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You're not going crazy. That is what I see as well. But, I do think there is value in:

- driving the LLM instead of doing it yourself. - sometimes I just can't get the activation energy and the LLM is always ready to go so it gives me a kickstart

- doing things you normally don't know. I learned a lot of command like tools and trucks by seeing what Claude does. Doing short scripts for stuff is super useful. Of course, the catch here is if you don't know stuff you can't drive it very well. So you need to use the things in isolation.

- exploring alternative solutions. Stuff that by definition you don't know. Of course, some will not work, but it widens your horizon

- exploring unfamiliar codebases. It can ingest huge amounts of data so exploration will be faster. (But less comprehensive than if you do it yourself fully)

- maintaining change consistency. This I think it's just better than humans. If you have stuff you need to change at 2 or 3 places, you will probably forget. LLM's are better at keeping consistency at details (but not at big picture stuff, interestingly.)

At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share their screen and talk about their projects and work at school and other internships.

Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the quality and extent of projects these students have been able to accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished, most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.

The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.

There's got to be some quantity of astroturfing going on, given the players and the dollar amounts at stake.

Matches my experience pretty well. FWIW, this is the opinion that I hear most frequently in real life conversation. I only see the magical revelation takes online -- and I see a lot of them.

Pretty much every software engineer I've talked to sees it more or less like you do, with some amount of variance on exactly where you draw the line of "this is where the value prop of an LLM falls off". I think we're just awash in corporate propaganda and the output of social networks, and "it's good for certain things, mixed for others" is just not very memetic.

> if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed.

The headline gain is speed. Almost no-one's talking about quality - they're moving too fast to notice the lack.

> it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right

I used this line for a long time, but you could just as easily say the same thing for a typical engineer. It basically boils down to "Claude likes its tickets to be well thought out". I'm sure there is some size of project where its ability to navigate the codebase starts to break down, but I've fed it sizeable ones and so long as the scope is constrained it generally just works nowadays

I find these agents incredibly useful for eliminating time spent on writing utility scripts for data analysis or data transformation. But... I like coding, getting relegated to being a manager 100%? Sounds like a prison to me not freedom.

That they are so good at the things I like to do the least and still terrible at the things at which I excel. That's just gravy.

But I guess this is in line with how most engineers transition to management sometime in their 30s.

Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not managing to get LLM work for them.

It's like CGP Grey hosting a productivity podcast despite his productivity almost certainly going down over time.

It's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity.

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year old has been using Y since its release three years ago?

And when you're in an existing company, stuck in thing X, knowing that it's obsolete, and the people doing the latest Y that's hot in the job market are in another department and jealously guard access to Y projects?

How about when you go to interview, and you not ONLY have to know Y, but the Leetcode from 15 years ago?

So maybe I've given you another alternative to 'it has to be power, there's no other rational reason to go into management'.

Here's a gentler one: if you want to build big things, involving many people, you need to be in management.

Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals? They're different types of work, and it's not about 'power' like you are suggesting. Autonomy and decision-making power are more the 'power' engineers often don't get (unless they are lucky, very very smart or in a small startup-like environment).

As an engineer, I can never actually let a system write code on behalf of me with the level of complacency I've accumulated over the years. I always have opinionated design decisions, variable naming practices. It's memorable, relatable, repeatable across N projects. Sure, you can argue that you can feed all this into the context, but I've found most models to hallucinate and make things unnecessarily opaque and complex. And then, I eventually have to spend time cleaning up all that mess. OP claims they can tell the model over the phone what to do and it does it. Good for OP, but I've never personally had that level of success with my own product development workflow. It sounds too good to be true if this level of autonomy is even possible today without the AI fucking something up.

I actually don’t think the author wants to become a real manager, he wants to play a video game where he sends NPCs around to do stuff.

Real managers deal with coaching, ownership, feelings, politics, communication, consensus building, etc. The people who are good at it like setting other people up to win.

Once you've written enough image caches, I think you often find yourself ready to move on to the higher level architecture of a larger project.

Often too it's the architecture that can cause a grand idea to crash and burn—experienced devs should be moving toward solving those problems.

On a similar note, I have never heard the phrase “higher level abstractions” abstractions so much. Everywhere I look, higher level abstractions. It’s becoming one of those phrases I have an instant reaction to. The word “abstraction” used to mean something, man…

Some people want the thing done more than they want to do the thing. That gets to extremes of exploitative parasitic behavior, but it's true at much less obnoxious scales: ever used a programming language's standard library instead of inventing your own _whatever_? Probably a yes.

