alt Hacker NewsI can't find a very good comment from HN from a few months ago with this churn of AI posts, but the idea was quite right: there were tinkerers, who loved a problem solving process, and entrepreneurs, who don't care about the problem itself and beauty of a neat solution, but only the end products to sell.
Entrepreneurs currently are in heaven, and tinkerers are in hell.
Replies
sampullman • today at 12:50 PM
I'm not so sure, I love tinkering but mostly see the code as a means to an end.
AI lets me flesh out both hardware and software side projects quickly that I never had time for. Most of them are experiments that won't be shared.
It's nice to have Codex/Claude whip up an SPI DMA driver while I'm doing something more fun, for example.
The bias in this comparison is insane. “Tinkerer” is a pejorative, normally used to downplay one’s (own) ability or impact. It’s often used to mean “unserious” or “amateur”.
The same comparison could be said the other way around: there are entrepreneurs, who care deeply about the product, inside and out; and scammers, who don’t care about the problem itself or the beauty of a a neat solution, but only the sales of the end product.
Entrepreneurs currently are in hell, and a scammers are in heaven.
I don’t think either is more apt or more offensive, they just appeal to whichever side of the fence your on.