Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#61

Post by troupo » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I 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 an…

Please re-read the article. Especially the first list of things we don't know about you, your projects etc.

Your specific experience cannot be generalized. And speaking as the author, and who is (as written in the article) literally using these tools everyday.

> 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.

This is where we learn that you haven't actually read the article. Because it is very clearly stating, with links, that I am extracting value from these tools.

And the article is also very clearly not about extracting or not extracting value.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#62

Post by hotpotat » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

gyomu wrote: post #45

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I 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 an…

> I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products Links please

I’d like to, but purposefully am using a throwaway account. It’s an iOS app rated 4.5 stars on the app store and has a nice community. Mild userbase, in the hundreds.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#63

Post by careful_ai » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

Jordan-117 wrote: post #27

careful_ai wrote: post #5

[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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#64

Post by alganet » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

LLM tech probably will find some legitimate use, but by then, everything will be filled with people misusing it.

Millions of beginner developers running with scissors in their hands, millions of investment in the garbage.

I don't think this can be reversed anymore, companies are all-in and pot commited.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#65

Post by ethan_smith » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

jm20 wrote: post #9

The 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…

These percentage estimates of AI's proximity to "human reasoning" are misleading abstractions that mask fundamental qualitative differences in how LLMs and humans process information.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#66

Post by careful_ai » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #44

Jordan-117 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714

This one is funny though. I'd bet on Bing CoPilot, which now always agrees with "AI" concerns because MSFT has probably realized that no one wants "AI" and takes a more cautious approach.

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#67

Post by larve » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

gyomu wrote: post #45

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I 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 an…

> I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products Links please

Here's maybe the most impressive thing I've vibecoded, where I wanted to track a file write/read race condition in a vscode extension: https://github.com/go-go-golems/go-go-labs/tree/main/cmd/exp...

This is _far_ from web crud.

Otherwise, 99% of my code these days is LLM generated, there's a fair amount of visible commits from my opensource on my profile https://github.com/wesen .

A lot of it is more on the system side of things, although there are a fair amount of one-off webapps, now that I can do frontends that don't suck.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#68

Post by mccoyb » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I 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 an…

Same experience here, probably in a slightly different way of work (PhD student). Was extremely skeptical of LLMs, Claude Code has completely transformed the way I work.

It doesn't take away the requirements of _curation_ - that remains firmly in my camp (partially what a PhD is supposed to teach you! to be precise and reflective about why you are doing X, what do you hope to show with Y, etc -- breakdown every single step, explain those steps to someone else -- this is a tremendous soft skill, and it's even more important now because these agents do not have persistent world models / immediately forget the goal of a sequence of interactions, even with clever compaction).

If I'm on my game with precise communication, I can use CC to organize computation in a way which has never been possible before.

It's not easier than programming (if you care about quality!), but it is different, and it comes with different idioms.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#69

Post by AlienRobot » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #43

Loosely related, but I find the use of AGI (and sometimes even AI) as terms annoying lately. Especially in scientific papers, where I would imagine everything to be well defined. If at least in how it is used in that paper. So, why can't we just come up with some definition for what AGI is? We could then, say, logically prove that some AI fits that definition. Even if this doesn't seem practically useful, it's theore…

We have a definition.

"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#70

Post by jppope » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One 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…

The reports from analysis of open source projects are that its something in the range of 10%-15% productivity gains... so it sounds like you're spot on