what are you using for a Maps app if not Apple? Google is (probably) much worse and does pretty much all the same things. Even in nav mode it shows a bunch of sponsored pins like chain restaurants or stores.
I've always thought that consumer complaints about Apple in HN only come from a loud and self-important minority, but wow the replies here represent such an infinitesimal market share
CoMaps. Though that's probably a bit hardcore for most people.
At the end of the day, Google is worse. But Google has a better set of POIs. If Apple is throwing in the towel on privacy, I'm not sure the degrees matter as much as the difference in quality.
I do something similar. But where I change it up a bit is depending on plan complexity I divvy up parts of the implementation to different subagents with fresh, only relevant context for whatever they're responsible for doing (e.g. a part of that plan). Edit: to clarify, I will also go back and forth with the planning agent making sure edge cases are covered. Sometimes that involves invoking a new subagent without our planning context to validate it without preconceptions.
I personally still find planning a valuable mental exercise; it's not so different from pre-LLMs and whiteboarding or otherwise taking the time to consciously plan a set of work.
I'm still surprised sometimes at how rapidly I can prototype something. Is it always shippable? No. But something that would've taken me an amount of time I can't afford to is much quicker.
This past weekend I decided to build an iOS app as a personal project. Normally I wouldn't have the time to work on one like that but I was able to get a working POC that is actually usable for my trivial use case in a matter of hours.
For pure design space exploration that can be a victory, equivalent to sketching a UI on paper being faster than making it in HTML, but is that the work you're actually doing most of the time? Maybe for some people it is.
But none of that pays the bills. The context is entirely about how people get paid for this stuff and, that's turning it into a commodity, and saying that "my AI talks to their AI" is pretty close to saying "my job is redundant"
People writing software have been automating others away for a long time. The "I'll replace you with a short shell script" attitude. It's not surprising nor especially unfair we get the same treatment.
Because there's people who care about the craft, and there's people who don't.
I don't see any kind of AI-assisted coding as making anything. You didn't build that iOS app, Claude did. Maybe you can delude yourself into feeling some kind of pride or contentment in it and somehow think you built it but a lot of us who actually have a passion for the domain can't.
Imagine you're a carpenter. You've spent decades honing your skills, countless incomplete or borked projects that were recycled for newer better ones, the skin on your fingers and hands have become tougher and rough like sand paper due to how the majority of your waking hours are spent manipulating wood.
Now, someone gives that carpenter a machine that you can tell it your idea for any wood object and it just spits it out in a couple minutes and charges you a few bucks. The carpenter says, out of curiosity, "make me the roof in the Chapel of San Idelfonso", and after a little while, it spits out a nearly perfect copy of that magnum opus.
Any real carpenter would probably be disgusted, or at least feel a deep void inside them and nothing but disinterest in the machine. They'd just go back to their workshop and leave the machine outside. But that's probably because nobody becomes a carpenter to chase the current hype thing and to make money; they have passion, just like our engineers used to.
Why are carpenters always the example in these arguments? I know a framing carpenter and I've never heard anyone whine more about their job than he does.
Construction was never the best metaphor for programming. The compiler constructs the code. Software dev is closer to building architecture than construction.
One of my favorite Youtube channels, Mighty Car Mods, had a video a while back where they chose to use all hand tools for one of their car build projects instead of power tools.
For guys like those you can't really make an argument that they don't care about the craft when they use power tools 90% of the time normally.
So are LLMs a short cut? sure. Does that mean people using them don't care about the craft? not necessarily.
I'd love to spend more time actually learning iOS development. It's just that I work in a different area for my regular job and when I get home I don't have the time (due to various responsibilities) to sit down and spend adequate time on iOS.
I think it depends on what you mean by "the craft".
I understand the sentiments, genuinely. I do miss the feelings of carefully crafting a great piece of code. There was a genuine sense of accomplishment there. I still get a sense of accomplishment from agentic development, but it's different. It feels more similar to when you've steered a team of people who are actually doing the work, and then the final product gets delivered. I never touched the actual work, but my input / steering / taste / direction / etc. was a big part of what was delivered. And now we have the solution that we wanted.
If you got into this field because you like to hand-write code, and that's what you view as your craft, then yeah, I think you probably are in a tough spot. There's always the opportunity to do that on your own time, just like I'm sure the vast majority of woodworkers today are doing it for fun, not as their profession.
But if you're in this field because you have a passion for building things that solve problems (you know, engineering), if that's what you view as your craft, I don't think there's any shortage of opportunities to practice your craft.
The hand-written code solves problems. Many of those are problems about how to write code. In your world, these are apparently invalidated as problems now, due to becoming less profitable: by "problem" you mean "profitable problem". Is chasing after profitable problems noble and special, I don't know, it serves demand, demand matters somewhat, fine then. But it's not the epitome of problem-solving.
The hand-written code solves problems. Many of those are problems about how to write code.
But what is code for? I don't know that I think there's any inherent value to code for its own sake. Just like I don't think a tool's value can be separated from what you do with it.
I'm not sure where the "profitable" part comes from. I know lots of people who have vibe coded little apps that solve a problem for them or their friends and family. There's no profit involved, but it solved a problem.
Can you give an example of a problem worth solving for which there is truly no demand? I don't understand that, because to me it seems like the demand is what makes a problem a problem. Otherwise it's just a state of being, and if there is no demand to change, whether yours or anyone else's, what makes it a "problem"?
