Hard agree.
AI Stans can’t help but get down on their knees so they can look cool for internet points.
The person who owns that website should feel absolute shame for posting that Trash. But they won’t because they’ll ask AI how they should feel and it’ll tell them they’re a super smart, good little developer!
hi! Dave here (a human, like you) — sometimes it's easy to forget there's a human on the other side, so I won't hold your thrashing too close.
1.) I've been writing both code and blogs for a long time. The feeling of having a skillset cultivated over a decade plus suddenly feel irrelevant is very real. Nothing about this post is unrepresentative of my perspective on what we're all going through. I don't think it's trash, but everyone is entitled to how they feel.
2.) I am shipping more code and words in the past month than I have in a long time, and yes, the process been AI-assisted — but _not_ AI derived. Anyone who has a personal blog can tell you first hand how it's the easiest channel to let slide, but I am of the camp that I'd rather have my thoughts exist in some form then die in the cavities of my head. This is true for both exploratory product ideas and recent personal writing.
3.) I'm no stranger to long-form articles. I can do it alone. Does that mean I should? I find it super interesting how those in tech are a-ok with AI-assisted programming, but other mediums are shunned. I'm a musician and write my music the old-fashioned way because I personally consider it my art. I probably wouldn't love listening to generative music. Some blogs I'd probably consider my art too. Others? I care more that the idea is represented in public than I do about the way it got there. My process has been dictate the idea -> work with Claude Opus 4.5 to structure it -> revise where the LLM misses the mark -> publish. It's been a force multiplier and I've had more traffic to my website in the past week than I had looking back at least 6 months. Clearly, the ideas resonate with others.
Does that mean I should stop? Is it more prudent that the idea dies due to its inability to climb the priority list? The whole point of these things are to use them as a tool. I'm not even defending this process, but I _am_ exploring what it means to use them effectively.
Good news; more on this will be posted soon, should you opt in(!) to read any further.
Here's my metric for "LLM-assisted" anything: if I, as someone who is well-informed on LLMs and pay close attention to the content I consume, can't tell an LLM generated the article/code/image/music/voice, it's fine and indicates that you as a person put enough effort into shaping the output to claim it as your own. If you can't even be bothered to do that much, to make it not completely obvious that an LLM generated it, you have no right to call it "assisted" or stake any ownership of the content. And I think it is frankly insulting to your readers that you would expect them to read something you couldn't even bother prioritising enough to write. If your ideas are actually worth sharing with the world, they would be worth making the time to write about.
And to be especially clear, my objection is not rooted in the moral aspect of LLM generation (although they are frequently used to plagiarise as well). My objection is that if I can tell the LLM generated it, it means the content is genuinely garbage. LLM output for writing is garbage. So too for code. So too for art. With enough human effort on top of it (usually more than doing it from scratch, IME), you can get it into a not-garbage state, but you didn't, and instead I wasted my time reading part of an article in which the writing was too bad for me to finish it.
From my perspective, the internet I once knew has been destroyed. The spambots won. Now spambots are openly accepted, promoted, reach the front page all the time. Somehow it is not a moderation policy to kill spambot posts and ban offenders. All because spambot technology advanced enough to fool people who are just consuming content passively. And now I have to sift through so, so much garbage to find the people who are still putting effort into creating content. Their work is being buried. It feels like living in a surreal nightmare for the past two years.
Footnote: Although I called the content you posted garbage, this is not an attack on you, because you did not write the content. I have not personally insulted you, so I hope that rather than taking this personally, you might reflect on whether this is really the way you want to express your ideas to the world. You might get views, but are your ideas really resonating? A lot of people mindlessly scroll the internet to kill time rather than critically engaging with content and digesting it. Is your ideal audience one who reads your idea and then forgets about it seconds later as they move on to the next shiny thing on the screen?
To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.
The goal was always, first and foremost, to teach. This is super obvious from the announcement trailer alone[1], where he says the point of the project is to pass on a way of life that inspired him. If Casey wanted to make money from a game he wouldn't have bothered with thousands of hours of Twitch streams.
I for one feel like my 15$ spent on Handmade Hero were well served by having access to the source code and the breadth of video that annotates every line of code. I think anyone that looked at he proposition that Casey made as something more than a way to support him, was naive.
Would you say that you really digest the books you listen to like that? It seems difficult to fathom to me. I generally try to use tedious downtime to think through things and solve problems in my head rather than listening to anything, but I've found that I can't even really keep my thoughts straight while walking outside due to watching where I'm going and the large variety of distracting external stimulus. I feel like I would get absolutely nothing out of listening to an audiobook at 2x speed while cycling.
On the one hand, I visually read a book significantly faster than 2x listening speed, so the speed in itself doesn't seem problematic.
On the other hand, if I'm listening while doing other things, then my attention is split. Which is why 1x works best for me. I can pay attention and still fold my laundry or make a meal or whatever.
Listening at 2x while cycling sounds positively dangerous to me. Unless you're somewhere with virtually no traffic, or you really just aren't paying attention to what you're listening to. Our brains only have so much bandwidth.
They don't mention the possibility of providing funding for developers anywhere in the article.
> Basically, the thinking goes that Handmade programmers have the technical chops to make amazing software, but don’t always have the aptitude or desire for the many, many other tasks that go into shipping. Payments, licensing, emails, support, design, marketing, testing, the list goes on.
