> just do what I want to do all day

Are the things that you want to do productive in any way? A sizeable portion of people have an innate drive to "produce" actual value.

Productive in which ways? I wouldn't be producing value for the society right, because AI would be doing that. But I could be doing things for my physical/mental health, right?

Other things could be just satisfying own curiosity, sports, hobbies, video games, films, books, shows. Kind of like being able to be child again?

I lived thru this… “do what you want all day" gets real old real fast. Cosmic purpose is mandatory

be the change you wish to see- share your thoughts.

That's not really the point: the key question is why HN is so out to lunch on this and closely related areas. It's clearly somewhat structural.

Look at the state of discussion just in this thread. I minimized my contribution for this reason.

I've found that for super large but simple refactors, codex and Claude struggle and will just quietly stop doing what you asked it if it's a long running task.

I actually had better luck asking codex to write temporary sed scripts based on the requirements then apply them.

AI helped me shop for some bits and tools that I needed to do my rear differential and brake fluid, and after some nudging, I also got it to do price comparisons for the tools I needed. saved me a lot of time to walk into each store with an exact list on the bits that I needed. And time with getting exactly the tool I needed without overspending.

I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.

I've had a similar experience when shopping at a gas station store that bought produce from a local strawberry patch. Unfortunately, it was on a road trip.

unions in the US aren't necessarily even comparable to in EU.

this is my workflow, converse with it to write a spec. I'm reviewing the spec myself. Ask it to trace out how it would implement it. I know the codebase because it was originally written mostly by hand. Correct it with my best practices. Have it challenge my assumptions and read the code to do so. then it s usually good enough to go on it's on. the beauty of having a well defined spec is that once it's done, I can have another agent review it and it generates good feedback if it deviates from the spec at all.

I'm unsure if this is actually faster than me writing it myself, but it certainly expends less mental energy for me personally.

The real gains I'm getting are with debugging prod systems, where normally I would have to touch five different interfaces to track down an issue, I've just encompassed it all within an mcp and direct my agent on the debugging steps(check these logs, check this in the db, etc)

> unless they have ways to externalize the costs onto the rest of society

UNH stock has been tanked all year, until the govt announced that they would raise Medicare advantage reimbursement rates. The insurance companies have an incentive to pursue volume instead of cutting costs for programs that the government is subsidizing. For everyone else, they just raise the prices which is a much more complicated issue.

In a state that I lived in, one day the laws changed and I became a felon overnight for not registering certain inanimate objects with my state govt.

This is exactly what it is. I know someone that's essentially representing themselves in family court. They had attorneys but the attorneys are basically useless for you if the opposition has more money and can spam you with motions that they are using AI to generate. which you then need to pay a lawyer to respond to. They since began representing themselves due to lack of money, and lawyer incompetence, and actually started to shut down the opposition... then the judge threatened contempt of court and jail time during one hearing if they chose to continue to make a statement and not accept a court appointed attorney to speak for them. Family court in the US is an absolute farce. The same judge recently started asking about "chatGPT" and mentioning that anything there would need to be disclosed to the courts. The person I know was primarily using their own local machine and models, however.

It's just not family courts. Judges absolutely loathe anyone who appears without counsel, mostly because they've been burned with too many sovcits and other nonsense that jams up the systems. So, even if you are competent they will try everything they can to shut you down and won't give you much time of day versus the party with the lawyers.

There is also the possibility that the person in question aggravated the judge by acting in a bonkers way. I have totally seen that - someone not understanding rules and procedures making all the wrong moves and then framing themselves as unfair victim.