I was thinking of steam locomotive enthusiasts, actually. I mean, yes, if the future of coding is similar, it would be a pretty sad, farty old hobbyist world to be consigned to. But some people understand steam engines very well, and this isn't for anything except steam engines. You get a bunch of subtle side-benefits: generic problem-solving is transferable, which in this case isn't completely generic either because the general domain is engineering and physics. There's also the history angle. It's also just interesting: who knows what the benefit is? Many assorted inspirations may crop up from the stimulation, like with pure mathematics.
But it doesn't have to be so brutally outcome-based as you're demanding, although you do get a ride on a steam train out of it too.
It's not entirely unprofitable, either, if that matters. Niche.
> you have a passion for building things that solve problems
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
I know what you mean, there's definitely a contingent of people super hyped up about AI who seem to be using it to build stuff to build more stuff to build more stuff, and I don't know what actual problem they're trying to solve at the end of the day. But I'm not sure that doesn't mean there's value, like someone building carpentry tools and not actually building anything with them, but building them for others to use?
Regardless, in my case, I build a SaaS app that I sell to real non-technical small businesses in a tiny niche that helps them with a particular problem they face in their business. They don't care that it uses AI, they just need this problem solved at an affordable price so they can focus on other things. This solution that I sell would have been absolutely impossible to provide in an automated way pre-LLM, and I could never have built and grown this business on my own (in this time frame anyway, probably at all) without agentic development.
You're not the carpenter though, the code you wrote can rarely do things on its own, you need a toolchain or an interpreter, or something to run it with. Toolchains use your code as rough reference, turning you into a designer/architect. I don't endorse it when people fully offload development to LLMs, that's lazy and irresponsible, but how I see most devs use it (not the loud minority) it's just another tool in the arsenal. If it lets you skip the annoying steps and focus on the logic - excellent, great, I'm not great at Java, i don't know all of its built in APIs, I can ask an LLM that I need this and this API to communicate with C++ layer, perform the following logic, output the following logs, after which I can audit and validate the code to the best of my ability. Is that such a bad thing? Did a caveman with a stick reject the hammer and the axe?
Disingenuous analogy, because you're taking the work of a carpenter and then jumping all the way to a Star Trek style replicator, which is daft.
The jump from writing code by hand to having a machine learning algorithm compute code for you is not the same as that. We had tags, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, word suggestion (via dictionary), intellisense, enhanced auto-completions via snippets, natural language processing, language servers, etc. etc. throughout the decades and an LLM is still not a Star Trek style replicator.
Now, it might have taken a blacksmith a hell of a long time to work various kinds of metal to order, but then someone got the idea of creating a mould so you could make more of them at once. Then later on technology advances and you can now machine it to ridiculously high precision with CNC. Now the person who writes CNC code for a high precision part might not be the same person who has to work another metal part manually.
Did the machines do that or did they? And why exactly does that distinction matter? Half the code I write depends on stuff hundreds or thousands of others have built before me.
What exactly did you eat the entire time? tonkatsu and karaage?
there's plenty of great home style food that isn't fried.. nikujaga, gyusuji, nikudofu, etc.
Public transit there is pretty great. If anything the lack of escalators for some stations can be unmotivating to some people but on the other hand walking a lot of flights of stairs is healthy.
It's not a snarky reply. It's important IMO that people realize the consistently top rated transit system in the world is nearly all private. Otherwise, they push for public transit, not realizing they are asking for something different.
Except that is not the definition of "public transportation" being used in this context; OP is clearly referring to transportation that the public uses to commute. They're hardly referring to its ownership.
Say I'm using Claude Code or GPT Codex's harnesses but also sending some queries to the respective Anthropic and OpenAI models via OpenRouter.
Do harnesses and therefore sending the queries directly to the LLM providers have caching and other benefits that OpenRouter does not provide? Would I get any of those benefits if I simply proxied any requests to the major providers' harnesses through OpenRouter? Or only if the requests go straight from the harness to the provider's API?
Your question is worded kind of confusingly, but all caching is handled on the inference layer, and by all major providers. In short, caching should work as long as you are sending requests to the same model and provider.
Apologies. I guess my main question is just is there a benefit to routing directly to a provider through its own harness vs just sending chat requests to those providers using OpenRouter or similar as a proxy?
As per your response it sounds like at least caching would happen for any provider regardless of the request's origin.
Too bad the Google Health app (which is required for FitBit devices since Google retired the FitBit app) is getting mostly 1 and 2 star (out of 5) reviews on the Google app store.
The reviews were ~90% 1 & 2 star within the first month of the FitBit Air release.
Three months later, the app has improved to ~80% 1 & 2 star reviews. At this pace, they'll be on v3 of the device when app reviews are decent...
They force everyone to move over to a different app when the replacement app doesn't have all the features/reliability of the old app.
Genius.
Garmin released the Cirqa band at $199 w/o compulsory subscription a few weeks ago. I may switch to that if the FitBit Air acts up.
I'm waiting for the Apple Health app support. Supposedly it's coming sometime in the fall. The Google app is ok but I don't use the AI features.
I'm not sure if proper Apple Health would help with this but Google tends to be delayed at automatic recognition of activities (e.g. I take a walk it can be an hour or two until it processes automatically). Apple would recognize a walk as I was on it.
I really just want an Apple version of the new Fitbit Air.
I had an Apple Watch for five years. Battery didn't even last a day.
I realized generally I have my phone or laptop with me all the time anyway, I don't need a watch with weather or app widgets.
So in June I bought the fitbit air and it's great. Battery life lasts about 6-7 days. No distracting screen. MUCH more comfortable to sleep with since it has no buttons and a smaller form factor.
If Apple made their own version of the Air but with Apple Pay I would switch back over in a heartbeat.
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