Honestly if I'm just following what a single LLM is doing I'm arguably slower than doing it myself so I'd say that approach isn't very useful for me.
I prefer to review plan (this is more to flush out my assumptions about where something fits in the codebase and verify I communicated my intent correctly).
I'll loosely monitor the process if it's a longer one - then I review the artifacts. This way I can be doing 2/3 things in parallel, using other agents or doing meetings/prod investigation/making coffee/etc.
> That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.
Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
People have kids later but life but expectancies and health and medicine for older people are far better than they were historically. Not for everyone, but for most people.
The rest all comes down to solvable social and economic problems, mostly as a result of putting short term GDP growth over all else.
Really couldn’t have put it better. When I was a child my grandmother retired and relocated 800 miles to help with my mother with childcare. Why? Because it’s why you do. It’s what all of her family did as far back as anyone could care to remember.
This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
It used to be that YOU help elderly parents. And they they are the patriarch ruling familly and his wife at that time. When the grandma did that help with children, it was at her terms - she was the decision maker to large extend.
That arrangement is not working from both sides. Younger generation wants autonomy and expects parents to not try to run things, not to demand more contact then they want etc.
Which makes sense. But you cant have it both ways - both autonomy/independence and service.
Younger generstion has their period of low responsibilities - before they create familly. It is shifted to later years tgen it used to ... but it is weird to then get jealous over their parents having some free time after work.
It used to be a two way street, actually. The broader family was just that, a unit.
Now it’s little independent atomic cells doing whatever with little to no regard for the bigger picture.
Ultimatel, it’s the Boomer me generation that broke this tradition. It’s not weird for a millennial to look back and say “How nice of them to have their cake and eat it too” as I raise children alone and deal with the dilemma of how to treat their greed and selfishness as they age and demand of us while contributing little.
That's not how it was. When the patriarch became too old, he'd give the farm and the "crown" to the eldest son - who would have more physical and mental strength than him.
Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers or mothers. Of course they would help them, as they are family. But the elderly would absolutely have to step aside, and those who were in their prime would call the shots.
> When the patriarch became too old, he'd give the farm and the "crown" to the eldest son - who would have more physical and mental strength than him.
That would mean very old. They kept main decision power as long as they could. By the time they gave it away, they were not helping with childcare much. Instead, they were cared for. And even with that arrangement, you are ignoring younger sons, daughters and wife's. Because childcare part is not something that concerned men - it was women's area.
> Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers
Yes they did. The dad was 50, that is not nearly old enough to give up power even in your arrangement. And yes, they were frequently pissed about it.
> or mothers.
They were taking orders from mother in law. And if you look at less individualistic societies now, that is the source of large friction - mother in law vs sons wife. Where mother in law expect her to be, basically, a maid and she does not like that at all. A woman marrying into the husbands multigenerational family is the lowest person in the hierarchy of adults, basically.
Daughter in laws butting heads with mother in laws (and father in laws) is a story portrayed in many cultures’ popular tv shows/movies. As are parents who own everything on paper, making them the ones with actual power, butting heads with their children.
It is only in the previous 100 years where young people all over the world have the power to support themselves without anyone else’s help, which is why the preference for independence was revealed.
Young people have always had the power to support themselves without anybody's help. That's how life has worked for billions of years now.
It is only very recently that the industrialized world became completely financialized, so that the cost of life has become artificially increased for the youth. Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc. It was only the oldest son who would inherit anything, so the rest of them wanted to scram as soon as they hit puberty.
Inheritance-baiting your children is the oldest scam in the book, but people weren't complete fools in the past, and wouldn't stick around if the old folks went too far. A lot of head-butting between generations and in-family as you mention.
> Young people have always had the power to support themselves without anybody's help.
You do not know much about history, do you?
> Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc.
Eh, for a bulk of history, people stayed in village where they were born. Women moved to husbands house, rarely other way round, but that is basically it. Miners and hungers and lumber jacks did not moved away from village.
If you take care to learn about history you will be surprised as to how wrong you are. You are mostly believing in simplified myths.
