I really want to know other's opinion on this, but the critique that Ai pushes spaghetti / barely maintainable code doesn't carry a lot of weight because that's all I've ever seen in production anywhere.
If I can spin up in a week what used to take me 6 months and it kind of works. That's absolutely insane. I really wish we could all step back and acknowledge that. Instead, I only hear people talking about how bad the code is.
Honest question, so what? If I can monetize a bad product in a miniscule fraction of the time it used to take. Then optimize it while funded, what's the issue? I get this may upset purists but for product companies it's always been about the MVP.
While you're correct. I truly believe the velocity offered outweighs this consideration for 90% of the application teams and startups. I've personally never worked in a clean codebase, and I've been convinced long ago that they're mythical. I don't see an issue with an LLM spitting out bad / barely maintainable code because that's basically every codebase I've ever seen in production.
The piece I think people are missing is for years the biggest bottle neck for development has been time. These services have just ripped apart the time barrier, and the industry is still trying to wrap their head around that.
To me the next obvious barrier will be size (context) barrier, and I can easily see a place for a human in that process. Sure, anyone can prompt an agent build a codebase, but as those code bases grow / evolve It's hard for me to believe a non-specialized person will be able to manage those projects.
edit:
I had another thought after posting this. To all the smaller company devs just building and maintaining internal tools. Users always want more features. The difference is now you'll be able to deliver them.
The biggest disruption I'm seeing is in estimation. It's a skill developed with experience, and it just went poof
Earlier this year, Conagra started labeling some of its Healthy Choice frozen meals with high protein and fiber as "GLP-1 friendly." A spokesperson said those meals are selling faster than rival products making similar claims on their packaging. The company plans to introduce new Healthy Choice recipes with the same labeling in May and work with grocers like Walmart (WMT.O), and Kroger (KR.N), to market them, the spokesperson said.
Nestle, the world's biggest food company, has also introduced new frozen meals that cater specifically to GLP-1 users, called Vital Pursuit.
Fast-casual Mexican chain Chipotle (CMG.N),on Tuesday added a "High Protein Menu" that features, among other items, a single cup of chicken or steak.
They are eating healthier, the above is not at all evidence for the original claim.
All research on GLP-1 diet changes shows that people on GLP-1 naturally shift away from junk snacks, soda, and fast food. With a significant increase in high protein food, especially "mushy" one like yogurt and cottage.
I'm baffled how messed up the food industry in the US has gotten over the last decades. When I was in the US I remember ordering pancakes in the morning. Those pancakes for like 10 bucks lasted for the whole week because I couldn't stuff so much in my stomach.
I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil. Good luck trying to get an actual healthy salad where the toppings aren't full of sugar or oil. When we cook something with oil here and fry it, it's too much if you use 5 spoons of oil. When people in the US fry something in oil, they pour at least a gallon in the pot, and call it "good food" afterwards.
It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU. I'm really glad I don't live in the US anymore. It was so exhausting having to buy whole foods and things without peanut, corn/maple, oil or sugar in it.
It's like 99% of processed food is made out of waste of those industries, can't explain it otherwise because it doesn't make sense to me. You have really great vegetables and fruits there because of having enough sun to grow them locally, yet it seems like nobody wants to eat them.
Tolerate what, stupid misleading advertising on frozen junk food? Normal people just don’t buy it.
>I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil.
Did you travel here and only go to fast food places or something?
>It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU.
When I traveled to EU, I was surprised at the number of nasty people smoking cigarettes outside at cafes, walking down the street, everywhere. You’d sure think that a lot of younger people don’t care about their health in EU based on all the smoking.
>You have really great vegetables and fruits there because of having enough sun to grow them locally, yet it seems like nobody wants to eat them.
That’s a weird assumption because the produce section of my grocery store is pretty much the most crowded section.
> Did you travel here and only go to fast food places or something
I attribute much of the weird slop like that post to bots or paid trolls driving an agenda. They say things that only really make sense in the online fantasy world.
That's funny, I feel I had the opposite experience going into EU. Maybe it's regional? Anyway we were eating out a bunch around Slovenia and menus had a lot of "mixed meat" "fried cheese" type foods and servers would look at you funny if you wanted just vegetables. I got the vibe that they felt like they were letting you down if they didn't offer you their best meat so maybe it's a cultural leftover from hungrier times
> You have really great vegetables and fruits there because of having enough sun to grow them locally, yet it seems like nobody wants to eat them.
Most of the fruit and vegetables in the supermarket aren't grown locally, those are usually imported (and rarely from other US states, most from South America). Farmers markets have the local stuff.
I've just learned to ignore everything that's not factual on a box. I'm basically flipping it over to read the ingredients.
