I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs.

I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit.

Funny enough, I get this feeling with a lot of modern technology. iPhones, all the modern messaging apps, etc make it much too easy to fragment your attention across a million different things. It’s draining. Much more draining than the old days

Same feeling as pair programming in my experience.

If your consciousness is driving, your brain is internally aligned. You type as you think. You can get flow state, or at least find a way to think around a problem.

If you're working with someone else and having to discuss everything as you go, then it's just a different activity. I've collaboratively written better code this way in the past. But it's slower and more exhausting.

Like pair programming, I hope people realise that there's a place for both, and doing exclusively one or the other full time isn't in everyone's best interests.

I've had a similar experience, where I pair-programmed with a coworker for a few days in a row (he understood the language better and I understood the problem better) and we couldn't be in the call for more than an hour at a time. Still, although it was more tiring, I found it quite engaging and enjoyable. I'd much rather bounce ideas back and forth with another person than with an LLM.

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding

I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice.

In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnover so the owners asked me to be a waiter for a little while. The first couple months I found the small talk and the need to always be "on" absolutely exhausting, but overtime I found my routine and it became less exhausting. I definitely loved being a delivery driver far more, but eventually I did hit a point where I didn't feel completely drained after every shift of waiting tables.

I can't help but think coding with LLMs will follow a similar pattern. I don't think I'll ever like it more than writing the code myself, but I have to believe at some point I'll have done it enough that it doesn't feel completely draining.

I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug.

With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honestly just hoped there weren't any bugs, but if there were, you could plausibly step through the debugger and figure out what was going wrong and file a bug report.

Now, the LLMs are generating so many orders of magnitude more code than any human could ever have the chance to debug, you're basically just firing this stuff out like a firehose on a house fire, giving it as much control as you can muster but really just trusting the raw power of the thing to get the job done. And, bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't, so you can't stop using the tool but you can't really ever get comfortable with it either.

> I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for

Not just that, but the fact that with programming languages you can have the utmost precision to describe _how_ the problem needs to be solved _and_ you can have some degree of certainty that your directions (code) will be followed accurately.

It’s maddening to go from that to using natural language which is interpreted by a non-deterministic entity. And then having to endlessly iterate on the results with some variation of “no, do it better” or, even worse, some clever “pattern” of directing multiple agents to check each other’s work, which you’ll have to check as well eventually.

> bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't

so as a human, you would make the judgement that the cases where it works well enough is more than make up for the mistakes. Comfort is a mental state, and can be easily defeated by separating your own identity and ego with the output you create.

I mean, you could make that judgment in some cases, but clearly not all. If you use AI to ship 20 additional features but accidentally delete your production database you definitely have not come out ahead.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1m4lqvh/replit_ai_w...

I think what will eventually help is something I call AI-discipline. LLMs are a tool, not more, no less. Just like we now recognize unbridled use of mobile phones to be a mental health issue, causing some to strictly limit their use, I think we will eventually recognize that the best use of LLMs is found by being judicious and intentional.

When I first started dabbling in the use of LLMs for coding, I almost went overboard trying to build all kinds of tools to maximize their use: parallel autonomous worktree-based agents, secure sandboxing for agents to do as they like, etc.

I now find it much more effective to use LLMs in a target and minimalist manner. I still architecturally important and tricky code by hand, using LLMs to do several review passes. When I do write code with LLMs, I almost never allow them to do it without me in the loop, approving every single edit. I limit the number of simultaneous sessions I manage to at most 3 or 4. Sometimes, I take a break of a few days from using LLMs (and ofter from writing any code at all), and just think and update the specs of the project(s) I'm working on at a high level, to ensure I not doing busy-work in the wrong direction.

I don't think I'm missing anything by this approach. If anything, I think I am more productive.

Thanks for the story. I also spent time as a delivery driver at an italian restaurant. It was a blast in the sense that i look back at that slice of life with pride and becoming. Never got the chance to be a waiter, but definitely they were characters and worked hard for their money. Also the cooking staff. What a hoot.

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc.

The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine (easy) to avoid putting in the work to plan a fun game (hard).

The more clarity you have about what you’re building, then the larger blocks of work you can delegate / outsource.

So I think one overwhelming part of LLMs is that you don’t get the downtime of working on implementation since that’s now trivial; you are stuck doing the hard part of steering and planning. But that’s also a good thing.

I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.

In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.

Ehh, I find that the most tedious code is also the most sensitive to errors, stuff that blurs the divide between code and data.

I actually like writing the tedious code by hand.

The whole time I'm doing it, I'm trying to think of better ways. I'm thinking of libraries, utilities or even frameworks I could create to reduce the tedium.

