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

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#111

Post by AnotherGoodName » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

0x696C6961 wrote: post #50

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 find that the code quality LLMs output is pretty bad. I end up going through so many iterations that it ends up being faster to do it myself. What I find agents actually useful for is doing large scale mechanical refractors. Instead of trying to figure out the perfect vim macro or AST rewrite script, I'll throw an agent at it.

I disagree strongly at this point. The code is generally good if the prompt was reasonable at this point but also every test possible is now being written, every ui element has the all required traits, every function has the correct documentation attached, the million little refactors to improve the codebase are being done, etc.

Someone told me ‘ai makes all the little things trivial to do’ and i agree strongly with that. Those many little things are things that together make a strong statement about quality. Our codebase has gone up in quality significantly with ai whereas we’d let the little things slide due to understaffing before.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#112

Post by CharlesW » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

ibaikov wrote: post #79

Crypto and NFT situation happened because of our society, media and vc/startup landscape who hype things up a lot for their own reasons. We treat massive technologies as new brands of bottled water. Or, actually, as a new hype toy as fidget spinners or pop it toys. This tech is massively more complex and you have to invest time to learn about its abilities, limitations and potential developments. Almost nobody actual…

It makes no sense to compare the current AI hype to the tulip mania of crypto/NFTs. A much better parallel is to cloud computing hype in 2009.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#113

Post by CharlesW » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

AlienRobot wrote: post #69

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

"AI" and "AGI" are very different things.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#114

Post by deadbabe » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:45 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…

Wait till they hear about the productivity gains from using vim/neovim.

Your developers still push a mouse around to get work done? Fire them.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#115

Post by gjm11 » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

careful_ai wrote: post #63

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

[dead]

For what it's worth, I had a similar "that looks like AI writing" response, and it wasn't because it was "too polished". And having looked at the rest of your comment history, the only reason why I'm only at 90% confidence it's all AI-generated rather than 100% is your explicit claims to the contrary. Today's LLMs have a definite style that is, sorry, not the same thing as being "polished", and if your comments have "zero automation involved" then it's quite the extraordinary coincidence how much more like an AI you sound than any other human writer I have ever encountered. And a further coincidence that this very AI-sounding human just happens to be selling services to "unlock Meaningful Business Outcomes With AI".

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#116

Post by estomagordo » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

smcleod wrote: post #86

jppope wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's about right for copilots. It's much higher for agentic coding.

[citation needed]

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#117

Post by ghuntley » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:48 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…

Canva has seen a 30% productivity uplift - https://fortune.com/2025/06/25/canva-cto-encourages-all-5000...

AI is the new uplift. Embrace and adapt, as a rift is forming (see my talk at https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/), in what employers seek in terms of skills from employees.

I'm happy to answer any questions folks may have. Currently AFK [2] vibecoding a brand new programming language [1].

[1] https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1940964118565212606 [2] https://youtu.be/e7i4JEi_8sk?t=29722

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#118

Post by the__alchemist » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

0x696C6961 wrote: post #50

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 find that the code quality LLMs output is pretty bad. I end up going through so many iterations that it ends up being faster to do it myself. What I find agents actually useful for is doing large scale mechanical refractors. Instead of trying to figure out the perfect vim macro or AST rewrite script, I'll throw an agent at it.

What sort of mechanical refactors?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#119

Post by ssk42 » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #110

mlinsey wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

What exactly are you basing any of your assertions off of?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#120

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 10:53 PM UTC

jules-jules wrote: post #89

careful_ai wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

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.

Generated comments of any kind are already banned according to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628) even though it hasn't been added to the HN guidelines page. So you could legitimately contact the moderators to ask them to investigate.