But Claude Code costs money. You really want to introduce a critical dependency into your workflow that will simultaneously atrophy your skills and charge you subscription fees?
It's also proprietary software running on someone else's machine. All other arguments for or against aside, I am surprised that so many people are okay with this. Not in a one-time use sense, necessarily, but to have long-term plans that this is what programming will be from here on out.
Another issue with it is IP protection. It reminded me stories where the moment physical manufacturing was outsourced to China, exact clones appeared shortly after.
Imagine investing tons of efforts and money into a startup, just to get a clone a week after launch, or worse - before your launch.
Right, we the workers are giving away control over the future of general purpose computation to the power elite, unless we reject the institutionalization of remote access proprietary tooling like this
I think this question can be answered in so many ways - first of all, piling abstraction doesn’t automatically imply bloating - with proper compile time optimizations you can achieve zero cost abstractions, e.g C++ compilers.
Secondly, bloated comes in so many forms and they all have different reasons. Did you mean bloated as in huge dependency installs like those node modules? Or did you mean an electron app where a browser is bundled? Or perhaps you mean the insane number of FactoryFactoryFactoryBuilder classes that Java programmers have to bear with because of misguided overarchitecting? The 7 layer of network protocols - is that bloating?
These are human decisions - trade-offs between delivering values fast and performance. Foundational layers are usually built with care, and the right abstractions help with correctness and performance. At the app layers, requirements change more quickly and people are more accepting of performance hits, so they pick tech stacks that you would describe as bloated for faster iteration and delivery of value.
So even if I used abstraction as an analogy, I don’t think that automatically implies AI assisted coding will lead to more bloat. If anything it can help guide people to proper engineering principles and fit the code to the task at hand instead of overarchitecting. It’s still early days and we need to learn to work well with it so it can give us what we want.
You'd have to define bloat first. Is internationalization bloat? How about screen reader support for the blind? I mean, okay, Excel didn't need a whole flight simulator in it, but just because you doing don't you use a particular feature doesn't mean it's necessarily bloat. So first: define bloat.
Some termite mounds in Botswana already reach over two meters high, but these traditional engineering termites will be left behind in their careers if they don't start using AI and redefine themselves as mound builders.
This doesn't seem exhaustive though I guess I'd be super impressed if it were. For example I watched a pokemon dataset get taken down then go back up under a new name a couple times from huggingface sometime in 2023-24, fairly certain they were getting c&d
I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress
That's bizarre. I watch a lot of great content on YouTube that's possible because those people get paid. I would rather like if YouTube paid them _more_ because the sponsors and patrons of the world prove that not all views are the same. Sadly, a lot of shit content gets lots and lots of views
I dislike it because it exposes content creators to similar pressures as traditional TV. There's a lot of content that doesn't get made because that content would be unsponsorable or worse yet would make the creator in general unsponsorable. It's also created some strange and twisted linguistics to appease sponsors or YouTube's algorithm like "unalive" or "PDF file" (as a standin for pedophile).
I guess it's the way of the world, but the introduction of heavy monetization has definitely influenced the kind of content YouTube carries.
I'd probably be OK if all the content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made at all, and the people who work as content creators stopped doing so. There is an overabundance of new content, having 10x less content would be perfectly fine, and in pretty much every niche there are amateur enthusiasts who clearly (based on their amount of viewers) are giving their time away, and their content is in many ways preferable and "more real" than the professionals - so I'd be OK if all the professionals stop and these awkward amateur enthusiasts are all that remain.
The same applies to web and blogs; the ability to monetize them by ads (and I do remember the "old web" before it was the case) increased the content but drowned out viewership for the true enthusiasts running things in their spare time, which IMHO were more valuable and I think that regime was better; again, losing 90% or 99% of the content wouldn't be bad in my mind, there still would be more than enough for anyone to ever "consume".
> You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.
Sure, but then how is this any different from TV? Eg I’ve seen a few videos dramatically overblowing the certainty of life on Mars lately, presumably for views. If I wanted half truths based on lack of context, I could just flip on the news.
> Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.
Sponsorships raise the money invested into videos, which raises viewer expectations, suppressing the likelihood these videos would ever be seen. You basically need sponsors for your videos to go anywhere these days because people expect professional editing/lighting/etc. The “I watched a Premier tutorial and filmed on a cellphone” approach won’t cut it anymore.
> People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?
I don’t want it to be work, I would prefer it was done by hobbyists. There are tons of thriving hobby communities full of people only getting personal satisfaction.
>You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.
You're missing the point entirely, the content I refer to as more interesting is stuff people made for fun or on principle not because of financial incentive
Imagine if people only commented on hn because they were expecting a paycheck for it
It would be great to live in a world where everyone could make cool stuff without needing to get paid, but we don't. Monetization is why YouTube gained a community in the first place.
That simply isn’t true. YouTube had a huge community when it was just amateurs sharing videos for the love of the sport. Professional content creators didn’t come along until much later.
It can be argued whether it is better to have creators who make it their income to constantly produce content or to have a revolving door of amateurs who cut their teeth on video production in youtube and move on.
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