This is actually one of the things I dislike the most about LLM coding: they have no problem with tedium and will happily generate tens of thousands of lines where a much better approach could exist.

I think it's an innovation killer. Would any of the ORMs or frameworks we have today exist if we'd had LLMs this whole time?

I doubt it.

I doubt if we're talking about the same sort of things at all. I'm talking about stuff like generic web crud. Too custom to be generated deterministically but recent models crush it and make fewer errors than I do. But that is not even all they can do. But yes, once you get into a large complicated code base its not always worth it, but even there one benefit is it to develop more test cases - and more complicated ones - than I would realistically bother with.

It depends on how you use them. In my workflow, I work with the LLM to get the desired result, and I'm familiar with the system architecture without writing any of the code.

I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/

Thanks for writing this up.

I just woke up recently myself and found out these tools were actually becoming really, really good. I use a similar prompt system, but not as much focus on review - I've found the review bots to be really good already but it is more efficient to work locally.

One question I have since you mention using lots of different models - is do you ever have to tweak prompts for a specific model, or are these things pretty universal?

I don't tweak prompts, no. I find that there's not much need to, the models understand my instructions well enough. I think we're way past the prompt engineering days, all models are very good at following instructions nowadays.

This hits home for me. Lawyer, not developer here. Implementation was never a hard part for me, it was an impossible part. Now that the time/cost needed to experiment with prototypes has dropped to near zero I've been been spending a lot of time doing exactly what you describe (steering, brainstorming). I find it fun but I do it mainly as a bunch of personal side projects. Can understand how it might feel different for users when the stakes are much higher (like when it's part of the day-to-day in a real job).

Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)

And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left largely to you nobody much sees them, only how they affect the outcome. Whereas now the LLM is in that role, responsible only for what the code does not how it does it.

Hehe, speak for yourself- as a 1x coder on a good day, having a nonjudgmental partner who can explain stuff to me is one of the best parts of writing with an llm :)

I like that aspect of it too. LLM never seems to get offended even when I tell it its wrong. Just trying to understand why some people say it can feel exhausting. Instead of focusing on narrowly defined coding tasks, the work has changed and you are responsible for a much larger area of work, and expectations are similarly higher. You're supposed to produce 10x code now.

Not sure if it's what you're talking about but I had a coworker trying to break into eSports and he talked a lot about the micro vs macro skills a game requires. Sounds like we all have an aimbot for programming so the competition has shifted hard towards the macro. That could definitely be tiring.

> Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)

I keep seeing this sentiment, but it sure sounds wrong to me.

Coding requires thinking (in humans, at any rate). When you're doing coding, you're doing both coding-thinking and the design thinking.

Now you're only doing one half of it.

I’d love to see what you’ve built. Can you share?

>how people who polish their game engine (easy)

This is such a weird statement. Game engines are among the most complicated pieces of software in existence. Furthermore, a game that doesn't run smoothly increases the chances that your player base doesn't stick around to see what you've built.

Maintenance is the hard part, not writing new code or steering and planning.

You can outsource that to another llm

If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.

> write an unambiguous prompt

That's an oxymoron. Prompts by definition are ambiguous otherwise you will be writing code.

> LLMs will do pretty much exactly what you tell them

That bit is quiet funny :-)

You used to be a Formula 1 driver. Now you are an instructor for a Formula 1 autopilot. You have to watch it at all times with full attention for it's a fast and reckless driver.

You're being generous to the humans; we're more like Ladas in comparison.

That may not be a bad comparison. A F1 car is really fast, really specialized car, that is also extremely fragile. A Lada may not be too fast but its incredibly versatile and robust even after decades of use. And has more luggage space

Classic coding was the process of incrementally saying "Ah, I'm getting it!" -- as your compile your code and it works better each time, you get a little dopamine hit from "solving" the puzzle. This creates states where time can pass with great alacrity as we enter these little dopamine induced trances we call "flow", which we all experience.

AI is not that, it's a casino. Every time you put words into the prompt you're left with a cortisol spike as you hope the LLM lottery gives you a good answer. You get a little dopamine spike when it does, but it's not the same as when you do it yourself because it's punctuated by anxiety, which is addictive but draining. And I personally have never gotten into a state of LLM-induced "flow", but maybe others have and can explain that experience. But to me there's too much anxiety around the LLM from the randomness of what it produces.

