I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
120/hr is not that strange as freelancer in the EU. My rate is 2k/day. My first gig, in the early 90s, was 90 guilders/hr while in uni which went up to 90 euros/hr begin 2000s. 2010 it was 200/hrs. But you must have a (one person) company and some portfolio. Just a job will never do this. If you are good with numbers and money and tax management (meticulous deduct, keep receipts, know what you can and cannot do in your country) you can make a lot of money in the EU and without the risk of ever sleeping under a bridge if it fails.
I can see why people would he, but it is amazing tech when used right; as others here said; if you are an experienced developer, you can get a lot of mileage out of it. If you are not a dev or a bad dev, you might struggle because of over estimating what it can do for you.
The most frustrating about AI I find is that it is (trying to) replacing things that I like; writing, art, programming while leaving me with the things I absolutely hate like testing, chores etc. I do like reading code, so thats not a big issue; I spent most of the day doing that before AI, however, being a fulltime QA was always my nightmare but here we are; AI sucks at it for a more than trivial frontend and backend its not that good at either (I should write the tests or rather tell the AI in detail what to test for otherwise it will just positively test what it indeed wrote; not what the spec says it had to write in many cases).
But no, I like talking about AI, just not so much about slop, trivial usage (show hn; here is a SaaS to turn you into a rabbit!) or hyperbole (our jubs!) (Although I do believe it is the end of code; like said; I read and review code all day but have not written much for the past 6 months while working on complex non trivial SaaS projects; I am with antirez; it is automatic coding, not vibecoding for me).
> If I have a 5-10 year old Node project, it might work well on Deno, but almost no one has the time to champion a migration when it just doesn’t have that many benefits.
We inherited a 10+ year old production system with node and react; it made by a succesful company that made it with vc money in a short time and then got acquired; the system has grown to 100s of 1000s of lines of js (no ts). It runs on a cluster of VPSs on ancient versions of everything.
It took me 3 days to rewrite it to typescript and deno with zero vulns by prompting cerebras glm 4.7 with basically 'port this to modern ts, drizzle and deno' and then opus in claude code to make it work and fix it. It uses playwright mcp to test all flows; it runs production now instead of the old version; no issues so far.
Also, the 3rd day was only on writing REST and Playwright tests on both versions so we could compare if everything works the same.
Here in spain i suddenly see a lot of them (chinese brands) and not in a bader meinhof way. They are advertising more and i see a lot more on the streets. I was picked up from the station by a BYD. Not sure about the numbers, but something is definitely happening.
It was mentioned somewhere else on hn today, but why do I care about token usage? I prompt AI day and night for coding and other stuff via claude code max 200 and mistral; haven't had issues for many months now.
I am mostly back to my phone being with ironfox and using it for everything instead of apps. My bank works fine with it still and so far no issues with other things I need.
reply