Yet another Hacker News

I use AI (Oct 2026)

30 points citelao 2 hours ago 39 comments

citelao 2 hours ago | parent

OP: [last year][1], I shared how I was using AI day-to-day as an ordinary engineer. This year, I did it again!

It's crazy realizing that Claude Code only started getting big in the last year or so. It feels so different now, with all the new models & tools we have to use. I hope you enjoy!

[1]: https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/how_use_ai_oct_2025

imhoguy 1 hour ago | parent

TIL: AI Doompop

suddenlybananas 1 hour ago | parent

>I’m really enjoying some AI music

I think I would rather shoot myself in the head

stickfigure 1 hour ago | parent

Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".

I walked into a paint store recently and there was some interesting music playing on the PA. It was some sort of spanish-language 80s new wave I'd never heard before. It had a nice groove. I asked the guy at the counter about it and was surprised to find out it was AI.

So... was it as good as great music? No. But it beat the hell out of muzak. And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.

viklove 1 hour ago | parent

AI music is far less interesting than anything any person could create. Even if it's acoustically interesting, it's hollow and pointless because it contains no human expression.

AI music is a complete waste of compute. It exists only to further enrich an already wealthy stakeholder, and we should all be ashamed to have ended up in a place where it even exists.

dale_glass 38 minutes ago | parent

It contains plenty human expression. It's ultimately made by people.

And I think it can be uniquely fun, because it allows for the very rare combination of truly off-beat ideas with excellent execution.

In real life, it very rarely happens that somebody will spend a lifetime learning, gather a band, and then record something extremely off-beat. Because there are risks to that. Destroying your image, having to find people that are on the same wavelength, having to justify the time and money it costs to record something weird and not marketable.

Sure, people make weird stuff once in a while, but very rarely, and generally it takes unique individuals that find some particular weird niche to work in, like Weird Al or Max Raabe. And even then they tend to pick something relatively tame and marketable and stick to that.

But AI can bypass all that, and that makes things interesting.

suddenlybananas 1 hour ago | parent

>80s new wave

>it was genuinely novel

Look, I don't know the song so I can't say how novel it is, but to me, it completely misses the point if its made by a music generation model. The point of music is not to make a bunch of novel sounds. Music is a means by which a human can express themselves, the whole _point_ of art is human expression.

Jtarii 49 minutes ago | parent

Just because its not art doesn't mean its not funny or interesting to listen to.

Bird's aren't making art when they sing, I still like listening to birds. Why can't the sounds AI make be in the same category.

computably 41 minutes ago | parent

Well, anybody can enjoy anything. But I personally would say birdsong is of infinitely higher value than genAI music.

Liuser 49 minutes ago | parent

Art is subjective. It sounds like AI music did evoke an emotional response from OP, which IMO is also just as important of what we define as the purpose of art: evoking emotion and awe from consuming art. A connection is being made from the creator to the consumer. I view AI as merely another tool to that means.

Human expression with art can go both ways from producing and experiencing.

recursive 1 hour ago | parent

Seems weird to contrast AI music with auto-tuned music. Most of the AI music I've heard has been tuned perfectly. And I don't generally have a problem with music being in tune.

For my part, I mostly dislike AI music. But if there was to be some AI music that I didn't already dislike for its content, then I would dislike it specifically for being AI. Call me close-minded if you will. Some people don't really like music at all. In general, I love music.

0x20cowboy 51 minutes ago | parent

Angine de Poitrine

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

try Jazz, infinitely more interesting than anything Ai could make

I saw a live band last week (daft punk meets prince), they wrote a song about Ai and used an auto tuner for it

computably 46 minutes ago | parent

> Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".

> And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.

For one thing, "interesting" and "novel" are not particularly the point of art. An infinite TikTok feed of AI slop is in some sense infinitely interesting and novel.

But also, those concepts are subjective. Pop music has a ton of evolution and innovation if you break it down. Sure, not every hit is doing something clever, but plenty of them are. You might not find those features to be interesting but it takes ingenuity to stand out in an era where the barrier to entry is so low.

keybored 46 minutes ago | parent

1. Find some truism, like that corners pop culture are trash

2. Call it slop

3. Claim victory

plastic-enjoyer 40 minutes ago | parent

>Controversial take: AI music is more interesting than the autotuned, quantized, mass-market-optimized slop that dominates contemporary pop "music".

Controversial take: AI shows that people simply don't give a shit and just confirms that mass culture is a mistake and the death of everything that is good and sacred.

iugtmkbdfil834 53 minutes ago | parent

shrug

I don't know what to tell you, but me and my kid are having a blast writing ridiculous songs and plopping them with song descriptions and some of those make it to our drive playlists.

