YHK - yet another hacker news clone

> Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or “competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option. Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we make games. That’s why we make anything.

So, a very long blurb to simply say that you can avoid using genAI and just do things "the hard way". And why? Just because he wants to do it.

Frankly, I was hoping for a deeper, more interesting conclusion.

Still, every day, I say to myself out loud, "this is crazy".

It's one of those platitudes that everyone knows, "the only constant is change", but everything feels like it's going be forever anyways.

Your parents will live forever. Your kids will stay young forever. You'll be at this job forever. You'll keep doing this routine you did this week forever.

Quotes, or advice, or history books are just too abstract until you live though them yourself. Looking back at all the history books I've read, I realize that this kind of magnitude of change is the norm. The Industrial Revolution. Colonialism. North Atlantic slavery. Chinese famines. War. Plague. Economic Depressions. To be honest, this is pretty tame, now that I'm making this list. A job that came into being just a few decades ago disappears just as fast.

Nobody thought that the entire industry would just be totally upended in such a short time, but here we are. It happened to all kinds of jobs over the past few hundred years, and it'll keep happening.

Time to get back to typing, "Do my job" over and over in a chat window.

I liked building apps and helpful tools before AI came around. I've been doing so for 15 years, 10 of them professionally.

Today, I like it even better. It's never been so fun.

What would have taken days of work, if it was feasible at all, I can have implemented in half an hour now and iterate on the result to make it work the way I want.

I stopped reviewing the code at all.

People on here are often saying how that's a disaster, how the result would be unmaintainable, and so on. I think they are clueless.

My app has 200k LOC + 100k in tests, and there is no sign of the AI slowing down or being unable to maintain it.

I've been working on the project for four months now. I invested hundreds of hours, and I expect to publish my paid app in the AppStore this month.

It has been fun. I am using the app every day and I look forward to the features I will add in the future.

Long before generative AI we all knew one absolute truth: ideas don’t matter, it’s the execution. YC marched to the drum. Execution! Execution! Execution! Do things that don’t scale, do the hard things, build something people want.

And then generative AI arrived and suddenly, unless you’re generating the maximum amount of code in the minimum amount of time, you’re going to fail, you’re going to be left behind, programming is dead, do the easy thing, generate! Generate! Generate!

We are years into generative AI and still there is no fundamental change. The most successful businesses are still the businesses doing something well, not businesses doing things easy. Spending hundreds of hours writing every line of code by hand isn’t a competitive weakness, it isn’t foolish, if it creates a good product.

So, I agree, fuck it, type your code line by line. Users don’t care if you spent 1 hour or 100, they care if your product is good, just as they did in 2025, 2020, 2015…

Maybe you’ll get beaten by someone generating a million lines of code. Just as maybe you would have been beaten by someone who typed faster than you in 2020. Nobody worried about increasing WPM in 2020.

Makers rediscovering the joy of hobbies is a thing that I'm all in on and here for.