Meh, I am also old enough to have experienced what the GP post mentioned, and I remember also when Visual Basic 6 was released, a similar sentiment appeared:

Suddenly, every cousin 13 year old could implement apps for their Uncle's dental office, laboratory, parts shop billing, tourism office management, etc. Some people also believed that software developers would become irrelevant in couple of years.

For me as an old programmer, I am having A BLAST using these tools. I have used enough tools (TurboBasic, Rational Rose (model based development, ha!), NetBeans, Eclipse, VB6, BorlandC++ builder) to be able to identify their limits and work with them.

That's great! I am also having a blast, and trying hard to take advantage of the new capability while not turning into the programmer equivalent of the passengers of the BNL Axiom. We aren't the intended audience for this post.

How are you guys using LLMs? I've done a couple of applications for my own use, including a "Mexican Train Dominoes" online multiplayer using LLMs and it doesn't stop amazing me, Gemini 3 is crazy good at finding bugs at work, And every week there are very interesting advances in Arxiv articles.

I'm 45 years old, have been programming since I was 9, and this is the most amazing time to be building stuff.

It already has with IVRs . I wonder if as a generalization, current technology will keep being used to provide layers and layers of "automation" for communication between people.

SDR Agents will communicate with "Procurement" Agents. Customer Support Agents will communicate with Product Agents. Coffee Barista Agents will talk with Personal Assistant Agents.

People will communicate less and less among each other. What will people talk about? Who will we talk to?

This comment here is pure gold. I love it.

On the flip side: If you do that, YOU are conscious and intelligent.

Would it mean that the machine that did the computation became conscious when it did it?

What is consciousness?

Thats the thing, when you use an Ask/answer mechanism, you are just writing a "novel" where User: asks and personal coding assistant: answers. But all the text goes into the autocomplete function and the "toaster" outputs the most probable text according to the function.

Its useful, it's amazing, but as the original text says, thinking of it as "some intelligence with reasoning " makes us use the wrong mental models for it.

For me, the problem is in the "chat" mechanic that OpenAI and others use to present the product. It lends itself to strong antropomorphizing.

If instead of a chat interface we simply had a "complete the phrase" interface, people would understand the tool better for what it is.

But people aren't using ChatGPT for completing phrases. They're using it to get their tasks done, or get their questions answered.

The fact that pretraining of ChatGPT is done with a "completing the phrase" task has no bearing on how people actually end up using it.

It's not just the pretraining, it's the entire scaffolding between the user and the LLM itself that contributes to the illusion. How many people would continue assuming that these chatbots were conscious or intelligent if they had to build their own context manager, memory manager, system prompt, personality prompt, and interface?

I agree 100%. Most people haven't actually interacted directly with an LLM before. Most people's experience with LLMs is ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or any of the other tools that automatically handle context, memory, personality, temperature, and are deliberately engineered to have the tool communicate like a human. There is a ton of very deterministic programming that happens between you and the LLM itself to create this experience, and much of the time when people are talking about the ineffable intelligence of chatbots, it's because of the illusion created by this scaffolding.

I'm sorry this guy feels like that, and I agree that there are tons of fraudsters and casino players in the current crypto scene.

It also doesn't surprise me to read the reactions in here, as most of HN users are from the US or other first world countries.

For people like me who were born and have lived in developing countries or countries were we cannot fully trust our banking/monetary systems, Bitcoin IS a tool to escape possible problems. I'm old enough to have been in 3 monetary crises in my country: 1985, 1994 and 2008. I'm old enough to have seen countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Lebanon, Greece experience bank runs. And when that happens, only the rich and connected can do something, while individuals like us are left holding the bag and paying for the errors of others (Americans may remember the 1% movement, occupy wall street).

So, no. Bitcoin is and still will be a useful thing for me and a lot of people. First word.country citizens may not understand it, until it becomes too late .

Reminds me of Red Vs Blue series of 2003 that were only using the Halo game. They were quite fun to watch. Imagine what can be done with AI nowadays!

Yeah, currently generated content made with some interconnected ideas, vision, script and talent is kinda better than I thought it will be. I expected it will be extremely sloppy at first.

I think it is a great exercise of self awareness to take a step back and see how things are done now.

I started my first prpgramming job in 2003. Some things where better, others were worse. But the only way we can improve the "craft" of software development is by having introspection. It's kindnofnwhat happen during the "software crisis" of the 80s, and why "waterfal" was rrplaced by "iterative" software development.

Now, with such an impactful change like AI aided coding, it is a great opportunity to see if we can evolve anything in the building process.

Location: UTC-6 (Americas)

Remote: Yes, strongly preferred.

Willing to relocate: Only for the absolutely right opportunity.

Technologies: Python, TypeScript (Nest.js for API, React for mobile or web front), Ruby, AWS (Architect, DevOps, AI/ML), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, LLMs, Scikit-learn(all MPL, SNS, pd, Data Science stack), Solidity, FinTech/Blockchain. (I've worked professionally with too many to write here and not give the feeling of "wall of text".)

Résumé/CV: baqueiro.com/static/baqueiro2025.pdf

Email: (in my resume)

Compensation Expectation: $140k and $170k USD gross yearly

Hello Hacker News! I'm a CompSci PhD (AI Multi-Agent systems... doing Agents' research back in 2004, before they were cool haha) and a passionate technologist with a warm spot for building high-impact products and teams.

For over 20 years, I've loved being a hands-on leader in FinTech, building everything from scalable crypto trading desks and AI/ML systems for fraud detection, to migrating entire platforms from monoliths to robust, cloud-native microservices. I thrive on aligning engineering with business goals and tackling complex distributed systems challenges.

Zero-to-One Success: Built foundational tech/AI/ML at a Fintech, enabling the company's Series A. Executive & Scaling Experience: CTO of a crypto trading desk; Head of Engineering, Product or AI/ML at high-growth FinTechs.

I'm actively looking for a remote role. I am most comfortable as first/founding engineer, also have been head-of/cto whatever the name building startup's technology teams. Right now I am most interested in doing AI/LLM work, like really pushing the status quo of both the Engineering and AI/ML. (I would love to get into something like SSI).