AlexCoventry 26 minutes ago | parent

Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HrlDMK3hXQ

johndhi 10 minutes ago | parent

Nice. You make it?

zzzeek 1 hour ago | parent

you can totally tell Claude to take some AI technical writing (which is, to be clear, writing where you explicitly need to not sound creative or interesting, and you need to maintain very strict "voice" [a term I only even know because claude explained it to me] so this is not a creative endeavor) and make it sound "less AI". At least working with opus 5.5, textual output already has a lot fewer of the colons and "load bearing" of a few months ago, and if a PR does have that kind of lingo I can just have Claude rewrite it "like a human" and it does great.

citelao 56 minutes ago | parent

OP: I'm not surprised you/other people are able to get better output than me.

And I agree that "less AI" edit passes reduce a lot of the hallmarks, but I think these models truly struggle with expressing complicated ideas. Have Opus been good at that for you?

Dzugaru 56 minutes ago | parent

There is no substitute for reading the code in many many cases. I spend more than 3k/mo on tokens. I find incorrect assumptions baked into the code (the ultimate spec) and missed by the agents and tests daily. This is more pronounced in data analysis and complex systems.

As a side effect having to read the code at least once inevitably makes it way shorter and usually much better.

argee 45 minutes ago | parent

That's right. And you have to read what the agent is doing as well. Once I said (Opus 5.5), given this list, find issues that are both critical and related to {X feature}.

Guess what: because I said "both", Opus decided I was looking to pick out exactly two of the issues. If I hadn't read that reasoning log, I would've remained oblivious and thought there were only two it could find.

AlexCoventry 20 minutes ago | parent

> I spend more than 3k/mo on tokens.

I'd be curious to learn how you're using them.

keybored 56 minutes ago | parent

HN title: I use AI

> I still believe I use AI fairly typically, but I’ve had a notable change in background. Last October, I was an engineer on Microsoft’s Windows AI team. I am now a research engineer at Salesforce AI Research.

Priest wears robes.

I guess it’s one of those nonsensical automatic rules.

vagab0nd 32 minutes ago | parent

Nothing against the post itself, but something I find funny: the development in AI is so rapid, that everyone thinks they are ahead of everybody else. Here we have a blog post telling us "coding is solved". In Oct 2026, how many of us don't know this already?

npc99 28 minutes ago | parent

I use AI extensively to develop software, but IDK if I would say "coding is solved".

LLMs still mess up a lot if you just let them loose and don't guide what they do.

zabriel_goss 26 minutes ago | parent

The structure of the post seems like a comparison of snapshots between a date this year and last. On HN, it's an odd statement. In the context the author is writing in, it seems fair.

kami23 25 minutes ago | parent

Find a lot of tech adjacent jobs on reddit and see them talk about being outskilled by new hires using AI to automate sysadmin tasks. I used to a sysadmin very early in my career and given the tools today and the problems back then, a lot of these jobs are going to be obsoleted or dramatically automated to not require FTEs. This is already started in those fields. Powershell and bash scripting is very good from these things and has been for longer than a year IMO.

We're in our own bubbles where a good part of HN population woke up to coding agents being good enough ~1 year ago, there's a group of folks that found out ~6 months before that, and then the people banging their heads on these a bit earlier than that. If you aren't using a coding agent everyday most people are just using these things to apply an instagram filter, or sort a grocery list. Muse is probably the closest thing to 'full automation' a lot of people are seeing for the first time.

Unfortunately I don't think the bubble that exists at the moment is on the promise of automating so much coding as trying to penetrate consumer use cases, which I think are still lacking and not reliable enough yet. As much as I use coding agents every day I still will not let a claw-like near a bank account or a credit card.

svieira 23 minutes ago | parent

:raises-hand: I still don't know this. But my definition of "coding" may be different from yours, might it not?

the__alchemist 19 minutes ago | parent

I still don't know. Use Claude and OpenAI all the time, but still manually code, esp regard to setting up modules and data structures.

deathanatos 19 minutes ago | parent

This was Gemini the other day: https://imgur.com/a/7mdqwjk — this wasn't some errant load, even refresh, hard refresh, etc. got the same result for a while. An outage, AFAICT.

While trying to capture that bug, I (ironically) asked Gemini (but the Gemini-via-Google-search Gemini, since Gemini proper was an outage) for the package name of a screen recorder (gtkRecordMyDesktop); the command it returned referenced a non-existent package¹. I then found an alternative, and then hit a bug in that screen recording software that I had to then work around to get the video file there.