Nutrition labels are hit or miss. Portions are pretty much a useless, arbitrary measure so I'm really just look at them to understand the general ratios.
i dont think nearly anyone in the US considers anything fried to be healthy.
i agree everything is very sugar-filled though, i think in part because of the misguided culture shift around everything needing to be fat free and manufacturers simply replaced fats with sugars
It's a prediction. Not a terribly unreasonable one as far as I can see. If a drug can move 5% of the ~trillion dollars spent on groceries in the US, there's a lot of money available for clawing those 5% back.
Demanding evidence for predictions like this is a bit... hm. Arrogant, maybe. A prediction is a commitment. We want people to make predictions. The evidence we get when those predictions come true or not. Would you be willing to make the opposite prediction?
There are sometimes truly bizarre demands for evidence. I once posted a pure opinion piece -- essentially a moral judgment on what is good and what is bad (in the domain of technical writing) -- and got hit with "source?"
I think if there were certain foods which, for some reason, aren't as affected by Ozempic-type drugs' (GLP-1 agonists?) appetite suppression effect - and I'm not an expert, but I totally wouldn't be surprised if there was - then I think the food industry would be very interested in finding them.
Fair enough. The ~trillion dollars also includes things which presumably wouldn't be affected by ozempic, like overpriced razors. But either way you look at it, it's probably going to move enough money to seriously hit the food industry.
At what point does a demand for evidence come back around to making the requestor seem less like a prudent, rational truth seeker and more like someone with naive lack of personal, lived experience? Like, not a single soul will say "got evidence for that assertion?" when it's a news story about EA or Oracle or Adobe acquiring a company and people are predicting that the acquired product will be destroyed, and isolated demands for rigor will be laughed out of the comment section. Why is that - when does it flip over to "oh, so I guess it's okay to just nakedly assert that food companies will seek profit by reformulating their recipes, even though there isn't a shred of evidence to support that, therefore, we're now allowed to predict anything!"
The complement of the claim is essentially "food manufacturers will never again attempt to modify their recipes to make them more hyperpalatable, now that GLP-1 exists." Does that need evidence? It's the null hypothesis, but it certainly sounds a lot more unrealistic than the opposite.
Destroying a product is a well understood process, and we've witnessed many big companies do it. That's evidence!
Designing a food to be more appealing is also a relatively well understood process that is already carried out, but Ozempic seems to blunt the effectiveness of it.
Food companies will surely try to make food that is appealing for Ozempic users, and will do so if they can. But it is a massive assumption that they will be able to, given that they're already doing as much as possible to make food appealing to people.
So there is significant uncertainty that the food companies can do what the parent suggested they would do.
It needs evidence that there's a general phenomenon of "hyperpalatable" food companies can search for, not just a latent property of how certain macronutrients balance in food. Otherwise, it's like proposing that public transit is pointless because car companies will somehow defeat it by making up more reasons to drive.
But that's what happened. I mean, it doesn't mean that proposing public transit is pointless, but if someone in 1930 heard about a trolley track being run in town and another person said "it's only a matter of time before the car companies try to sabotage mass transit", they would've been right. That's what actually happened.
This should be viewed like attempts to put the cocaine back in coca-cola. The industry may be able to get away with "our food is naturally delicious", but engineering it for superior addictiveness should be banned. Not going to get there under the current FDA, though.
Capitalism creates these monstrous corpo-organisms, and while we have found one way to strangle "Big Processed Food" this article shows that BPF has a will to survive.
I don't know about a full on conspiracy, but it's no secret that in the US they put a lot of additional sugar into products you wouldn't think had them.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.
I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.
French food having sugary sauces has nothing to do with American food having too much sugar though, and I'd wager 99% of the US has never heard of steak au poivre. We may know of pepper steak, but that doesn't always have sauce.
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
> America hides sugar in everything. Plain old white sandwich bread often has loads of added sugar.
It's not hidden, it's on the label, and expected. I just don't buy garbage bread.
> Sugar isn’t necessary for bread making. Yeast can break down the starch. That’s what it evolved to do. Flour, water, yeast, salt, done.
That usually means that malt is added to the flour (most bread flour). You can get breads without added sugar or malt, but you're going to have to go to a bakery that makes their own dough and buys flour without additives, which is getting rarer and rarer.
Every day another city or village in 4 different states. I won't go into everything I saw or noticed while staying there. HN doesn't like criticism of the US.
Fiber mostly, but that's not an addictive, I guess that's a subtractive.
But think about, say, oranges. They naturally have fiber in them to make you feel more full and to slow the absorption of sugar. Then we remove all the fiber by juicing them, and now you can eat 6 oranges in 60 seconds, which is typically impossible or, at least, very uncomfortable.
