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hypfer | on: The Dawn of the Data Intelligence Engineer
Isn't that the same message we've been hearing ad-nauseam by now?

What makes that quote so special that it is worth pointing out as "the best" in 11/2026?

lavendermon | parent | next
It's not new, but especially after the release of Opus 5.5 it's been sticking in my mind lately.
ilumanty | root | parent | next
I thought so too. After a few weeks of semi-auto mode, I can clearly see how my codebase deteriorates. Humanity is not over yet.

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

hypfer | root | parent | next
You haven't answered my question.
Marczelloni | root | parent | next
Since the release of Opus 5.5 I have more work than ever and it enables me to move out from the coding I never really enjoyed to a full stack product engineering.

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.

hypfer | root | parent
Nice, now the less-than-14d old accounts are teaming up to push the narrative for the upcoming IPO
Marczelloni | root | parent
I have zero stock or interest in Anthropic IPO, moreover I really hope open weights catch up price-wise to what Claude Max provides (tokens there are heavily subsidized right now), so that I can make a switch and not feed the beast.

I'd like to also use a model on my owm hardware, but alas, I'm relatively young in the industry and my wallet is not fat enough for a local AI stack.

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8by3 | parent
My view, as someone who was flat out "AI is a hype scam" up until around Jan this year. It was hype for a while, and forms of it are still very much hype, but the reality is catching up with the hype.

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.

torginus | root | parent | next
I was out for 2 weeks, and the resident meat proxies on my team managed to half-destroy the project by doing everything the way AI wanted to, instead of how the company systems work, introduced like half a dozen cross-connections across barriers that should never be crossed, introduced a parallel artifact repo, permissions system, and different build tooling to what the rest use (including what the current project was built with), and managed to create a lot of drama with external teams who refused to work with these new systems.

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.

8by3 | root | parent
The same could easily have happened pre LLMs (just slower). Its why things like ArchUnit existed, or style guides, or annoying architects who stopped engineers from using latest JS framework pre LLMs, to define high level requirements for software.

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.

torginus | root | parent
I don't think it'd have been likely. First, pre-LLM, people read code 90% of the time and wrote it 10% of the time - so the flow would've been to first understand the exsiting code and figure out how to interact with it, and/or asking others when stuck, rather than just plowing ahead with the favorite set of tools that particular LLM has
hypfer | root | parent
Sure, but these are still astroturfing bots, and treating the messages as anything else but that helps them achieve their goals.

They weaponize the HN rules here. Which is frustrating, because one has to break the letter to defend the spirit.

lavendermon | root | parent | next
Interesting that you think I'm a bot
hypfer | root | parent
Well that's one option. It could also be someone that is paid. It could be someone who drank the Kool aid. It could be someone financially invested

Or it could be a kid that watched too many tech YouTubers.

But, fundamentally, that doesn't matter, because functionally it's as described.

lookimanewacc | root | parent
[flagged]
hypfer | root | parent | next
We're now at three fresh accounts and one additional greybearded anti AI strawman.

___

Huh, actually, if I look back on my extensive conversations with LLMs and compare those with human conversations, the whole idea of a greybeard memorizing manpages is something they liked to come up with much more than humans do (if at all).

The idea of a greybeard kinda died out in normal conversation a while ago. Mostly, at least.

Good job on the abliteration I suppose.

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