Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best thing to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.
I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.
This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.
If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.
It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.
Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.
So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.
Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not understand how genuine human people could think it good to "comment" like this.
There's just such a ridiculous pile on of people with such enormous overwhelming negativity underneath this ocmment. This off-gassing is almost never engaged with the material. Now there's an excuse to write off any material we don't like instantly, to accuse it of fakeness. But I still do not see a realness enscribed upon people who so actively work to tear down & prevent thought & consideration.
To engage with the post: I do think the definition of fashion is interesting, and a real power dynamic to be aware of. But do think there's a lot of things that take off in the world because they are good and interesting and nice, especially in technology and products, that the world wants nice things, and will happily support you for doing that. And especially in tech, the technical decisions we start from and build underfoot steer us towards success in subtle compounding ways, that matter, and that taste is crucial, where fashion is not a factor.
Again, at a meta level: my distress & frustration at the top is less from seeing this comment, and far more from seeing everything down thread trying to out-do one another with how cynical and anti-meaning anti-trying they can be. But I think this post definitely started on an all too familiar note, blood in the HN waters that all too often gets us so sharky.
I'm a firm believer in not engaging with or promoting the content of misrepresented AI.