This is the most delusional comment i think i have ever read on this site. It didn't make sense until i read the part about "Founders and CEOs" and realized it was not a post about any serious software enterprise.
I wonder if the difference here is age/experience or what you're working on/in.
When I was 20, writing code was interesting, by the time I was 28 it became "solving the problem" and then moved on to "I only really enjoy a good disaster to clean up".
All of my time has been spent solving other peoples problems, so I was never invested in the domain that much.
Yeah, I used to enjoy writing code but after a while I realised I actually more enjoy creating tools that I (and other people) liked to use. Now I can do that really quickly even with my very limited free time, at a higher level of abstraction, but it's still me designing the tool.
And despite the amount of people telling me the code is probably awful, the tools work great and I'm happily using them without worrying about the code anymore than I worry about the assembly generated by a compiler.
Trust me, I have many days where I wish I had your relationship to this. I wish it were as boring as watching paint dry. But it triggers that part of my brain that wants more, and I have to be very careful about that.
Ironically my favorite use of claude is removing caring about jira from my workflow. I already didn't care about it but now i dont have to spend any time on it.
I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is infinitely humorous to me.
Horrible degrading take. Be the change you want to see. Don't fuel the fire that's burning you.
If something's not happening, something else's making it impractical. Saying this as a 10+ years product manager and R&D person with 20+ more years of engineering on top.
I also had to deal with "managers are just complicating things" or "users are stupid and don't understand anything"; do you think I complained? No, I had engineers barter trust of their ingenuity with trust of my wisdom, and brought them to customer calls and presented them to users almost like royalty, which made them incredibly respectful as soon as they saw what kind of crap users had to deal with.
The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. Leadership and product don't have any respect for the code, why would engineers have any respect for the ticketing process.
Thats an unreasonable asymmetric effort demand, "Your code does not matter but my precious tickets must have elbow grease put into them."
The industry is broken. It's broken in the same sense the railroad industry is broken. It has reached the point of abundance, where we're doing things that don't need doing. That won't get done in an efficient market. But since we're not in an efficient market, there are globs of capital thrown at people building stuff that.. doesn't stand a chance of actually making any return on capital.
But while it lasts, us, the glorified machine-minders (just like railroad engineers, well, minded the engines), get paid large lumps of money, through large hordes of managers, arguing on minutia of conversion optimization, and fundamentally, being paid enough to not to try and do something else, perhaps competitive.
And that is broken. Especially for the "smarter of us" - the graduation ceremony of my physics department rings true - we've trained you to discover the secrets of universe and reach the stars, and most of us will use it.. to gain an edge at Lehman Brothers.
(And I think the root of this problem, is the abundance of low-risk capital, from people who expect a small return and a pension that lasts for decades in retirement)
My behavior is a reaction to the environment I am in. And currently the environment is push slop code as fast as possible. So being able to claw back just a little bit of my time from the people pushing this stupidity is a small pro in a sea of cons.
Teach me your ways. I’ve long wished for an actual, human secretary to handle that for me. The context-switching and digging around in a painful, slow interface (I don’t just mean Jira, 100% of the ones project managers find acceptable seem to have this quality) is such a productivity killer, and it’s so easy to miss important things in all the noise.
No one does currently, and its going to take a few very painful and high profile failures of vital systems for this industry to RELEARN its lesson about the price of speed.
In fact it will probably need to happen a few times PER org for the dust to settle. It will take several years.
I recall a time, maybe around 2013-2017, when people were talking about 4 or 5 nines. But sometime around then the goalposts shifted, and instead of trying to make things as reliable as possible, it started becoming more about seeing how unreliable they can get before anyone notices or cares. It turns out people will suffer through a lot if there's some marginal benefit--remember what personal computers were like in the 1990s before memory protection? Vibe coding is just another chapter in that user hostile epic. Convenient reliability, like this author describes, (if it can be achieved) might actually make things better? But my money isn't on that.
That is by no means all of these projects. I'm not interested in a circle-the-wagons crackdown because it won't work (see "it's foolish to fight the future" above), and because we should be welcoming and educating new users in how to contribute substantively to HN.
The future you're concerned with defending includes bots being a large part of this community, potentially the majority. Those bots will not only submit comments autonomously, but create these projects, and Show HN threads. I.e. there will be no human in the loop.
This is not something unique to this forum, but to the internet at large. We're drowning in bot-generated content, and now it is fully automated.
So the fundamental question is: do you want to treat bots as human users?
Ignoring the existential issue, whatever answer you choose, it will inevitably alienate a portion of existing (human) users. It's silly I have to say this, but bots don't think, nor "care", and will keep coming regardless.
To me the obvious answer is "no". All web sites that wish to preserve their humanity will have to do a complete block of machine-generated content, or, at the very least, filter and categorize it correctly so that humans who wish to ignore it, can. It's a tough nut to crack, but I reckon YC would know some people capable of tackling this.
It's important to note that this state of a human driving the machine directly is only temporary. The people who think these are tools as any other are sorely mistaken. This tool can do their minimal effort job much more efficiently, cheaper, and with better results, and it's only a matter of time until the human is completely displaced. This will take longer for more complex work, of course, but creating regurgitated projects on GitHub and posting content on discussion forums is a very low bar activity.
> That is by no means all of these projects. I'm not interested in a circle-the-wagons crackdown because it won't work (see "it's foolish to fight the future" above), and because we should be welcoming and educating new users in how to contribute substantively to HN.
Is it really that difficult to identify bot accounts right now? Or people who create a HN account only to post their project?
That seems like low-hanging fruit that should be picked immediately.
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