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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
21–30 of 377 posts
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#22The thing is, the questions such as “are they an expert in the domain” … “are they good at coding to being with” … and so on only really apply to the folks claiming positive results from LLMs. On the flip side, someone not getting much value - or dare I say, a skeptic - pushes back because they _can see_ what the LLM gave them is wrong. I’m not providing any revelatory comment here, but the simple truth is: people who are shit to begin with think this is all amazing/magic/the future.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#23[deleted]
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#24The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology. Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…
> AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning
Considering LLMs have 0 level of reasoning, I can't decide if it's a bad take, or a stab at the average human's level of reasoning.
In all seriousness, the actual numbers vary from 13% to 26%: https://fortune.com/2025/02/12/openai-deepresearch-humanity-...
My take is that there are fundamental limitations to try to pigeon-hole reasoning to LLMs, which are essentially a very very advanced autocomplete, and that's why those % won't jump too much too soon.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#25https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws includes the 3rd law, which reads, and seems on topic, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
And of course it says first law that applies here.
The people I have talked to at length about using AI tools claim that it has been a boon for productivity: a nurse, a doctor, three (old) software developers, a product manager, and a graduate student in Control Systems.
It is entirely believable that it may not, on average, help the average developer.
I'm reminded of the old joke that ends with "who are you going to believe, me or you're lying eyes?"
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#26One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…
> overall my productivity is 10-15% better. That is nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't 10x.
It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. The total cost of production should always be considered, not just throughput.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#27[flagged]
- superficial emotion
- cliché phrasing
- em dashes
- abundant alliteration
- all comments suspiciously similar in length
- all posts pointing to the same website
Does HN not have a policy against vapid AI comment spam? If not, it needs one.
edit: It does:
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#28[flagged]
Amen. At my job right now there is an imminent threat from a team empowered to say "what if we asked an AI to just build X instead of having a team build and maintain it?" X is something where it's straightforward when N is below 50 but deeply complex when N is in the thousands, which for our team it is, and there is a huge risk that this team will get a demo with N=15 that attracts leadership attention and trying to…
FWIW the comment you are responding to was authored by AI.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#29The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology. Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…
I've always looked at it as we're not making software that can think, we're (quite literally) demonstrating that vast categories of things don't need thought (for some quality level). The problem is, it's clearly not 100%, maybe it's 90-some percent, but it doesn't matter, we're only outsourcing the unimportant things that aren't definitional for a task.
This is very typical of naive automation, people assume that most of the work is X and by automating that we replace people, but the thing that's automated is almost never the real bottleneck. Pretty sure I saw an article here yesterday about how writing code is not the bottleneck in software development, and it holds everywhere.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#30I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better and claude 4 is out, I barely ever write code, and I don’t mind. I’ve leaned into the Architect/Manager role and direct the agent with my specialized knowledge if I need to.
I started a job at a demanding startup and it’s been several months and I have still not written a single line of code by hand. I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously, but Cursor + Sonnet is just insane with their codebase. I’m convinced I’m their most productive employee and that’s not by measuring lines of code, which don’t matter; people who are experts in the codebase ask me for help with niche bugs I can narrow in on in 5-30 minutes as someone whose fresh to their domain. I had to lay off taking work away from the front end dev (which I’ve avoided my whole career) because I was stepping on his toes, fixing little problems as I saw them thanks to Claude. It’s not vibe coding - there’s a process of research and planning and perusing in careful steps, and I set the agent up for success. Domain knowledge is necessary. But I’m just so floored how anyone could not be extracting the same utility from it. It feels like there’s two articles like this every week now.