Of course young adults have always been able to support themselves. If people in their prime can't support themselves, then nobody can. Young adults have always supported themselves + other people.
Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
And as I have mentioned: Only the oldest son would inherit the village farm, so the other sons and daughters were often anxious to get moving.
>Of course young adults have always been able to support themselves. If people in their prime can't support themselves, then nobody can. Young adults have always supported themselves + other people.
Maybe pre-property rights when an individual's ability to inflict violence was more correlated with their status, but not post-property rights when first mover's had an advantage in gaining ownership to be able to collect rent and have a group of able bodied young to enforce it (e.g. police). Once that dynamic is established, the game favors those who can benefit from previous generations.
After that, the option for a young person to support themselves is mostly based on expanding to unclaimed or lower priced land, which is a big gamble because it is usually unclaimed or lower priced for a reason (hard to reach, no infrastructure, enemies, climate, clean water, etc).
>Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
The internet might have been the most recent world that was available to be colonized, but it is not clear to me that these worlds will always be available.
People also used to marry younger and have children sooner. When people were getting married and starting to have kids in their teenage years, it meant that new grandparents would only be in their mid-30s or so. That put them in a much better spot to assist with the grandchildren.
Now many people I know are waiting until their 30s to have children, meaning that the grandparents are already 50-60s.
When was that? The average age of marriage in medieval England was early 20s as far as I can find out.
There are cultures where it is usual for grandparents to help where people are having kids in their mid twenties or later.
I know and have known lots of people who are perfectly capable of looking after kids (maybe not full time permanently), but for holidays or during the day, in their 70s or 80s.
In fact standard retirement age (insofar as it still exists) here in the UK is 67 so most people will still be working in their 50s and most of their 60s. It really is not that old.
I think one thing that has changed-both my parents and my wife’s parents are divorced, which makes things socioemotionally more complicated in terms of grandparental involvement in our children’s lives-it still happens, but I think it involves difficulties which didn’t exist for my own parents and grandparents when I was young, and were it not for those difficulties, it likely would happen more
Both grandparents divorced means you go from two family units involved to four-which in itself adds logistical complexity-and new partners doubles the opportunities for interpersonal conflicts
TBH it was also expected trade - you will take care of elderly parents in exchange for their help with kids participation, so since boomer parents don't help they also can't expect help
my (divorced) parents (5+ and 2.5+ hours away by car) didn't help us with kids at all (wife's parents are 7500 km away), but they can't expect I will be taking care of them when they will be really old, after all my father and his sister put their own mother to retirement home, when she could not live alone by herself, so they should kinda expect the same treatment (although I was against it and wanted grandma rather die alone in her house earlier than suffer slightly longer in retirement home without her garden/animals), actually my mother put her mother to retirement home as well, though I think she wanted to go there, it was pretty great facility, it was very small house (studio), each separated part had one occupant with minigarden with meals minutes away + it was also <1km from her old big house, so not much change and not much difference for her since she lived in front of the living room TV anyway
I've seen a few instances of where Claude showed me a better way to do something and many many more instances of where it fails miserably.
Super simple problem :
I had a ZMK keyboard layout definition I wanted it to convert it to QMK for a different keyboard that had one key less so it just had to trim one outer key. It took like 45 minutes of back and forth to get it right - I could have done it in 30 min manually tops with looking up docs for everything.
Capability isn't the impressive part it's the tenacity/endurance.
> The "no LLM" stance makes sense if you don't have guardrails. With the right constraints, AI-assisted code is faster AND safer than solo human development — because the agent never gets tired, never rushes before a deadline, and never thinks "I'll test that later."
Ironically I had a bunch of cases recently where CC would stop saying stuff like "this test problem is unrelated/a pre-existing issue when it had no proof of this and it was clearly not true (the branch built/tests were passing before the LLM changes).
The only reason you can "afford" anything is because other people do shit they would rather not, but do so for the money. If people could actually "afford to make choices" you'd find out pretty soon how dependent you are on others doing the dirty work for you to maintain your living standard.
