling out of control.
I try to avoid justifying my own existence, but its a reason why I think skilled engineers are way more productive using LLM's than person off the street. Because they can confine them. Though there is no technical reason that ability can't be codified.
They weaponize the HN rules here. Which is frustrating, because one has to break the letter to defend the spirit.
Or it could be a kid that watched too many tech YouTubers.
But, fundamentally, that doesn't matter, because functionally it's as described.
I am not alone in dropping a positive AI message once in a while without having "an account" which is an outdated, useless notion anyway.
I find the greybeards unbearably stuck in anti-AI psychosis. People like myself have been saying LLMs are capable for years and were nothing but stigmatized and ignored. But now ya'll are seeing the light? A little tardy to the party. Again. Always late, but with a big mouth.
Cut a long story short: I don't gaf about Anthropic or any American company for that matter but I also don't gaf what happens to shortsighted big mouth developers that need literal years to see what was obvious on day one. No longer do I need to bow down to these types and it's extraordinarily liberating. In my company the dickhead sysadmins are falling one by one and it's gorgeous. Good luck memorizing manpages and obscure pf settings, because that's what we really need now. Humans memorizing things and calculating because that's what we're really great at. Great long-term strategizing there Newton.