That can extend to arbitrary absurdity. You are probably not growing your own food, mining your own ore, forging your own tools, etc etc etc.

It's all just a matter of where you rely on external tools/abstractions to do parts of the work you don't want to do yourself.

>the joy of problem solving

It's frontier exploration that brings me joy. If a clanker can do something, then it's a solved problem. I use all the tools at my disposal to push the frontier of problems solved. Wasting my time re-inventing the wheel brings me the opposite of joy.

For me, getting into management was less about feeling bogged down in the specifics, but more about control (directed mostly above). Anyone who’s had a bad manager or bad decisions they need to adhere to might be familiar with the feeling that caused me to dip my toes into management.

Like I’ve been in situations as an IC where poor leadership from above has literally caused less efficient and more painful day-to-day work. I always hoped I could sway those decisions from my position as an IC, but reality rarely aligned with that hope.

I actually love the details, but I just don’t get too deep into them these days as I don’t want to micro-manage.

I do find I have more say in things my team deals with now that I’m a manager.

I don't really want to be a manager of humans, although my role as an engineer is a leadership role that has some overlap.

But I'm acutely conscious that in the 5+ years that I've been a senior developer, my ability to come up with useful ideas has significantly outstripped the time I have to realize those ideas (and from experience, the same is often true of academics).

At work, I have the choice between remaining hands-on and limiting what I can get done, or acting more like a manager, and having the opportunity to get more done, but only by letting other people do it, in ways that might not reflect my vision. It's pretty frustrating, to be honest.

For side projects, it's worse. Most of them just can't be done, because I don't even have the choice.

It has nothing to do with power. I just want to build bigger, cooler things, faster.

It’s more that there’s a career ceiling and ageism is a looming threat. There are far more management jobs than high-level IC and for decades there’s been this thought that older engineers will be replaced with younger ones more aggressively than managers, although the big tech layoffs raise questions about whether that’s still true. I know multiple people who moved into management not because they were enthusiastic about it but because that was the best path for their career.

My 15 year old son has been building his own video games with Unreal Engine for a few years..

I was recently looking for mentors to work with him and advance his skills, targeting college aged kids / young 20s..

It was surprising to me how many people I came across in this field at this young age that are trying to focus on the "higher level" game planning aspects and not so much on the lower level implementation specifics.

I don't think it's about power. I feel more empowered as an engineer than I would as an engineering manager. As an engineer I have the power over all the intricate details of how systems work. As an engineering manager if I am lucky I would get to decide whom to fire if my team's budget gets a cut.

I think it's that there is only that much demand for solving really complex problems, and doing the same thing over and over is boring, so management is the only way forward for many people

another way to look at it is that management is a job with a set of skills, challenges, and rewards, just like any other, but as a civilisation we seem to have tied it to power and hierarchy, and made it something you need to be promoted into rather than choosing as a career from the outset (MBAs notwithstanding). maybe a lot of engineers would have gone into the engineering management path if they could have, and engineer was just seen as the more entry-level option.

I became a manager so I could solve bigger problems. Good managers do dive into the details. It's a mistake to think that as a manager, you don't have to concern yourself with the minutia. You still have to do homework and deep thinking. you just don't have to write the code

It's human nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stonecutter

I liken it to being an author.

You want to write a book about people's deepest motivations. Formative experiences, relationships, desires. Society, expectations, disappointment. Characters need to meet and talk at certain times. The plot needs to make sense.

You bring it to your editor. He finds you forgot to capitalise a proper noun. You also missed an Oxford comma. You used "their" instead of "they're".

He sends you back. You didn't get any feedback about whether it makes sense that the characters did what they did.

You are in hell, you won't hear anything about the structure until you fix your commas.

Eventually someone invents an automatic editor. It fixes all the little grammar and spelling and punctuation issues for you.

Now you can bring the script to an editor who tells you the character needs more development.

You are making progress.

Your only issue is the Luddites who reckon you aren't a real author, because you tend to fail their LeetGrammar tests, calling you a vibe author.

i like the aspect of engineering that's building useful or interesting or fun things for people, and i'll always experiment with new tech that facilitates that

Engineering, to me, is simply "the art of compromise."

You can't do that from a high level abstract position. You actually need to stand at the coal face and think about it from time to time.

This article encodes an entitled laziness that's destructive to personal skill and quality work.