It's the same story for the entire food industry. Whole foods are complex, we often zone in on some aspect of them and extract it, essentially concentrating it.
You are implying people should shut up about it because it's not novel information. I think "are you surprised?" is a very lame and unoriginal response I see everywhere and doesn't even care to engage with the problem. I think HN's rules suggest you should put in more effort than this.
"People losing their jobs on the right" can, in every case I'm aware of, be reworded as "people losing their jobs because they oppose basic human rights for certain categories of people."
Over the past few decades, and especially since about 2008, "the right" has become the refuge for every kind of bigotry (especially, though not solely, in the USA). Trying to defend that bigotry by crying about political neutrality is...well, to be polite I'll just say it's pretty ugly and leave it at that.
Not as wild of a claim as you might think, as opposition to gay marriage falls starkly along political lines in the US. If you are a republican and you support gay marriage, you are solidly in the minority (41%). 12% of democrats oppose it.
> In May 2025, a record-high 88% of Democrats supported same-sex marriage, support from independents stood at 76%, while Republican support dipped back down to 41%
Due to discrimination and bullying. There goes freedom of expression out of the door. Fortunately that crazy ship has long sailed and nowadays he'd have enough support to resist and publicly voice his opinions without personal attacks.
I think there is a very large difference between citizen activism (i.e. boycotts which can lead to resignations) and government authoritarianism. I have no problem with people exercising their right to free speech - including both Brandon Eich, and Firefox users.
No government official spoke up to have Brandon Eich fired, or bullied him or anything like that. His defenestration wasn't driven by government. Brandon Eich said some things, and the community around him judged those things and reacted to it. That's means that we're not talking about free speech any more. You have no right to speak and force other people to listen without social consequence, you do have a right to speak without the government retaliating. But other people are free to react to your speech as well, and to speak out in opposition to you.
A lawyer once described what you are calling Free Speech as merely "Protection of the First Speech." You believe that Brandon Eich should be able to speak (the first speech), but that the other people around him should not be able to say what they want in reaction to it (the second speech). Brandon Eich did say things without any government retaliation- and the people who worked at Mozilla didn't want to be associated with that, and so he chose to resign before the organization fell apart. Because those people around Mozilla have free speech rights as well, they are not forced to associate with Mozilla.
Similarly, a company choosing to fire an employee because of their speech is not really a free-speech issue. The company can fire you for pretty much any reason (at least in America- some countries have stronger worker protections), because they don't want to be associated with you any more. On the other hand, if a Government official suggests that you should be fired for something you said in your private life, then your free speech rights are being violated, even if the company does not fire you. It is only when the government gets involved that it becomes a Free Speech issue.
Obligatory XKCD to help you understand why you are wrong about what "Free Speech" means: https://xkcd.com/1357/
No need for "government official". There were plenty of non-government official branches such as media and social networks that were demonstrated to work as shadow tools for imposing heavy censorship around specific agendas. Up until the recent election so was the case for the large majority of mainstream social networks and legacy media.
The whole corona fabrication wasn't that long ago when governments directly mandated to silent dissident voices (even the scientific ones) and push a whole group of normal people into burning anyone who'd point out the obvious inconsistencies.
The First Amendment right exists in large part to enable and encourage non-governmental news reporting - to avoid a world in which government officials can dictate "reality" or "truth."
The Guardian is actually a British publication, which is a bit orthogonal from the original discussion of US free speech. It might be more accurate to say that this was part of an international political conversation. This is because Bradon Eich, the leader of an organization which provides products internationally, made public donations to political groups that seek to strip rights from others. He has a first amendment right to do so.
As OP states, the rest of the world has a right (in the US, legally; elsewhere, perhaps morally) to respond to Brandon Eich, and Mozilla. If they believe that his views may influence the organization negatively - either due to bad press or through his other behaviors within the organization - they are also granted free speech to call out this behavior.
What we are seeing now is actual government agencies and officials working hard to remove people from their jobs - both in the public and private sectors - in response to views that don't align with their own.
It's not clear to me what your argument is exactly.
My argument is that he contributed to a ballot initiative that passed (meaning the majority supported it), but he was still targeted and lost his job because media platforms targeted him.
To quote Andrew Sullivan
> "McCarthyism applied by civil actors".
When people with large platforms target you, you're just as screwed regardless of their status as elected officials. To be outraged by one and excuse the other is laughable.
It's almost like connected infrastructure is inherently unsafe.
I stand by "your kid, your problem". I don't want any kid to be "unsafe", but commonsense went out the window when schools started to require the internet.
The true "safe" option is not allowing any of this until your child is old enough to understand the risks... so 18? 25?
All I'm saying is there is no route to prevent all bad things (or even most) and people who say otherwise are generally selling you something.
reply