This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!)
Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one" - or to learn an existing one.
Another good analogy, not by concidence, is to Lisp in general. The classic knock against itāone I never agreed with but used to hear all the timeāis that Lisp with its macros is so malleable that every programmer ends up turning it into their own private language which no one else can read.
Tangential to that was Mark Tarver's 2007 piece "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer" which had much discussion over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=comments%3E0%20The%20Bipolar%2...). He wrote about the "brilliant bipolar mind" (BBM) - I won't get into how he introduces that or whether fairly or not, but it's interesting given how "AI psychosis", in both ironic and unironic variants, is frequently mentioned these days.
From Tarver's article (https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html):
The phrase 'throw-away design' is absolutely made for the BBM and it comes from the Lisp community. Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp [...] No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.
Sounds pretty 2026, no? He goes on:
The C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you're liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you're liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere. And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one).
---
When production is so easy, consumption becomes the bottleneck [1], and suddenly sharing is a problem. This is why the Emacs analogy is so good. A .emacs file is as personal as a fingerprint. You might copy snippets into yours, but why would you ever use another person's? (other than to get started as a noob). You just make your own.
The more customized these cocoons get, the harder they are for anybody else to understandāor to want to. It isn't just that another's cocoon has too high a cognitive cost to bother learning when you can just generate you own. It's also uncomfortable, like wearing someone else's clothes. The sense of smell somehow gets involved.
I would call this, maybe not AI psychosis, but AI solipsism.
In software it's fascinating how configuration management (that boringest of all phrases) is becoming the hard part. How do you share and version the source? What even is the source? Is it the prompts? That's where the OP heads at the end: "share it somewhere ā or, better yet, just a screenshot and the prompts you used to make it." But when I floated a couple trial balloons about whether we might use this for Show HNāi.e., don't just share the code you generated, because that's not the source anymore; instead share the promptsāwe got a lot of pushback from knowledgeable people (summarized here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213630).
These dynamics can only be what's behind the pipe-bursting pressure that Github has been under. What a Github successor would look like is unclear, but as a clever friend points out, there will have to be one. Projects and startups along these lines are appearing, but we seem to be in the horseless carriage phase still.
Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM nowāor rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, locked in a manic state, primed at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-usāhow do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.
My sense is that a lot of software teams, startups and so on, on the cutting edge of AI-driven / agentic development, are currently contending with this, not (only) philosophically but practically, e.g. how does my generated code compose with your generated code. With these frictions we presumably end up giving back some portion (how much? who can say?) of the productivity gains of generated code. One would expect such effects to show up over time, as the systems being built this way grow in complexity and maintenance/development tradeoffs become things.
I don't see many talking about it publicly yet though, which is a pity. No one wants to be the first to stop clapping and sit down during an obligatory standing ovation, but it's a bummer if you can't (yet) tell interesting stories about downsides and instead have to pretend that this is the first free lunch, the only downsideless upside that ever existed. It makes the discussion more boring and probably slows evolution since the experiments, ironically, are happening in silos.
These are the people doing the most serious and real and advanced work with the new tools (edit: I mean in the field of software dev), so it sucks if all talk of downsides is left to the cynical/curmudgeonly contingent, who for whatever good points they may, er, generate along the way, are obviously wrong about AI having no value for software dev. It's easier to talk about AI wiping out the human race than, say, bug counts going up or productivity levelling off after a while.
Mostly I just want to know what's really going on! and how people are dealing with it and how it is developing over time. Do I have to like go to meetups or something?
[1] That's why a recent paper used the title "Easier to Write, Harder to Read" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6726702
tptacek
yesterday at 10:55 PM
There's something about this whole situation that rhymes with the issue of LLM-generated prose. It's not that GPT 5.5 writes bad prose (I mean, it doesn't write good prose, but it's not awful). It's that once I pick up on the text being GPT 5.5's, my brain switches into a mode where it starts reminding me "this is just GPT output, you could just ask GPT 5.5 these questions yourself, and get answers better tailored to what you want to know". Why am I reading this one particular artifact of a conversation with the LLM? Once I know what the conversation is about, I can just have a better one myself.
Same deal with a lot of this software. I guess there's some "taste" to it, but mostly what you care about are the ideas and the "recipe".
Also, you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread.
dang
yesterday at 11:03 PM
Those are great points and it leads right back to the solipsism thing. Also, you snuck a "It's not that X, it's that Y." in there. Nice.
> you should just do a monthly "Vibe HN" thread
It wouldn't stop people from feeding them into the Show HN stream, which is the problem. If we had a good enough way to tell them apart, we could factor them into two streams, but we don't yet.
I don't want to make this about people's faith or whatever, but to put it frankly, I've heard a lot of contemporary Christian music, I don't care for it, and [I like to think] I can reliably recognize it in three notes or fewer,Ā¹ which may or may not bear out in rigorous testing, but saves me a lot of time either way. This feels like it parallels strongly with the topic at hand
1. erring on the side of sounding cooler
> Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork?
I can concur with that thought direction. We used to pair and group-program on my team, we have a "Zoom office". Now it has become "let me take this ticket and feed it to Claude, you try the same thing with Copilot, and then we compare the results", or "I'd make a PR with my clunker, you use yours to review it". This shit honestly feels almost pointless. The pair-programming is absolutely dead. Who wants to watch me run several agents, trying to fix multiple things in different work-trees, while I'm juggling them around and fixing inconsistencies in my agents.md?
I've been pushing the idea of building a self-governing, fully autonomous cloud pipelines so we'd stop playing "stupid tokenomy" games, and it seems my management is just quietly trying to "keep it down", because I think there's a simple understanding - the moment that shit proves airworthy and actually can fly, a bunch of them are guaranteed to lose their cushy seats.
ontouchstart
today at 12:15 AM
> Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM nowāor rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, permanently locked in a manic state, springloaded at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-usāhow do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.
One example of teamwork is how the programmers and researchers worked together to build the UNIX SYSTEM (https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf). It is not a product but an environment optimized for building tools and solving practical problems with tools written in C (while BBMs were busy with Lisp in Boston .;-)
C++ is a totally different story and you need an IDE for that.
If WASM succeeded in being the one universal ABI, it could be the perfect successor to the unix pipe for the AI age. Wasm modules for libraries, that double as terminal tools.. One could only imagine
dnnddidiej
today at 5:44 AM
So cool to see a dang comment comment. Rather than moderating comment.
jr_isidore
yesterday at 9:49 PM
Tarver's piece was new to me, and fun, and spot on. Yes, LLMs bring the emacs cruft heap to the masses. A throwaway culture on disk is a lot less worrisome than one on soil.
> easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one
seriously?
user3939382
today at 5:00 AM
Maybe itās just another cocoon but Iāve been working on a framework for modular CLIs which allow different humans or agents to spin different features simultaneously but with some enforcement of shared dictionary, aliases, help, logging, formatting, semantic parsing, a few other things.
It works, itās powerful, and certainly one way to answer the question you pose. I would argue itās the optimal answer, itās an answer to RPC, REST, and MCP at the same time, but itās definitely an example of an answer and approach. In any case it is a good question and something Iāve given a lot of thought to.
Unfortunately in the age weāre in now thereās something lackluster in sharing any solution or design you have. Though the architecture and design of what Iām describing came 0% from AI everything is assumed to be and therefore unimportant? But it is the direct answer to your question so if anyoneās curious lmk.