Working with LLMs for coding tasks feels more like juggling I think. You're fixating on the positions of all of the jobs you're handling simultaneously and while muscle memory (in this metaphor, the LLMs) are keeping each individual item in the air, you're actively managing, considering your next trick/move, getting things back on track when one object drifts from what you'd anticipated, etc. It simultaneously feels markedly more productive and requiring carefully divided (and mentally taxing) focus. It's an adjustment, though I do worry if there's a real tangible trade-off at play and I'm loosing my edge for instances where I need to do something carefully, meticulously and manually.

I suspect it's because you need to keep more things in your head yourself; after a while of coding by hand, it becomes more labor and doesn't cost as much brain power anymore. But when offloading the majority of that coding to an LLM, you're left with the higher level tasks of software engineering, you don't get the "breaks" while writing code anymore.

How often, in your life, did you write code without stopping, in the middle of writing, to go back and review assumptions that turned out to be wrong?

I'm not talking about "oh, this function is deprecated, have to use this other one, but more "this approach is wrong, maybe delete it all and try a different approach"?

Because IME an AI never discards an approach, they just continue adding band aids and conditional to make the wrong approach work.

The tactical process of writing the code is also when you discover the errors in your design.

Like, did we think waterfall suddenly works now just because typing can be automated? No.

Who says you can't iterate on a design just because an LLM does the manual typing?

I meant to write “tactile”, not “tactical”, but missed it before the edit window expired.

Anecdotally, ask people who knit whether their brain is stimulated. Physically engaging with the thing you are making is part of the process that makes it actually good.

Yet someone who knits can do so without spinning the yarn themselves, or shaving the sheep.

Theory of Bounded Rationality applies. Tech tools scale systemic capability limits. 3 inch chimp brain limits dont change. The story writes itself.

I go through phases with it where I am extraordinarily productive and times where i can't even bear to open a terminal window.

It feels no different than inhheriting someone's code base when you start at a company. I hate this feeling. AI removes the developer's attachment and first hand understanding of the code.

I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.

The way I've tried to deal with it is by forcing the LLM to write code that is clear, well-factored and easy to review i.e. continually forcing it to do the opposite of what it wants to do. I've had good outcomes but they're hard-won.

The result is that I could say that it was code that I myself approved of. I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't read all of it, when you just let them go the results are so awful. If you're letting them go and reviewing at the end, like a post-programming review phase, I don't even know if that's a skill that can be mastered while the LLMs are still this bad. Can you really master Where's Waldo? Everything's a mess, but you're just looking for the part of the mess that has the bug?

I'm not reviewing after I ask it to write some entire thing. I'm getting it to accomplish a minimal function, then layering features on top. If I don't understand where something is happening, or I see it's happening in too many places, I have to read the code in order to tell it how to refactor the code. I might have to write stubs in order to show it what I want to happen. The reading happens as the programming is happening.

It’s easier to write code than read it.

Id argue the read-write procedures are happening simultaneously as one goes along, writing code by hand.

It's important to enforce the rules that make the code easier to read.

Any programmer needs to be able to approach a foreign code base and navigate through it to identify ab issue. Reading code and understanding what is going on is an essential skill.

They make a big difference. For example if you use the Jira cli, most LLMs aren’t trained on it. A simple MCP wrapper makes a huge difference in usability unless you’re okay having the LLM poke and prod a bunch of different commands

Fwiw I'm having a good experience with a skill using Jira CLI directly. My first attempt using a Jira MCP failed. I didn't invest much time debugging the MCP issues, I just switched to the skill and it just worked.

Yes occasionally Claude uses the wrong flag and it has to retry the command (I didn't even bother to fork the skill and add some memory about the bad flag) but in practice it just works

Do you mean wrap the CLI with an MCP? I don't get that approach. I wrapped the Jira cli with a skill. It's taken a few iterations to dial it in but it works pretty damn well now.

I'm good, yet my coworkers keep having problems using the Atlassian MCP.

Silly. All it needs is docs. No need to overcomplicate it.

I was going to say, how on earth does it take 3 months to build 12 ramps. Seems like there’s a much deeper dysfunction. Ramps should genuinely be able to be stamped out at scale. This is the type of thing China would do in a few hours

Perhaps it has to do with public-private partnership shenanigans or subcontractor incompetence?

Sorry, how on earth does it take 3 months to make curb cuts

being TOO steerable is another issue though.

Codex is very steerable to a fault, and will gladly "monkey paw" your requests to a fault.

Claude Opus will ignore your instructions and do what it thinks is "right" and just barrel forward.

Both are bad and papering over the actual issue which is these models don't really have the ability to actually selectively choose their behavior per issue (ie ask for followup where needed, ignore users where needed, follow instructions where needed). Behavior is largely global

I my experience Claude gradually stops being opinionated as task at hand becomes more arcane. I frequently add "treat the above as a suggestion, and don't hesitate to push back" to change requests, and it seems to help quite a bit.