I think plenty would be willing to be managers if you removed the volatility of human personalities from it. At least for me, it means I get to focus on the more interesting tech work and not worry about writing tests or github actions.

For many people, code is just a means to an end to solve problems and build. The joy from solving problems doesn't disappear. Would you use traditional (not WebAssembly) assembly to build a web application? Probably not. LLMs make a lot more sense if you think of it as a tool to translate requirements into solutions.

Software dev has been promoted as a good career path for almost 2 decades now. Naturally you'll have a bunch of people going in only because of money.

A few years ago, when Agile was still the hot thing and companies had an Agile "facilitor" or manager for each dev team, the common career path I heard when talking to those people was: "I worked as a java/cobol/etc in the past, but it just didn't click with me. I'm more of a peoples person, you know, so project management is where I really do my best work!".

Yeah, right...

Yeah, i’ve gone to the point where I will just stop reading AI posts after a paragraph or two if there are no specifics. The “it works!” / “no it doesn’t” genre is saturated with generality. Show, don’t tell, or I will default to believing you don’t have anything to show at all.

Well, note that the previous post was about how great the Rabbit R1 is…

Exactly. Posts that say "I got great results" are just advertisements. Tell me what you're doing that's working good for you. What is your workflow, tooling, what kind of projects have you made.

>Over the past year, I’ve been actively using Claude Code for development. Many people believed AI could already assist with programming—seemingly replacing programmers—but I never felt it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work.

Funny, because just last month, HN was drowning in blog posts saying Claude Code is what enables them to step away from the desk, is definitely going to replace programmers, and lets people code "all through chatting on [their] phone" (being able to code from your phone while sitting on the bus seems to be the magic threshold that makes all the datacenters worth it).

I am somewhat worried that this is the moment AI psychosis has come for programmers.

Did they even end up launching and maintaining the project? Did things break and were they able to fix it properly? The amount of front-loaded fondness for this technology without any of the practical execution and follow up really bugs me.

It's like we all fell under the spell of a terminal endlessly printing output as some kind of measurement of progress.

There is no code, there are no tools, there is no configuration, and there are no projects.

This is an AI generated post likely created by going to chatgpt.com and typing in "write a blogpost hyping up [thing] as the next technological revolution", like most tech blog content seems to be now. None of those things ever existed, the AI made them up to fulfill the request.

It's AI slop itself. It seems inevitable that any AI enthusiast ends up having AI write their advocacy too.

I just give the link to those posts to my AI to read it, if it's not worth a human writing it, it's not worth a human reading it.

Does it matter?

It reads like articles that pretended blockchain was revolutionary. Also the article itself seems like AI slop.

A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correct thing as "it is too big of a refactor", doesn't understand that the dev database is not the prod database and avoids migrations. And so forth.

I've got 10+ years of coding experience, I am an AI advocate, but not vibe coding. AI is a great tool to help with the boring bits, using it to initialize files, help figure out various approaches, as a first pass code reviewer, helping with configuring, those things all work well.

But full-on replacing coders? It's not there yet. Will require an order of magnitude more improvement.

If you look at his github you can see he is in the first week of giving into the vibes. The first week always leads to the person making absurd claims about productivity.

To be fair, AI probably wrote the blog post from a short prompt, which would explain the lack of detail.

Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects.

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

>Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.

Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no one will ever use?

Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they feel the public won't feel the same.

AI is great, harness don't matter (I just use codex). Use state of the art models.

GPT-5.2 fixed my hanging WiFi driver: https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24...

Given that the authors previous post was about how the Rabbit R1 has “the potential to change the world”, I don’t expect much in the way of critical assessment here.

I was reading the post and had the same feeling of superficiality. I don’t think a human wrote it tbh

My openclaw built skills (python scripts) to interact with the Notion API which allows it to make work items for me and evenly distribute them, setting due dates on my calendar.

AI is all facade

It can make/take phone calls[0], but they need to be prompted on the nature of the call, the data they need, and how to collect it. They can also output the results of the call via API. An AI agent from Masterworks recently called me using this technology.

[0] https://vapi.ai/

> My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has already been automated or can be automated easily ....

> I’m just a frustrated old man I guess.

I think this is a great summary of the failure of vision that a lot of tech people are having right now.

> automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever

Facebook used to have API's, Reddit used to have API's, amazon used to have API's

They are gone.

Enshitification and dark patterns have taken over.

"Hey open claw, cancel service xxx" where XXX is something that is 17 steps and purposely hard to cancel so they keep your money.

