try the tools. Really. If you are remotely interested in tech or AI, try the tools
Copilot this is not. You may be trolling of course. There are huge steps between these various tools, if you try them, for a smidge of investment, it will become obvious what the trajectory is.
It is like saying "I don't handwrite anything, I care too much about line spacing, I only use a dot matrix printer" when some one is trying to sell you a calligraphy pen and coloured inks, and you have only tried a ballpoint pen. You might be the wrong market, but they are not even close in use case and application.
It's a shame to find an AI-written ad so highly upvoted here.
The author even insists that AI was used because of their poor English, which is the standard excuse on Reddit as well. But clearly, this is not a translation:
> Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?
This is bog-standard AI slop to increase engagement.
Look at the blog on their linked site as well. AI-generated posts.
This has been posted here for SEO. This is a business venture.
It's times like this when I think HN needs a post downvote button. Flagging might not be quite appropriate here, but I hate to see this content cluttering up the front page.
To me this is the biggest threat that AI companies pose at the moment.
As everyone rushes to them for fear of falling behind, they're forking over their secrets. And these users are essentially depending on -- what? The AI companies' goodwill? The government's ability to regulate and audit them so they don't steal and repackage those secrets?
Fifty years ago, I might've shared that faith unwaveringly. Today, I have my doubts.
In summary, a wealthy westerner travels the world, asking the poor for favors. He eventually comes to believe that enlightened spirituality rests primarily on gratitude. (One can't imagine why.)
He then proceeds to passive-aggressively browbeat readers who aren't as grateful as he is for the "lucky ticket called being alive."
Has it occurred to him that perhaps it was his ticket that was lucky? It certainly seems luckier than that of the Filipino family who opened their "last can of tinned meat" to feed him, a volitional vagabond.
If there's anything worth reading here, it's the reminder that altruism is more prevalent than individualists sometimes expect. The rest is frankly stomach-turning.
Yeah, while the article is beautifully and poetically written (he's a reputed magazine editor after all), it comes across naive to extrapolate his good fortune to "you just have to be open enough to let the miracle happen to you". (I know, I'm simplifying here a bit.)
Obviously, there's some truth to it, but there are many unspoken variables that worked in his favor that he doesn't bother to acknowledge them. Some other comments also touched on it.
I'm not being cynical here. I myself have had incredibly good fortune in experiencing the kindness of strangers, both in the East and the West, and I do my best to reciprocate. But I'm acutely aware of how invisible factors that are not in my control helped facilitate some of the good fortune that came my way. I can't merrily attribute it all to my own "openness to experience"!
I pivoted into integrations in 2022. My day-to-day now is mostly in learning the undocumented quirks of other systems. I turn those into requirements, which I feed to the model du jour via GitHub Copilot Agents. Copilot creates PRs for me to review. I'd say it gets them right the vast majority of the time now.
Example: One of my customers (which I got by Reddit posts, cold calls, having a website, and eventually word of mouth) wanted to do something novel with a vendor in my niche. AI doesn't know how to build it because there's no documentation for the interfaces we needed to use.
I think it goes beyond the social hurdle. I have an Oculus, and I just never use it. A phone or laptop screen generally just feels good enough. It's easier to start and stop using, and it doesn't feel like I'm shutting myself off from the world when I do.
These AI Overviews are awful. I've been documenting the ones I've gotten over the past few months. Examples:
- 2025-09-19. My query: "is mics an abbreviation for micrograms." AI Overview: "No, MICs is not an abbreviation for micrograms; it is an abbreviation for Minimum Inhibitory Concentration."
- 2025-09-19. My query: "75 mics of medication." AI Overview: "When discussing medication, 'mics' is a common abbreviation for micrograms (mcg)."
- 2025-11-03. My query: "copilot 'replace string in file'." AI Overview: "While Copilot in tools like Visual Studio Code can assist with code generation and refactoring, its primary function is not directly to perform 'replace string in file' operations across an entire project." ("Replace string in file" is the name of an operation that Copilot performs, and I was looking for more info about how it works.)
- 2025-11-22. My query: "u2 'spirits move you'." AI Overview: "The phrase 'spirits move you' is not a direct U2 song title, but it likely refers to their song 'With or Without You,' a famous track from their album The Joshua Tree." (Who said anything about it being a "direct U2 song title"? It's a lyric from "Mysterious Ways.")
It's so frequently wrong and so frequently makes insulting assumptions that it's worse than worthless. And when you click the "Dive deeper in AI mode" button at the bottom, the new response often contradicts the old one. Just garbage.
Would have thought it was obvious I was talking about cars? Its reply was hilarious:
> A Renault Clio is much bigger than a giant panda. While a panda can be 4 to 6 feet long and 2 to 3 feet tall, a Clio is typically 4.053 meters long and 1.440 meters tall, making it significantly larger in all dimensions, according to Auto Express and CarsGuide.
AI Overview: "A 22 American Wire Gauge (AWG) copper wire can carry a maximum of 551 amps. Here are the fusing currents for some other AWG wire sizes..."
(A fusing current is the current that will instantly melt and possibly even vaporize a wire. The safe operating limit is two or three orders of magnitude lower.)
While this is true - it's the reason why fusing current was measured in the first place - it is not a reasonable way to answer a question asking for "max amps".
Think of the kinds of people who vie for leadership roles at established companies like Sears was at the time. Those people aren't innovators and creators. They're management types, MBAs, bureaucrats.
And fair enough: When the ship is that big and there are that many people on board, you often don't want to "move fast and break things," because the downstream effects can be extreme. Now you've just broken a company that had been working for decades. You're incentivized to take small risks with high likelihoods of reward.
Of course, the problem is, at some point that becomes fatal. A balance can be struck, but it can be hard when the original driving force is long gone.
I'm even struggling to come up with counter examples where a major established company is able to successfully pivot when the business model that brought them success is no long as viable as it once was. Maybe IBM counts in that they still exist, although I'd argue they aren't nearly the omnipresent force they were back in the day. You could also count widely diversified companies, but I probably wouldn't because they never really have to try to pivot the entire business.
As you said, finding a balance is hard and maybe not truly possible.
Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.
Apple: suffered from Windows PC competition in the 1990s but came roaring back under Steve Jobs. They doubled down on high-quality design, user experience, and vertical integration, and even switched from PowerPC to x86 and ARM, and from classic macOS to BSD-based OS X.
HP(E): after stumbling with itanium, replaced its proprietary Unix server business with x86 and Linux.
Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.
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