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

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#181

Post by ibaikov » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #175

ibaikov wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does. Startups, VCs and media still provoke hype trains. People cherry pick and extrapolate everything in AI as well.

Except the benefits of LLM adoption can be measured empirically, with your own eyes. And don't require network effects to fully realise benefits, unlike cryptocurrency and NFTs. Ignoring the hype and doing your own thing with it is a good choice.

I agree to some level, but crypto and NFTs also have value without network effects present.

You could even argue that without network effects AI is also very limited: way less users -> way worse models. It took OpenAI to commit capital first to pull this off.

The point is I think comparing these areas (and other tech) is still interesting and worthy.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#182

Post by airstrike » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

jorl17 wrote: post #160

timr wrote: post #110

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. 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).…

12 months ago, if I fed a list of ~800 poems with about ~250k tokens to an LLM and asked it to summarize this huge collection, they would be completely blind to some poems and were prone to hallucinating not simply verses but full-blown poems. I was testing this with every available model out there that could accept 250k tokens. It just wouldn't work. I also experimented with a subset that was at around ~100k tokens…

Your comment warrants a longer, more insightful reply than I can provide, but I still feel compelled to say that I get the same feeling from o3. Colder, somewhat robotic and unhelpful. It's like the extreme opposite of 4o, and I like neither.

My weapon of choice these days is Claude 4 Opus but it's slow, expensive and still not massively better than good old 3.5 Sonnet

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#183

Post by swader999 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #52

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 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.

It lies with such enthusiasm though.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#184

Post by geuis » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #146

> Like most skeptics and critics, I use these tools daily. And 50% of the time they work 50% of the time. I use LLMs nearly every day for my job as of about a year ago and they solve my issues about 90% of the time. I have a very hard time deciphering if these types of complaints about AI/LLMs should be taken seriously, or written off as irrational use patterns by some users. For example, I have never fed an LLM a co…

Hmm. Ok so you're basically quoting the line from The Weatherman "60% of the time, it works all of the time."

I also use gpt and Claude daily via cursor.

Gpt o3 is kinda good for general knowledge searches. Claude falls down all the time, but I've noticed that while it's spending tokens to jerk itself off, quite often it happens on the actual issue going on with out recognizing it.

Models are dumb and more idiot than idiot savant, but sometimes they hit on relevant items. As long as you personally have an idea of what you need to happen and treat LLMs like rat terriers in a farm field, you can utilize them properly

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#185

Post by an0malous » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:30 AM UTC

richardw wrote: post #158

leptons wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is no better than the comment in the article that the author is calling out. "90%" also seems a bit suspect.

I just went through the last 10 chat titles and all of them were spot on for me. Maybe the person you’re responding to has a different experience than you do and calling their perspective “suspect” is somewhat uncharitable. (There are times I do other kinds of work and it fails terribly. My main point stands.)

Can you share the questions you asked?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#186

Post by thunky » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:37 AM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #168

thunky wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. That may also be in part because llms are not as big of an accelerant for junior devs as they are for seniors (juniors don't know what is good and bad as well). So if you give 1 senior dev a souped up llm workflow I wouldn't be too surprised if they are as productive as 10 pre-llm juniors. Maybe even more, because a ba…

The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Precision machining is going through an absolute nightmare where the journeymen or master machinists are aging out of the work force. These were people who originally learned on manual machines, and upgraded to CNC over the years. The pipeline collapsed about 1997. Now there are no apprentice machinists to replace the skills of the retiring workforce. This wi…

> The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though.

Totally agree.

However, I think this pipeline has been taking a hit for a while already because juniors as a whole have been devaluing themselves: if we expect them to leave after one year, what's the point of hiring and training them? Only helping their next employer at that point.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#187

Post by nasduia » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:40 AM UTC

abletonlive wrote: post #125

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…

I’m a tech lead and I have maybe 5X output now compared to everybody else under me. Quantified by scoring tickets at a team level. I also have more responsibilities outside of IC work compared to the people under me. At this point I’m asking my manager to fire people that still think llms are just toys because I’m tired of working with people with this poor mindset. A pragmatic engineer continually reevaluates what t…

A new copypasta is born.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#188

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:44 AM UTC

labrador wrote: post #109

98eb1d0ff7fb96 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there are a lot of projects and problem domains that don't even demand that much or have any real consequences for failure. I look at all the self-service stuff my employer has for HR, benefits, policy compliance, it's all half-broken, nobody ever seems to get held to fixing anything, and the only answers are "try it again later."

Professional programmers built this stuff too, or maybe it was vibe-coded but since it's been like that for years I think probably not.

But we don't know where on the spectrum of "people might die" to "try again later" most of these programmers who claim great productivity gains from LLMs lie. Maybe it is making them 10x faster at churning out shit, who knows? They might not even realise it themselves.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#189

Post by bwfan123 » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

geetee wrote: post #180

I'm working with product managers that are almost certainly using LLMs to generate product requirement docs, complete with code samples, data type definitions, and diagrams. Everything looks good to the untrained eye, but it's complete and utter bullshit. LLM abuse is going to be the end of so many tech companies.

> Everything looks good to the untrained eye

thats the trick with bullshit in general.

> LLM abuse is going to be the end of so many tech companies

and is also going to provide a lot of opportunities for experienced engineers to cleanup the mess.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#190

Post by DebtDeflation » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC

kgeist wrote: post #153

DebtDeflation wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the LLM overhype is starting to die down........to make way for the AI Agent hype which is on trajectory to be 1000X worse. People are writing articles and making videos about how AI Agents will replace SaaS. What?

The OP compares the current LLM hype to crypto, but I think it's more fair to compare it to the dotcom bubble. When a new, interesting technology appears, there's always a lot of hype around it - I think it's natural. People are still figuring out what works and what doesn't. Naturally, some overoptimistic people overhype it. The dotcom bubble burst; nonetheless, the internet is now an integral part of our lives. Des…

Oh 100% the comparison to dotcom is better than crypto. Despite the hype, AI and dotcom both were useful, crypto was always a grift.