What's going to happen when your AI tool can go to a website and strip the ad's off and return you just the text? What happens when it can build a customized news feed that looks less like Facebook and more like HN? Aren't we just gaining back function we lost with the death of RSS?

Consumers are mad about the hype of AI but the moment that it can cut through the bullshit we keep putting in their way it's going to wreck business MODELS, and the choice will be adapt or die. Start asking your "AI" tools to do all the basic, tedious bullshit tasks that are low risk (you have a ton of them) and if it gets 1/4 of them done your going to free up a ton of your own time.

I think some of it might be genuine. For people that don't code (like management), going from 0 to being able to create a landing page that looks like it came from a big corporation is a miracle.

They are not able to comprehend that for anything more complicated than that, the code might compile, but the logical errors and failure to implement the specs start piling up.

If you check the OpenClaw discord, a common sentiment there is "it works but only if you use Opus." That seems to be the actual situation now.

Grok 4 Fast told me its own internal system prompt has rules against autonomous operation, so that might have something to do with it. I am having decent results with it though.

I’ve also been a little suspicious of the vote counts these days. Pro AI stuff regular hitting like 800 votes. The codex announcement hit like 1500? Like what’s goin on here

By not trusting OpenClaw on your system, you are missing out on lot of 0-days and 10/10 CVEs!

skill issue

I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting:

1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time.

2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels continuous. You can use it on your desktop and then pick up your phone and send it an iMessage.

3. It hooks into a lot of things, so it feels like it has more agency. You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"

It feels more like a smart assistant that's always around than an app you open to ask questions to.

However, it's worth stressing how terrible the software actually is. Not a single thing I attempted to do worked correctly, important issues (like the discord integration having huge message delays and sometimes dropping messages) get closed because "sorry we have too many issues", and I really got the impression that the whole thing is just a vibe coded pile of garbage. And I don't like to be that critical about an open source project like this, but I think considering the level of hype and the dramatic claims that humans shouldn't be writing code anymore, I think it's worth being clear about.

Ended up deleting it and setting up something much simpler. I installed a little discord relay called kimaki, and that lets me interact with instances of opencode over discord when I want to. I also spent some time setting up persistent files and made sure the llm can update them, although only when I ask it to in this case. That's covered enough of what I liked from OpenClaw to satisfy me.

You can just hook up Claude Code to a Telegram bot and get basically the same result in 50 lines of code.

https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON

Well, it's a work in progress, but I have self-upgrading and self-restarting working, and it's already more reliable than Claw ;)

I used the Claude Code SDK (Agents SDK) originally, but then realized I can get the same result by just calling `claude -p the_telegram_message`

The magic sauce being the --continue flag, of course. Bit less useful otherwise.

I haven't figured out how to interrupt it or see what it's doing yet though.

"and then the engineers turned themselves into managers, funniest thing I've ever seen"

Indeed. When I was just starting every blog and tweet screamed micro-management sucks. It does if the manager does this all the time. But sometimes it is extremely important and prevents disasters.

I guess best managers just develop the hunch and know when to do this and when to ask engineers for smallest details to potentially develop different solutions. You have to be technical enough to do this

Nothing, that is why it change his life ;-)

While Claude was trying fix a bug for me (one of these "here! It's fixed now!" "no it's not, the ut still doesn't pass", "ah, I see, lets fix the ut", "no you dont, fix the code" loops), I was updating my oncall rotation after having to run after people to refresh my credentials to so, after attending a ship room where I had to provide updates and estimates.

Why isn't Claude doing all that for me, while I code? Why the obsession that we must use code generation, while other gabage activities would free me to do what I'm, on paper, paid to do?

It's less sexy of course, it doesn't have the promise of removing me in the end. But the reason, in the present state, is that IT admins would never accept for an llm to handle permissions, rotations, management would never accept an llm to report status or provide estimate. This is all "serious" work where we can't have all the errors llm create.

Dev isn't that bad, devs can clean slop and customers can deal with bugs.

> find and call a carpenter, a plumber when I need him

Good luck hoping that none from the big money would try to stand between you and someone giving you a service (uber, airbnb, etsy, etc) and get rent from that.

I hate receiving competitive quotes so I take what the 1st guy offers or dont engage at all. AI agents could definitely be useful gathering bids where prices are hidden behind "talk to our sales specialist" gates.

It's absolutely terrifying that Ai will control everything in your PC using openclaw. How are people ok with it?!

Openclaw is just that, it wakes on send and as cronjobs and get to work.

