Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This is so chatGpt it hurts. Can we petition hn to ban ai generated comments? I see more Reddit communities actively putting a ban on ai, hn should follow if it can be done with the available resources.
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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
101–110 of 377 posts
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#102One 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…
It's just another tech hype wave. Reality will be somewhere between total doom and boundless utopia. But probably neither of those. The AI thing kind of reminds me of the big push to outsource software engineers in the early 2000's. There was a ton of hype among executives about it, and it all seemed plausible on paper. But most of those initiatives ended up being huge failures, and nearly all of those jobs came back…
This was what I was saying to a friend the other day. I think anyone vaguely competent that is using LLMs will make the technology look far better than it is.
Management thinks the LLM is doing most of the work. Work is off shored. Oh, the quality sucks when someone without a clue is driving. We need to hire again.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, whic…
Whenever people claim that LLMs are not capable of reasoning, I put them into a category of people who are themselves not capable of reasoning.
Whenever people claim that LLMs are capable of reasoning, I put them into a category of people who are themselves able to reason as much as an LLM.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#104I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…
I tried the "thinking partner" approach for a while and for a moment I thought it worked well, but at some point the cracks started to show and I called the bluff. LLMs are extremely good at creating an illusion that they know things and are capable of reasoning, but they really don't do a good job of cultivating intellectual conversation.
I think it's dangerously easy to get misled when trying to prod LLMs for knowledge, especially if it's a field you're new to. If you were using a regular search engine, you could look at the source website to determine the trustworthiness of its contents, but LLMs don't have that. The output can really be whatever, and I don't agree it's necessarily that easy to catch the mistakes.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#105I 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 use Claude code for hours a day, it’s a liar, trust what it does at your own risk. I personally think you’re sugar coating the experience.
> I use Claude code for hours a day, it’s a liar, trust what it does at your own risk.
The person you're responding to literally said, "I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously".
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#106I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…
I tried the "thinking partner" approach for a while and for a moment I thought it worked well, but at some point the cracks started to show and I called the bluff. LLMs are extremely good at creating an illusion that they know things and are capable of reasoning, but they really don't do a good job of cultivating intellectual conversation. I think it's dangerously easy to get misled when trying to prod LLMs for knowl…
You don't say what LLM you are using. I'm using ChatGPT 4o. I'm getting great results, but I review the output with a skeptical eye similar to how I read Wikipedia articles. Like Wikipedia, GPT 4o is great for surfacing new topics for research and does it quickly, which makes stream of thought easier.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#107One 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…
I don't disagree with your assessment of the world today, but just 12 months ago (before the current crop of base models and coding agents like Claude Code), even that 10X improvement of writing some-of-the-code wouldn't have been true.
It still isn't.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#108Earlier 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
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Reaction to a post at 21:39:36:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468067
Reaction to a different post at 21:40:30:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468069
Fast typist! (Incidentally, both are exactly 59 tokens long)
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…
See, your comment is a good example of what's going wrong. The OP specifically mentioned "mission critical things" - My interpretation of that would be things that are not allowed to break, because otherwise people might die, in the worst case - and you were talking about just SOMETHING that got "done" faster. No mention about anything critical. Of course, I was playing around with claude code, too, and I was fascina…
The mission of a professional programmer is to deliver code that works according to the design specs, handles edge cases, fails gracefully and doesn't contain performance bottlenecks. It could be software for a water plant, or software that incurs charges to accomplish it's task and could bankrupt you if there is a mistake. It doesn't have to be a matter of life or death.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#110One 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…
I don't disagree with your assessment of the world today, but just 12 months ago (before the current crop of base models and coding agents like Claude Code), even that 10X improvement of writing some-of-the-code wouldn't have been true.
> I don't disagree with your assessment of the world today, but just 12 months ago (before the current crop of base models and coding agents like Claude Code), even that 10X improvement of writing some-of-the-code wouldn't have been true.
So? It sounds like you're prodding us to make an extrapolation fallacy (I don't even grant the "10x in 12 months" point, but let's just accept the premise for the sake of argument).
Honestly, 12 months ago the base models weren't substantially worse than they are right now. Some people will argue with me endlessly on this point, and maybe they're a bit better on the margin, but I think it's pretty much true. When I look at the improvements of the last year with a cold, rational eye, they've been in two major areas:
* cost & efficiency
* UI & integration
UI and integration is where most of the rest of the recent improvement has come from, and honestly, this is pretty close to saturation. All of the various AI products already look the same, and I'm certain that they'll continue to converge to a well-accepted local maxima. After that, huge gains in productivity from UX alone will not be possible. This will happen quickly -- probably in the next year or two.
Basically, unless we see a Moore's law of GPUs, I wouldn't bet on indefinite exponential improvement in AI. My bet is that, from here out, this looks like the adoption curve of any prior technology shift (e.g. mainframe -> PC, PC -> laptop, mobile, etc.) where there's a big boom, then a long, slow adoption for the masses.