You can't be serious. It couldn't be more obvious what the poster was referring to, a drive by put-down comment with no attempt to discuss anything seriously is more highly upvoted than an objection to such a comment.

What is this place for? Dang tells us, curious discussion. The guidelines explicitly state that certain comments are not in the spirit.

But the community seems to have decided otherwise, which is a shame.

Don't read too much into it, downvotes/upvotes are highly random here, saying the same thing twice will have different reactions depending on the time of day and the topic of the submission, seems certain crowds are drawn to certain topics, which isn't that surprising.

I don't mind the downvotes, the points aren't really the reason I'm here anyways, I just want fun and interesting discussions with people and read other's perspectives, the points don't hinder that :)

I think the general population earning median wages will have very little sympathy for first world software engineers earning vast amounts of money.

What are you going to tell them? Suddenly you're earning what they're earning for sitting at a desk every day?

General population, you mean non SWEs? Because there are many SWEs around the world who earn median wage and who stand to lose it all as the avalanche of firings is ramping up.

Non SWEs (salespeople, clerks, secretaries, assistants, taxi drivers, writers, 3D modelers, artists, designers) are of course going the same way. Unless they are protected (unionized or such), why would they have sympathy for SWEs? People of our ilk are the ones causing this (to them and to ourselves). What I will tell them is to not repeat our mistake, organize and protest.

I don't think HN is libertarian at all. In fact, I can barely tell the difference between reddit and HN now. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment here now.

There is a small group of people who are quite openly attempting to make you, me, and everyone else obsolete. They’re doing it while blatantly lying that they’re not. Surprisingly, people aren’t receiving it well. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment everywhere.

I must be doing something very different from the anti-AI people on here. It is ridiculously empowering.

Got an issue in production? Give your agent the knowledge of how to locate the logs, and where the codebase is, and ask it to diagnose, and off it goes. It almost always finds the issue, and while it has been doing that, I've been able to get on with more productive things.

In terms of coding, if you work on it, and give it the correct guidelines, guardrails and ability to check its own work, it produces very high quality results.

The worst part is in such a short space of time I just don't think I can ever back to normal coding. I don't mind that, but it sucks when I'm offline.

I honestly don't know what people are doing wrong, or what sort of code they're writing that they can't get an AI to work well for them.

There's just different types of programming, I also find that if I give a decent description of a bug an LLM will often find the problem, and that great in a system that's mostly legacy and hard to repro. LLMs are also good for quick small scale from-scratch projects.

But there's a middle ground where you're really have to build something out that's super complicated and performant. Or do refactors that have a high quality bar. Situations where code bloat really matters. LLMs tend to create crazy amounts of code, not really thinking through the broader system and taking system level in-variance constraints seriously.

This is also my experience 80% of the time.

Now that I am used to this, the other 20% feels like a lot more work than it used to. Is it more work? No. But my expectations have changed.

For who?

A lot of institutional investors get caught out all the time when they make mistakes about the fundamentals.

> What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute?

Stopping some random rogue nation blowing it up.

Having a space program is extremely difficult, much more difficult than blowing up basically anything on earth.

I agree. And that stuff is soul destroying. I have done it, and right now I work in a place a little smaller, but we get so much done without all the cruft. And we get it done better. I spend much more time writing code now (*) than at the big corps, and we do a much better job because we can iterate.

(*) Well, now claude spends a lot of time writing code, I spend a lot of time designing and steering it. Claude can write remarkably sophisticated code with the correct steering.*

There is almost nothing new in computer programming. 99.999% of any code most of us on this forum write will be repeating patterns that have been written thousands of times before.

Tell a coding agent what your new thing needs to do, give it the absolute constraints, max response times, max failover times, and so on, tell it which technologies it has access to or could use, and then tell it to spend a lot of time going over and over the design, coming up with an initial X number of designs (I use 5), and then it must self criticise each one of them and weigh them up, narrow down to three, before finally presenting those three options to the user.

Now you read the options, understand them, realise that the AI has either converged on something very sensible, or it has missed something, so you tell it what it missed and iterate. Or it nailed something good, you pick the option you prefer, and tell it to come up with a more fleshed out high level design, describing the flow and behaviour deeply (NO CODE REFERENCES!). Then once you're happy, tell it to use that and write a comprehensive coding plan. Tell it specifically what coding patterns you prefer (you should have these in your AGENTS.md file already), what patterns to avoid (single threaded? multi-threaded? Avoid gc? How you typically deal with error conditions, etc etc).

Then have it start iteratively working on the coding plan, and it *MUST* have a strong feedback loop. If there is no feedback loop initially, I tell it to build one. It must be able to write very fluent integration tests (not just unit tests). It must be able to run the app and read the logs.

Do all this and I bet you get a better result that 80% of developers out there. Coding agents are extremely good when used well.

Disclaimer: I love writing production systems in Java. I was a C++ programmer for 10 years before moving to Java about 15 years ago. Java offers a virtually all in one package when writing large systems. You have a single language where you can write code that doesn't care to be the fastest possible, and you just rely on ZGC to do its thing, and it works. Or you can write GC free code with a mostly quite performant SoA type approach. You can do this in the same codebase, and developers don't need to know different languages to write either style of code. You then have one build system, one deployment system, an incredible set of observability tooling, etc, etc.

So I might be biased, but with the correct curation of AGENTS.md files and skills, we're getting extremely good results using Claude Code writing Java.

Another disclaimer: I haven't tried with another language, but we're happy with the results.

Would be interesting to find out what kind of production systems you write in Java and how you deploy / scale them. What DB backends you use, caching, etc. And whether you're also on Spring.

Always finance, trading systems. In the last 15 years mostly what they call "front office".

At the moment, for the place I work, we deploy on AWS mostly (because that is where our target trading venues often are). DB backends are largely not something we think about too much, because all of that is done out of band of course as a final state. Our main persistence is through our "bus" using aeron, and everything starts and recovers from there. This is not your typical enterprise java. No Spring.

Ok that's quite interesting. Am I correct to presume this is crypto trading? I was under the impression most regular HFT is near the exchanges, or physically at the exchange in a DC. Unless it's an AWS Outpost or something.