Like sure things aren't perfect, not everyone is compensated proportionally to their contributions, no perfect markets and you can certainly improve things, but "I hate this planet" vibe when the default is hunter gatherer I feel like is majorly lacking perspective.
Your logic here amounts to "some people have it bad therefore everyone needs to have it bad". There are many situations where the world would generally be better if a relevant group of people had the option to choose to go elsewhere. When you are part of such a group and don't have that choice it is perfectly reasonable to be frustrated by the state of things.
I think I wholly disagree - if sufficiently compensated the tasks would get done. Bit like claiming that abolishing slavery would result in the former slaves refusing to do the necessary work.
Regardless, such observations are not valid arguments against noticing that a particular situation could be improved in a particular way. The logical outcome of such negative lines of thinking is to ultimately arrive at a mentality of trying to drag others down to your own level rather than to lift them up when possible.
Not so. Certainly in many contexts it is a clue that reframing the problem might be useful but you certainly don't need to. In many cases doing so might even be counterproductive. There are times when being frustrated or even angry at the situation you find yourself in is the right thing.
I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here. Just observing that frustration doesn't necessarily imply that you're wrong. Of course the inverse is also true. Being frustrated doesn't mean others are necessarily in the wrong - it might well be your own damn fault.
“The default is hunter gatherer” kind of leaves out a lot of communal living that happened throughout human history. Someone had to hunt, someone had to watch the kids, someone had to garden, eventually people needed to work on sewage lines and waste disposal.
Nothing about everyone having their needs met precludes the dirty work getting done - heck, some people even enjoy it!
The idea that everyone would just give up taking care of the necessities is, imo, ridiculous. It smacks of the tired line of “in an emergency, it’s every man for himself and no one will have your back” when history has shown again and again that communities come together and mutual aid flourishes in the face of disaster.
This is basically the performance of M1 with 8GB ram (with shittier USB/connectivity). I've seen developers who used the 8GB air a few years ago on a project. It would't work for me (even the 24GB air I have is swapping), but I can see this working for students without any problems.
Buying this for a kid would be a no-brainer for me - especially if it was on a discount (and it's not uncommon for Apple stuff to get 10-20% discount drops at retailers). Even the USB 3.0 is enough to power an audio interface - should be good enough to run some basic DAW, a MIDI keyboard, electronic drums etc. Will probably pick it up for my son at some point to motivate him to learn to type.
I don't get where this class/status/worthiness ties into HN comments ?
I get decent feedback most of the time, and I read interesting stuff, it's the easiest way I found to stay in the loop in our industry. What are you guys commenting for ?
Worthy to continue the discourse. Everyone claims that one doesn't discriminate a badly written English text from a good one, but only because they haven't actually encountered such text after all. There surely exists a threshold for "badness" and an outright ban of LLMs means that you are not even given a chance to lower that badness. That is a discrimination, you like or not.
Nobody will notice if you use LLMs as long as it doesn’t sound like an LLM. But sounding like an LLM is as “bad” as badly written English, so you’ll get looked down upon either way in that case.
It’s not without reason that bad English is taken as a signifier, and for similar reasons LLM-speak is taken as a signifier as well.
These people play around with shit and try to sell you on their secret sauce. If it actually works it will come to claude code - so you can consider them practical SOTA and honestly just plopping CC to a mid sized codebase is a pretty great experience for me already. Not ideal but I get real tangible value out of it. Not 10x or any such nonsense but enough to think that I don't think I want to be managing junior developers anymore, the ROI with LLMs is much faster and significant IMO.
The study you quoted is sonnet 3.5/3.7 era. You could see the promise with those models but the agentic/task performance of Opus 4.5/4.6 makes a huge difference - the models are pretty amazing at building context from a mid size codebase at this point.
I prefer to review plan (this is more to flush out my assumptions about where something fits in the codebase and verify I communicated my intent correctly).
I'll loosely monitor the process if it's a longer one - then I review the artifacts. This way I can be doing 2/3 things in parallel, using other agents or doing meetings/prod investigation/making coffee/etc.
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