The site I uploaded the video to, Imgur, breaks completely — i.e., it cannot even so much as surface an error message — if your browser refuses to let it store god knows what on your disks. (So as it is, I have an extension that says "why yes, of course you can have storage, and essentially provides a black hole. But since it looks like a "success" to the Javascript, the JS doesn't crash!)

This isn't, to me, some one-off interaction. Every interaction with software these days feels like this, more and more. Just breakages everywhere that leaves me wondering if "coding is solved", where is all the bug free software?

(¹forcefully prompting the AI to actually query the package listing netted me a classic "You're absolutely right! The package name I referenced does not exist!")

12317 17 minutes ago | parent

Where are the author's open source projects from before AI that make him qualified to proclaim that "coding is solved" with such certainty? He is a "researcher" of some sort at slop company Salesforce.

johndhi 15 minutes ago | parent

Nice post!

stego-tech 10 minutes ago | parent

It’s kinda nice seeing more nuanced takes from folks as the bubble kinda deflates and both sides realize their idealized vision isn’t coming to pass. AI isn’t going to replace all the jobs, but it’s also not going away; finally, it is merely a tool in our toolchest.

What does amuse me to no end, however, is how many craftsfolk in AI circles are loudly rejecting AI imagery and video in favor of humans. The only folks who seem fine with that are the grifters looking to slop out a bunch of adverts quickly for commercial gain rather than do actual art, or folks who want “art” but don’t want to pay a human to make it for them or learn the skills themselves. Both of those camps are viewed with disdain and loathing by both sides of the AI Boom/Doom arguments, so I’ll take whatever allies I can get on those fronts.

AI music…man, I live with artisans and musicians and we have a number of “artists” we suspect are AI but whose music is pretty solid. We’re waiting for the shoe to drop, but I’m trying to look at it as a kind of turbocharged Fruity Loops/Logic as opposed to a human replacement. I hope I’m right on that, but time will tell.

The game changer I think more doomers need to experience is agents. It sounds like a recipe for disaster (a bunch of models known to hallucinate and allowed to run roughshod over a computer unattended? What could go wrong?), and it often (hilariously) is for the scammers out there giving it full access to production and fucking off to hawk their latest Masterclass on X or LinkedIn, but that first time you give it a reasonably achievable prompt and come back to a halfway decent product you can review and refine into production in 15m or less?

Absolutely magical, doubly so when it’s just 27B Qwen via Hermes and not some souped up stack in a frontier lab costing you thousands a month in tokens. If I were to evangelize AI, that’s how I’d do it. Fuck subscriptions, fuck cloud compute, fuck frontier labs and token buckets and whatever slop Sundar/Scam/Dario/Elmo et al are hawking this week; run that locally, give it a reasonable prompt that solves a real problem, and show them the results.

Then do the right thing and go for a walk with the two hours of free time the AI just freed up for you. Don’t ask for permission to take back your time.

amelius 9 minutes ago | parent

Why is product search still so bad? Google should have solved it ages ago, but even with AI it is still bad.

lbrito 7 minutes ago | parent

>I spend about ~$3,000/ month in tokens.

...

>In case you’re wondering, I’m subscribed to: > Claude Pro ($17/ mo) > GitHub Copilot Pro ($10/ mo)

Nothing wrong there at all, amirite?

Maybe AI scrapped basic arithmetic and now those numbers are totally fine

mef51 3 minutes ago | parent

I always find so much cognitive dissonance in these kinds of posts.

> My most successful work this year was hand-writing a tool, replacing ~4,000 lines of vibe-code with a few hundred. My system has proven more flexible, easier to test, and more generalizable than what it replaced.

> agents still need human taste and experience to produce good work.

Where do you think human taste and experience in software comes from?

> overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.

> for many of us, honing the code, finding the right design, seeing the parts mesh together — that was the meditative purpose we found in our jobs.

> That’s not the only time AI waylaid me. LLMs could not figure out how to annotate that model’s training data correctly. I spent days going back and forth with them

> LLMs are not yet good companions when brainstorming complicated things.

Why do we expect this to get better? The training data will degrade in quality if more people rely on LLMs so I'd expect models to eventually start getting worse even if they currently enjoy apparent improvements in output.

> Writing code is solved.

What are strange thing to say given all the above experiences, which I think we all share.

Why are we willing to give up so much in terms of purpose and understanding for perceived productivity gains?