> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling
Reading the site in past 2 years left me with the feeling that HN has been injected by subtle to catch AI marketing campaigns. It's exausting and calling out astroturfers imo is not that bad
To anyone with experience on the matter: I'm looking for making a mobile app which resembles more of a game or "a graphical app" and was looking into tech I could use, all I need is a drawing API I could use cross platform for Android and iOS without much hassle, don't need any OS specific widget/component, I just want to draw stuff on the screen, handle touch input and do some network calls. Possibly with a statically typed language that gets compiled and has good performance. So far I excluded React Native because it's javascript and has too many dependencies(especially with expo) and SDL3 with plain C which seemed a little too much low level to dealing with on a mobile phone. Also tried go mobile but seems unmaintained and gives opengl context which is deprecated on iOS, and finally I'd really liked using Raylib but no iOS support :(. Any suggestion?
I really like love2d and used prior but lua isn't compiled and network support is limited, although I see they now support https requests on the latest version
I personally use Skia, in combination with a very thin platform layer. I do use C++ so that might still be a bit too low level, but after having set up everything, the Skia API is really nice for just drawing some text / other primitives onto the screen.
React Native uses Skia under the hood as far as I recall.
It implements the (pretty large) subset of the tool I personally need.
But everyone needs a different subset, and maintaining a coherent codebase that supports everyone's need is difficult.
What could put Adobe and others out of business is everyone reaching for Claude code, cursor or codex the next time they need complex software tailored to their use case instead of the one size fits all software that is commercially available.
It is nonsense because it's just nonsense finding a bot "funny" and the team requesting it otherwise they'd be sad. It's totally nonsense if not just marketing
In particular: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
They're giant pattern regurgitators, impressive for sure, but they only can be as good as their training data, reason why they seems to be more effective for TypeScript, Python etc. Nothing less nothing more. No AGI, no Job X is done. Hallucinations are a feature, otherwise they would just spit out training data. The thing is the whole discussion around these tools is so miserable that I'm pondering the idea of canceling from every corner of the internet, the fatigue is real and pushing back the hype feels so exausting, worse than crypto, nft and web3. I'm a user of these tools me pushing back the hype is because its ripple effects arrive inside my day job and I'm exausted of people handing to you generated shit just to try making a point and saying "see? like that"
I don't understand how Agents make you feel productive. Single/Multiple agents reading specs, specs often produced with agents itself and iterated over time with human in the loop, a lot of reviewing of giant gibberish specs. Never had a clear spec in my life. Then all the dancing for this apperantly new paradigm, of not reviewing code but verifying behaviour, and so many other things. All of this to me is a total UNproductive mess. I use Cursor autocomplete from day one till to this day, I was super productive before LLMs, I'm more productive now, I'm capable, I have experience, product is hard to maintain but customers are happy, management is happy. So I can't really relate anymore to many of the programmers out there, that's sad, I can count on my hands devs that I can talk to that have hard skills and know-how to share instead of astroturfing about AI Agents
To me part of our job has always been about translating garbage/missing specs in something actionnable.
Working with agents don't change this and that's why until PM/business people are able to come up with actual specs, they'll still need their translators.
Furthermore, it's not because the global spec is garbage that you, as a dev, won't come up with clear specs to solve technical issues related to the overall feature asked by stakeholders.
One funny thing I see though, is in the AI presentations done to non-technical people, the advice: "be as thorough as possible when describing what you except the agent to solve!".
And I'm like: "yeah, that's what devs have been asking for since forever...".
With "Never had a clear spec in my life" what I mean is also that I don't how something should come out till I'm actually doing it. Writing code for me lead to discovery, I don't know what to produce till I see it in the wrapping context, like what a function should accept, for example a ref or a copy. Only at that point I have the proper intuition to make a decision that has to be supported long term. I don't want cheap code now I want a solit feature working tomorrow and not touching it for a long a time hopefully
In my real life bubble, AI isn't a big deal either, at least for programmers. They tend to be very sceptical about it for many reasons, perceived productivity being only one of them. So, I guess it's much less of a thing than you would expect from media coverage and certain internet communities.
Just because you haven't or you work in a particular way, doesn't mean everyone does things the same way.
Likewise, on your last point, just because someone is using AI in their work, doesn't mean they don't have hard skills and know-how. Author of this article Mitchell is a great example of that - someone who proved to be able to produce great software and, when talking about individuals who made a dent in the industry, definitely had/has an impactful career.
Hell I see the big banner picture hallucinated by a prompt and all I see is an unproductive mess. Won't comment on the takes the article makes they're just miserable
Reading the site in past 2 years left me with the feeling that HN has been injected by subtle to catch AI marketing campaigns. It's exausting and calling out astroturfers imo is not that bad
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