What made it so popular I think is that it made it easy to attach it to whatever "channel" you're comfortable with. The mac app comes with dictation, but unsure the amount of setup to get tts back.

I don’t think there’s any solution to what SimonW calls the lethal trifecta with it, so I’d say that’s still pretty impossible.

I saw on The Verve that they partnered with the company that repeatedly disclosed security vulnerabilities to try to make skills more secure though which is interesting: https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership

I’m guessing most of that malware was really obvious, people just weren’t looking, so it’s probably found a lot. But I also suspect it’s essentially impossible to actually reliably find malware in LLM skills by using an LLM.

Can only reasonably be described as "shitshow".

It's still bad, even if they fixed some low hanging fruits. Main issue: prompt injection when using the LLM "user" channel with untrusted content (even with countermeasures and frontier model) combined with insecure config / plugins / skills... I experimented with it: https://veganmosfet.github.io/2026/02/02/openclaw_mail_rce.h...

My company has the github page for it blocked. They block lots of AI-related things but that's the only one I've seen where they straight up blocked viewing the source code for it at work.

Many companies have totally banned it. For example at Qt it is banned on all company devices and networks

It is already known as Ai psychosis and ai productivity porn

FWIW Mac Minis have not increased in price because of "RAM Prices". Same models cost exactly the same as a year ago. Maybe it will change in the future, maybe not. Who knows. But right now Apple seems to have secure a good stash of RAM to use and avoid price changes.

Quite literally, the previous post on this blog is from 2024 talking about what a revolution the Rabbit R1 is. We all know how that turned out. This is why I give every new trendy developer tool a few months to see if it’s really a good thing or just hype.

Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.

It's a racket never ends.

There seem to be a lot of posts like this as of late. I truly can't decide if the authors actually believe what they've written or if it's some preposition of themselves to be included in the hype cycle of AI FOMO or what. It feels very cringe as I read it. As if to say OpenClaw has somehow been such a pivotal change in their life, so monumental, that it's an epiphany that has changed them forever. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been surrounded by automation for many years and also using it with agents or LLMs for the past couple that I just don't feel like this is a true sentiment of what actually exists. It feels placed, it feels targeted and it feels like a huge lie. I guess you could also call it low effort marketing.

These people are always swarming the new shiny gadgets thinking it will finally unfuck their miserable life while not noticing that the chase is why they've been miserable this whole time. What they need is 6 month in a cabin in the middle of nowhere without internet

I’m working on a product related to “sensemaking”. And I’m using this abstract, academic term on purpose to highlight the emotional experience, rather than “analysis” or “understanding”.

It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the particular visual/summary artifact is useful, actionable or accurate!

Not people, that post is from OpenClaw... 100% ;-)

Oh my god your verbalization of this phenomenon is spot on! I feel validated that someone else feels this way.

Don't forget about Obsidian

But today, the AI is writing the blogposts for them.

Generate hot fart to rattle HN.

On that thought you got to ask yourself why almost every thread has 200+, some even 500+ comments now. Definitely wasn't like this a few months ago

Exactly, I'm not going to waste my time reading this AI generating post that's basically promoting itself.

What I really wonder, is who the heck is upvoting this slop on hackernews?

Hah, I read that as well and made a big "hmmmmmmmmm" sound...

The last time I talked to someone about OpenClaw and how it is helping them, they told me it tells them what their calendar has for them today or auto-tweets for them (i.e., non-human spam). The first is as simple as checking your calendar, and the second is blatant spam.

Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?

Our cognition evolves over time. That article was written when the Rabbit R1 presentation video was first released, I saw it and immediately reflect my thoughts on my blog. At that time, nobody had the actual product, let alone any idea how it actually worked.

Even so, I still believe the Rabbit has its merits. This does not conflict with my view that OpenClaw is what is truly useful to me.

> Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their past opinion

Yes I think it is

Wow, I re read after reading your comment and now I'm fairly sure the whole post is humourous ^^

That's a different problem and not really relevant to OpenClaw. Also, your issue is primarily a skills issue (your skills) if you're using one of the latest models on Claude Code or Codex.

and the "hype-wits" don't realize openclaw is just claude with good mcp. there is nothing new under the sun. its just the first time someone was benevolent enough to open source the codebase to the public or it went viral enough to matter... and yet what people focus on is its "emergence" or "agi" - neither of which are remotely true. but good luck "crushing" those "mid-wits"

There is a reason I stopped listening to All-In Podcast.