Instead, it sounds like they want to take on the role of a publisher. Perhaps providing publisher-like services without any money changing hands between developer and publisher, with the latter being funded by donations and the former still having to make their own bread, just with some of the development-adjacent work offloaded.
Why do you think it would be impossible to vet people? Publishers vet the developers they work with all the time.
Edit: Upon re-reading, I actually missed this paragraph the first time.
> Membership will grant you access to a private Discord channel with other members, access to the aforementioned business resources, and possibly more benefits down the line. We have other ideas for Foundation activities, but we don’t want to distract ourselves from our primary goal as we get the Foundation off the ground.
It sounds like you get the publisher-like services in exchange for paying them. So in that sense they probably don't care if you're vetted because you're giving them money? Assuming the membership fee is sufficiently large. They are also talking a lot about "community", in-person meetings, etc. so I assume a close relationship is expected, though.
No, we're still going to vet people. There's a slice of benefits we can offer to everyone who pays to become a member, but then on top of that we'll be able to provide tangible support for some number of projects as well, funded by the membership dues. Which projects we choose to support in this way will be at our discretion, and vetting the developer and the project is an obvious part of that process.
The thing we can offer developers, which is rather unique, is bespoke "Handmade-style" handling of many dull aspects of professional software: payments, licensing, email lists, websites, support, etc. The goal is to do these things without locking the project authors into a third-party platform; that is against our Handmade values and there are plenty of such products on the market today.
> identification increasingly depends on colour and shape.
If only they would stop there. These design terrorists won't even let us have that much; Google's Android apps all use the same 4-color-rainbow scheme. Not only did they get rid of the ability to visually identify the icons by color, but you can't even really identify them by shape because applying four highly constrasting colors to a simple shape breaks up its silhouette into something that is not quickly recognisable at a glance. It's as though they're intentionally trying to make the icons have as little functional utility as they possibly can.
Google's icons are actively hostile to usability. I honestly found myself using their apps less because I couldn't pick the one I wanted out from the rainbow soup.
The worst part is, when computer screens were monochrome or had only 16 colors, (and perhaps 16 pixels a side) to work with, designers managed to create more distinct icons or pictograms. Perhaps they may not have looked as elegant as a set of items on a collector's display case, but they helped the end user quickly zero in on the part of the screen they were interested in.
Aside from the LLM writing vibes, or perhaps because it was written by an LLM, I think this article has very little tether to reality.
> It’s bringing back something we collectively gave away in the 2010’s when the algorithmic feed psycho-optimized its way into our lives: being weird.
It's really not. Prompting an LLM for a website is the exact opposite of being weird. It spits out something bland that follows corporate design fads and which contains no individuality. If you want to see weird websites, people are still making those by hand; the recently posted webtiles[1] is a nice way to browse a tiny slice of the human internet, with all its weirdness and chaotic individuality.
> It's really not. Prompting an LLM for a website is the exact opposite of being weird. It spits out something bland that follows corporate design fads and which contains no individuality. If you want to see weird websites,
I see your point, but I disagree. You consider part of the "weirdness" of being how it's done; and yes, it is indeed "weird" to learn several languages, consisting mostly of punctuation, in order to create an online self-promotion. But I think for most people, the "weirdness" (or its absence) is to be found in the end result. To that end, if a person wants a personal web page with animated tentacles around the edges and flying bananas in the background and pictures of demonic teddy bears, that is something that an AI can easily do when asked.
It is less obvious than you think. Obvious to you and me, perhaps. But a significant portion of the population genuinely believes that you are born with the talent to just do this like it's nothing, or born with the talent to be a piano prodigy, etc, and as a result never bother to apply themselves, even though with the wealth of educational resources available today anyone[1] could make paintings of this quality if they were to put in the effort to learn. I think that article headlines that reinforce this popular misconception are rather damaging.
[1] Given the level of pedantry on this site, I suppose I should say "almost anyone", since a small minority of people with severe disabilities may not be able to.
Cmon, even famous virtuosos still have to go through a period of being children without fine motor control.
I won’t argue about the obviousness as that’s a tarpit of comparing each others social circles, but let say it’s reasonable to assuming this wasn’t his first ever brush stroke to touch canvas.
My observation has nothing to do with my social circle, but rather the general population. Coming back to this thread hours later, the top comment thread has people blathering on all about how talent is genetic and citing works like these as an example, despite the fact that Michelangelo is in fact a very proof of the opposite, of nurture over nature, given that he was training from a young age. The majority of people genuinely believe certain people are born with the skill to move a paintbrash well and that it's somehow not the result of years of disciplined training.
HN specifically selects for a population that leans towards a belief that hard work creates results, and yet even here you can find this nonsensical ideology of genetic paintbrush skill as a mainstream part of the discourse. It is 10x worse in the average population, and this garbage, factually incorrect framing of "first painting" rather than "earliest known published" for something that Michalangelo had spent years of his childhood practicing for contributes to that misunderstanding of the world. Rather than making misleading claims and leaving the reader to "assume the obvious", why not just correctly state the obvious in the first place?
If this is how little you think of an app with ~50 million monthly active users, I take it making apps with a billion MAU is something you routinely do during your toilet breaks, or...?
It is funny watching people debate at length with your LLM word-vomit. I'm not sure whether you yourself are convinced that the soup you've copypasted across multiple replies means anything, but apparently some people are convinced enough to argue with it, so this is pretty great satire in one way or another.
it feels good to watch the aforementioned clergy kvetch about AI while multiple multi-trillion dollar corporations backed by a friendly administration continue to run their bulldozers :)
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