Yeah that happens to me too. It’s hard to know where it’s going to break off and follow instructions too well vs use it as a tip. Idk it’s all tiring

> they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost

They should be, and the answer is obviously no—at least to them. No political or business leader has outlined a concrete, plausible path to the sort of vague UBI utopia that's been promised for "regular folks" in the bullish scenario (AGI, ASI, etc.), nor have they convincingly argued that this isn't an insane bubble that's going to cripple our economy when AGI doesn't happen—a scenario that's looking more and more likely every day.

There is no upside and only downside; whether we're heading for sci-fi apocalypse or economic catastrophe, the malignant lunatics pushing this technology expect to be insulated from consequences whether they end up owning the future light-cone of humanity or simply enjoying the cushion of their vast wealth while the majority suffers the consequences of an economic crash a few rich men caused by betting it all, even what wasn't theirs to bet.

Everybody should be fighting this tooth and nail. Even if these technologies are useful (I believe they are), and even if they can be made into profitable products and sustainable businesses, what's happening now isn't related to any of that.

I hope they do. We live in a time of incredibly centralized wealth & power and AI and particularly "the machine god" has the potential to make things 100x worse and return us to a feudal system if the ownership and profits all go to a few capital owners.

IMHO this is exactly what is happening. Everyone should be on the phone with there senators putting pressure to enforce anti-trust and deal with citizens united

For good measure, a bunch of this is funded through money taken directly from the electorates taxes and given to a few select companies, whose leaders then graciously donate to the latest Ballroom grift. Micron, so greedy they thought nothing of shutting down their consumer brand even when it costs them nothing at all, got $6B in Chips Act money in 2024.

> At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.

Not saying this is necessarily a bad prediction for 2028, but I'm old enough to remember when the 2020 election was going to be a referendum on billionaires and big tech monopolies.

I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.

You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!

As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.

But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...

I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...

> I can use real Firefox!

This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.

I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.

Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.

NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.

> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though

I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.

RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).

Teenagers supposedly care. But I've never seen adults who care in the least what kind of phone someone has.

I've heard that, but anecdotally, neither of my two teenagers care at all. Maybe it used to matter in the past, but these days all the kids seem to be on Discord and any phone will do.

Personally I’ve only experienced the opposite. Lots of people mocking me for having an iphone, never seen any anti android sentiment.

> I think this update is finally ending that for some people.

For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.

There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.

Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.

Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.

If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.

I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)

I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.

I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).

But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.

But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.

> Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”

Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates

Yeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.

I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.

It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).

> ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.

This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)

Sure, but neither my Pixel nor Samsung handset defaults to gesture navigation. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but just never use Apple's multitasking provisions on iOS and iPadOS.

Pixels do now

Followed by “where is the back button.”

Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)

You mean the “roulette-wheel do-something-vaguely-backish” button?

I can't remember the last time I've encountered an app that didn't let you swipe to go back. That's practically built into iOS at this point.

Does apply still sometimes put the back button in the top left?

That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches

iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them

Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.

The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.

Things like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.

I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but I regularly use Android via single-use tablets and dev test devices and I think I dislike Material 3 Expressive even more. M3E feels weirdly awkward and unrefined and it's a struggle to come up with a color scheme that looks right. It would be a constant irritation if Android were my daily driver.

The latest top of the line Chinese phones (Xiaomi 17, Vivo x300 pro, Oppo X9 Pro) are at least equal if not better than top of the line iPhones or Samsung phones. Better battery life, larger batteries, better screens, faster charging. Much better cameras. They now do collaboration with lens makers like Zeiss and Hasselblad and it really shows in the photo quality, last year was the first time I've felt like a phone could replace an entry level DSLR.

People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.

I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again

Especially with the state of the App Store. We used to have really nice, well designed apps to go along with the amazing hardware, now it’s even worse than Android with an endless list of SEO-optimized, copycat and IAP scam apps.

Yeah I switched to Android in large part because of Liquid Glass. Not the look, pictures of it are quite nice, but because of how it works or rather, doesn't. It's buggy, slow (on a 1 generation old pro phone), and way too UI-forward, prioritising UI over content in the same way that skeuomorphism did. Overall it just felt dated in the same way that skeuomorphism did when it died.

It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided to nearly universally stop enforcing rules on a large basis as an alternative to legislative reform.

We’ve basically decided that actually reforming the bureaucratic machine is much too hard, so instead of reform let’s just not enforce anything.

