I'd love if someone with experience can correct me if I'm wrong but in my experience it can do all of that really, really badly. I find the happy and most likely case for any sort of autonomous thing is that it totally fails to do anything. The sad case is it does the wrong thing. There's just no case where these things make good judgement calls or understand what you think is important.
I do still find some things useful about my nanoclaw setup - convenience and easy scheduling of LLM related tasks. Well, promising actually, not useful yet. But autonomy is not one of those things.
How so? If coding is largely solved and we are on the cusp of not even needing to learn to code, then the statement that they use electron because it’s what most of their engineers are familiar with seems a little contradictory.
What's wrong with taking existing skills into consideration when making technical decisions while coding skills still matter, just because you think coding skills won't matter "in a year or two"? Where's the contradiction?
Why do we repeatedly say that tarrifs are passed off in full to the consumer in the form of higher prices? Isn't that as obviously wrong as the argument for them, that they're paid entirely by the other countries?
Is there a reason to believe, or evidence, that it's not a mixture of the two?
edit: I want to highlight esseph's reply has a link to evidence that last year's tarrifs were passed off 90% to consumers, which is exactly the type of info I was looking for.
"American consumers bore 90% of last year's nearly six-fold tariff increase, adding $1,000-$2,400 to average household budgets, despite overall inflation dropping to 2.4% in January 2026."
I have to assume that some of that 4% has second order negative effects on US importers and consumers.
Profit margins can not always go down by 4% and in those cases goods and services would then not be available to US importers and consumers is only one example.
My assumption is that the 96% statistic does not fully encapsulate the negative costs to consumers. I have to to wonder how much higher the burden is over 96% when all second order effects are taken into account.
Importer != Consumer. I think that's very obvious to anyone paying attention to this whole thing. In fact, it's a small minority of imports that are direct to consumer.
It absolutely is a mix of the importer (e.d. manufacturer, producer, wholesaler, retailer, etc.) absorbing some in their margin and the consumer picking up the bill via price increases for the rest.
It's quite obviously not 96% being paid by the consumer across the board just from looking at the CPI numbers.
All this study states is the obvious: foreign producers didn't lower their cost by much in response to tariff burden. They largely charged the same rate to a buyer in the US vs. a buyer in Germany.
This isn't to defend the tariff situation - just that this study gets trotted out a whole lot in an extremely disingenuous manner. Other data that exists is better that measures direct consumer impact.
The study makes it clear that the people footing the bill for the tariffs are in the US - it is not the rest of the world paying Trump's taxes, it's Americans, whether directly as consumers or importers.
For goods for which no domestic equivalent alternatives exist, why would the foreign suppliers lower their prices to compensate for the tariffs (which are paid by the importers to the government)? More generally, the cost of the tariffs will be split between foreign suppliers and local importers/consumers according to the competitiveness and availability of domestic suppliers, and according to market elasticity for the respective goods.
Well, they would likely have to lower their profit margin because the demand is reduced by the higher prices. Fewer purchasers will want to/be able to buy the item at the higher price. The supply and demand curve will find a new equilibrium, but it isn’t like the sellers are going to sell the exact same quantity of items with the price exactly increased by the tariff amount.
That assumes that demand is meaningfully elastic, that suppliers have room in their margins to absorb it, and that they're willing to. That is obviously not the case for a lot of things.
Products with inelastic or less elastic demand we can skip over because it's pretty self explanatory.
Products like the random cheap widgets a lot of us would buy from random Chinese sellers are often high volume low margin products with a lot of competition. Think about stuff like a USB->TTL serial board that's basically two connectors, one cloned chip, and a few supporting components on a single layer PCB. Hypothetically this is an ideal case for free market economics and these things should have already been basically as cheap as they can be at every step in the chain.
For less competitive items, particularly lower volume specialty items, a vendor may also decide that it's just not worth sacrificing profits in other markets by letting them know there's room to come down. A lot of the independent hardware designers I've been wanting to buy things from sell out every batch one way or another so they just don't care, demand exceeds supply even if demand from the US is reduced. Others have decided the volatility of the situation just isn't worth it with the risk of products getting delayed or additional charges added resulting in chargebacks and lost products and have simply stopped selling to the US altogether.
Well, the analysis by the Federal Reserve said that domestic entities (consumers and companies) paid 90% of it. So, yes, saying that consumers pay it all is wrong, but it's less wrong than saying that foreign countries pay it all.
I don't recall seeing a split between domestic consumers and domestic companies, but I'm fairly sure that consumers are paying more than the 10% that foreign entities are.
It is a mixture of the two. But my reading of various studies indicates that in this mixture, the majority was passed to consumers in the form of higher prices.
The businesses in the other countries are, you know, businesses. Even if it were Chinese companies that were paying the tariffs, that will be baked into the cost of the good.
This is literally first-day economics. No such thing as a free lunch. The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
I have no idea how the fuck the rumor that these tariffs will be “paid by other countries” started. If there are suspicions that the tariffs are temporary then they might be willing to eat the cost temporarily so it’s not passed onto the consumer immediately, but that’s inherently temporary and not sustainable especially if it would make it so these companies are losing money.
A tariff or import tax is a duty imposed by a national government, customs territory, or supranational union on imports of goods and is paid by the importer. Exceptionally, an export tax may be levied on exports of goods or raw materials and is paid by the exporter.
