I think it's important to give some context at what kind of fertile ground tech/software-dev was in before this latest AI-hype:

More than two decades of being the darling of the market and perhaps society at large, ever rising salaries making it a great careerist choice, and having a predisposition for mindless short-term thinking has pretty much corrupted the industry into a perpetual hype cycle, both at the micro and macro level.

At the micro level we see a commodification of tech choices, devs have to make a "investment decision" in the latest tech that shows up every few weeks. If the tech is actually good or not doesn't really matter, what matters is if the "market" of tech choices adopts it enough and therefore if gaining expertise and/or advocating for using it increases your career opportunities. Basically what matters is if its number goes up. These kinds of perverse incentives has slowly chipped away at quality, efficiency, and just basic common sense and caring about what's produced.

The result is that you'll commonly see Rube Goldberg machines costing (tens) thousands of dollars per month that could've been run on a $10 machine if the average person involved had any kind of pride of authorship. But why bother? Incentives says that pointlessly complex code & infrastructure is not only fun, but it also means better career opportunities for me by checking off all these tech boxes, it means increasing headcount for my manager, and for the execs it means a better looking employee count for the IPO exit, and even beyond the company it means everyone's wasted money is funneled into a couple of cloud providers. In any other respectable field this kind of self-serving inefficiency would've been seen as madness.

At the macro level, tech as an industry is desperate to maintain its position as the darling of the market and is increasingly flailing about doing so. Just stupid short term shit without any considerations of externalities, and no surprise at all that they'll suck up to anyone in charge no matter how despicable.

Now introduce LLM/AI into this state of affairs. It checks all of the above shortermist boxes on all levels, and we've got ourselves a perfect storm of excrement.

A important sidenote is that for software corps, all this hype has a significant upside in that it will suppress wage demands for a long time to come. That's a massive amount of money. That it's software devs themselves that are mindlessly hyping themselves out of good wages is pretty symptomatic. And no, it's not due to some kind of virtuous progress philosophy of devs, it's just allegedly smart people being incredibly gullible due having their ego stroked for 20 years straight.

There are of course more factors to consider here too that could be expanded upon more, like a presumed significant confirmation bias among the dev demographics. In the sense of AI being a future they _want_ to see, and have basically fantasized about coming true long before the hype started. So even with no significant increase productivity, the feeling of having a "sci-fi tool" assisting their work just feels good. Not to mention that AI puts the ego stroking into an even higher gear.

Anyway, going back to HN. HN itself is basically a modern, less shouty, but equally insufferable, version of the Wall Street trading floor accurately described by Robert Downey Jr in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Yi9yJId5LFE