One of Zohrans ads is such an on the nose example of this. He has an ad where he says he’s gonna help out small business by cutting down the fines that they face. Which on the surface sort of sounds nice, but now we basically just get shitty businesses selling shitty things and facing small slaps on the wrist instead of actually going through and removing the onerous laws and enforcing the important ones.

Same thing going on with immigration. The system is so fucked up, that instead of reform we simply won’t enforce immigration laws.

You see the same thing with housing that abundance basically called out. The system has gotten really good at writing more and more complicated laws at the cost of things basically falling apart in the real world

These copper thefts affect millions of people. It regularly happens to the MTA and shuts down the subway. A functional society would make an example of people committing these thefts so that the rest of us can continue to contribute and live their lives without being screwed by antisocial people

Seems to me there’s been a weird inversion on the left towards prioritizing individual rights over rights of society.

The right to use drugs in public, to camp in a park, to steal copper, to do sexually inappropriate stuff, to break laws, all seem to be more important than societal safety, comfort, and peace now.

100%.

It’s very hard for me to make a case for urban living, and more apartments, and less cars when the average experience in cities in America is rampant drug use, and tons of unenforced quality of life issues.

In what world is that the "average experience" in American cities?

I live in a very very good area of Brooklyn and still regularly run into needles, human shit, and open fentanyl use.

LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.

DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.

SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles

I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.

I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.

In what "very very good area of Brooklyn" are you regularly encountering needles?!

I've lived in the NYC metro area for nearly two decades and have yet to see a single one. Definitely saw them when I lived in Baltimore, and have seen them in Philly, but even then not "regularly" in either case.

Have you been to Kensington in Philly?

This looks more like refusing to enforce the law rather than prioritizing individual rights.

I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.

To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?

Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin. Chesa also had pedigree like Zohran does (in his case, both parents in prison for terrorism charges, raised by lefties).

Inevitably, people saw through the virtue signalling and ended up recalling him. I voted for him initially because he sounded good on paper ("a DA with a heart") but when it actually came to running the office, he was a disaster.

Case in point: SF is overrun with Honduran drug dealers. But Chesa was convinced that they are all victims of human trafficking and refused to enforce the laws against them! His office would either not file charges against them, or just let them walk with a slap on the wrist. Naturally, in the Hondo drug dealer circles it was a well known fact that if you ever get picked up in SF, claim that you were trafficked there and/or that you are underage.

After a couple of years people had had enough of this circue, and decided to recall him. I voted to recall him at the first chance I got.

> Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin

As a former New Yorker who grew up in the Bay Area, I disagree.

Chesa had zero public experience prior to his run, and he never moderated his position, not even after being ousted from office. In the end, he was elected by fewer than 90,000 people [1]. (Smaller than the population of Manhattan’s Chinatown [2].)

Mamdani has some experience as a city legislator. And he moderated between his primary and the general, the latter which he won with more than a million votes [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_San_Francisco_District_At...

[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/manhattan-neighborhoods-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele...

> I specifically mean the left) has decided to nearly universally stop enforcing rules

The left isn’t generally in control of policing.

The police respond to upstream actions of the prosecutors and judiciary. If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them. If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place. This is broken windows theory in action.

> If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them.

That’s a weird excuse to be soft on crime.

> If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place.

Well right there is the reason they should still be doing their job. Because you’re right, if the police stop arresting people, why would anybody report crime to the police?

> It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided ...

I'm going to invoke Murc's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law ) here and call out that this is an example of ascribing all agency in government to the left (and considering the right to be a force of nature that can't do anything but what they're going to do).

> Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined. The term originated in the left-wing blogosphere and has since gained traction in commentary about press bias and political framing.

Leopards eating faces or the scorpion and the frog ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog )...

These sorts of things are not a "the left has stopped enforcing laws" (the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws), but rather there has been a concerted effort to remove the ability for government to operate and regulate people organizations.

That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.

Yes, reform is hard. It is made more difficult when there aren't resources to do the reforms. It is furthermore difficult to do reforms when the suggested alternatives are "privatize it, move it to the states (or to cities), let the market figure it out."

> the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws

Left DAs absolutely have the ability to enforce or not enforce laws.

> That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.

Who was saying "defund the police"? And yes, some of them were actually trying to do that, to do exactly what they said.

I think immigration currently is fucked up and there needs to be clean, legal avenues for immigrating. I don’t think immigration policy is too soft. It’s much too hard if anything.

But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement

> Where does ICE fit into your view that immigration policy is too soft?

The post is (clearly to me) referring to left’s much more welcoming stance to immigration. (“No person is illegal.”)

^^ yes

Famously more dangerous? NYC? What on earth are you talking about

It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.

i feel like it's really not that bad