If an analysis says that "domestic consumers are paying 90%" of a tariff then they are simplifying the process that others are describing here as "baked into the cost" and I would say, more accurately, "the cost of tariffs are recouped from consumers/businesses by those who paid them (the importer)"
The economic burden of tariffs falls on the importer, the exporter, and the consumer. [Wikipedia]
If economists are saying "consumers pay tariffs" then I would expect to see a notation on the price tags and a line-item on my receipts, but the cost of the tariff must be paid by the importer, or there won't be a consumer who can purchase the goods, let alone bear the costs of their tariffs.
I am just saying that it eventually is paid by the end user, regardless of the bureaucratic steps in between. We can try and figure out who is directly paying them but I feel like that detail is unnecessary to my overall point.
US Consumers pay in fungible dollars, and so if your company paid for three pizzas eaten by an AWS team, and I paid for 1 ounce of Maersk fuel oil, and our Starbucks venti latte purchases paid to rethatch Juan Valdez's hut, who can even trace the serial numbers on our $1 bills?
It wasn't a "rumor" it was explicit deliberate disinformation. Unfortunately many people in the US have insufficient education and accurate news feeds to realize.
See also: disinformation that "other countries charge us the same tariffs", which turns out to be either a plain lie, or they mean VAT (a sales tax, like we have in the US).
"But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. "
> The cost of the item that the end user pays should reflect all costs associated with production and distribution to that end user.
Eh, standard business school logic these days is that if you want to maximize profits, you should charge what the market will bear, not your costs + some fixed profit.
So if you're already charging what the market will bear, there may be more wiggle room to absorb some of the hit of tariffs, so long as it still leaves you making enough profit or in a favorable position. It still comes down to what maximizes tariffs: at higher prices, demand drops, but at lower prices, your profit/item drops.
Still, yeah, from what I understand, the bulk of the tariff costs were passed along to customers.
Sure, there might be some wiggle room in some of the margins, and when tariffs were like 10% that might have been something close to “sustainable”, but that doesn’t extrapolate forever. When Trump enacted 125% tariffs on China, they by definition couldn’t eat the cost.
Well its completely wrong. Tariffs are regressive consumer taxes that hurt people who make <$200k/year the most while enriching the inner circle of crony capitalism. Corrupt and should be prosecuted for such criminal robbery of the American people
I guess I mostly don't understand how anyone believed it.
He ran on lowering grocery prices, and he was going to do this by making tariffs. So his plan boiled down to "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".
With Trump it can be tough to tell if it's idiocy of malice but at some point I suppose it's a distinction without much of a difference.
I've had multiple HNers message me saying that their gas bills and grocery prices have never been lower, and that since day 1 of the new administration prices have dropped. Looking at trends across all states, I wonder how they came to that conclusion at all.
Does anyone have a good explanation on how supposedly other countries were paying the tariffs? If so, nothing would deter the american consumer from buying foreign?
It's much more true than saying that the foreign company pays it. Depends on how much slack there is in profit margins for both the exporter and importer, but the consumer does pay most of it, like 90%.
> "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write"
At this point I'd settle if they bothered to read it themselves. There's a lot of stuff posted that feels to me like the author only skimmed it and expects the masses to read it in full.
I love everything about coding. I love architecting a system, and I love tending all the little details. I love to look at the system as a whole or a block of code in isolation and find nothing I want to change, and take pride in all of it. I also love making products.
LLM-agents have made making products, especially small ones, a lot easier, but sacrifice much of the crafting of details and, if the project is small enough, the architecture. I've certainly enjoyed using them a lot over the last year and a half, but I've come to really miss fully wrapping my head around a problem, having intimate knowledge of the details of the system, and taking pride in every little detail.
Me too, and I'm glad to see that this point keeps being brought up. I noticed that what shapes my satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) about working with AI depends on whether have understanding of what's being built or not.
For a prototype, it's pretty amazing to generate a working app with one or two prompts. But when I get serious about it, it becomes such a chore. The little papercuts start adding up, I lose speed as I deal with them, and the inner workings of the app becomes a foreign entity to me.
It's counterintuitive, but what's helping me enjoy coding is actually going slower with AI. I found out that my productivity gains are not on building faster, but learning faster and in a very targeted way.
Look through my comment history at all the posts where I complain the author might have had something interesting to say but it's been erased by the LLM and you can no longer tell what the author cared about because the entire post is a an oversold monotone advertising voice.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots.
What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?
It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself.
This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas.
I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
It's intentionally reckless, not intentionally harmful or intentionally falsifying quotes. I am sure they would have preferred if it hadn't falsified any quotes.
He's on the AI beat, if he is unaware that a chatbot will fabricate quotes and didn't verify them that is a level of reckless incompetence that warrants firing
The state of California can classify some driving under the influence cases as operating with "implied malice". Not sure it would qualify in this scenario, but there is precedent for arguing that reckless incompetence is malicious when it is done without regard for the consequences.
“In any statutory definition of a crime ‘malice’ must be taken not in the old vague sense of ‘wickedness’ in general, but as requiring either (i) an actual intention to do the particular kind of harm that was in fact done, or (ii) recklessness as to whether such harm should occur or not (ie the accused has foreseen that the particular kind of harm might be done, and yet has gone on to take the risk of it).” R v Cunningham
I do still find some things useful about my nanoclaw setup - convenience and easy scheduling of LLM related tasks. Well, promising actually, not useful yet. But autonomy is not one of those things.
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