Programming is one of those things where everyone thinks they are above average, like driving.

If most people are average, then just use the bot to spit out average code. Or better yet, if you are above average, use it to spit out average code and then you need above average code, then write it.

Most programming is boilerplate. Its not faster to type boilerplate than t is to have the robot do it. I promise.

Programming is hard. If it wasn't you wouldn't be getting paid what you do.

Ok so you speak with certainty about the capabilities of something you don’t use and therefore have no experience of.

Childish and naive.

If you said you’ve been using Claude heavily and it’s never done better than you on your own, then your position would be credible.

That’s… not how the labour market works

Of course. That’s because the labor market prefers cost over quality. The labour market will always prefer cheap and fast code that works at first glance. That is how capitalism works. That has nothing to do with my capabilities. It has nothing to do with the fact that I will always outperform a shitty statistical model. It has everything to do with the fact that most of you are too lazy to think. It has everything to do with most of you sucking and being too lazy to your job.

I think you need to take a deep breath and calm down.

Perfectly calm mate. Maybe you should try to factually argue against my position? Probably not though. Your account was created 30 minutes ago and likely a bot.

Not a bot, just annoyed at disrespectful people.

My account was created 14 years ago. You need to calm down.

There is a reason discussions about agent use have been on Hacker News every other day, and it's not a grand conspiracy. Even in this submission, people have talked about how they have used Claude Code and its longer context window successfully as a tool for programming, even if they may be technically skilled to do it themselves. However, if you assume that every commenter is acting in bad faith, then there's no point in continuing.

I’m not going to defend the tone of the OP, and it is clearly wrong to assume that everyone who is pro AI is a shill or bot.

That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.

And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.

I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.

That's a better argument. That said, by definition, many distinct people with different affiliations and incentives can't astroturf, as what would be the point?

Bots from a single company can amplify (retweet, upvote, comment in support of) comments and stories from many different individuals to steer the conversation to some extent.

I know that pro LLM bots exist. Here’s an example https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7

If you look at the timestamps you’ll see instances of it posting faster than a human could.

I know that there are numerous companies with hundreds of billions of valuation predicated on AI being better than just a useful addition to the programmers toolbox.

There are even more companies making millions off of the current hype.

People in these companies now have access to tools that can generate spam that’s nearly indistinguishable from ham. Of course some of them are using that capability.

Of course existence of astroturfing by itself doesn’t imply that that astroturfing is effective.

For that I’d point to other evidence. My personal experience with LLMs doesn’t match the hype. The experience of every single close programmer friend whose technical ability I trust, doesn’t match the hype. The output of my organization doesn’t match the hype. I can’t find any publicly verifiable numbers that match the hype. No new operating systems, no new browsers, no vibe coded hit games, the number of games released on Steam hasn’t gone up drastically, the number of apps on the Apple App Store has, but not if you filter out apps that are just wrappers for LLM APIs. Multiple studies show no impact on GDP, publicly traded software companies are showing large impacts to their bottom line etc…

Then you have things like my company pushing people to spend hundreds of thousands (per person) on Claude with zero productivity requirements. This is weird. I think the most likely explanation is an artificially inflated hype cycle.

It’s not that hard and yet Claude can’t do it?

Why should I spend my mental energy doing simple things just to avoid being perceived as “lazy”? I have endless other engineering work to do other than typing code.