This tracks for other areas of AI I am more familiar with. Below average people can use AI to get average results.
This is in line with another quip about AI: You need to know more than the LLM in order to gain any benefit from it.
AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
41–50 of 218 posts
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#42Since agents are good only at greenfield projects, the logical conclusion is that existing codebases have to be prepared such that new features are (opinionated) greenfield projects - let all the wiring dangle out of the wall so the intern just has to plug in the appliance. All the rest has to be done by humans, or the intern will rip open the wall to hang a picture.
Hogwash. If you can't figure out how to do something with project Y from npm try checking it out from Github with WebStorm and asking Junie how to do it -- often you get a good answer right away. If not you can ask questions that can help you understand the code base. Don't understand some data structure which is a maze of Map (s) it will scan how it is used and give you draft documentation. Sure you can't point it t…
> Sure you can't point it to a Jira ticket and get a PR
You absolutely can. This is exactly what SWE-Bench[0] measures, and I've been amazed at how quickly AIs have been climbing those ladders. I personally have been using Warp [1] a lot recently and in quite a lot of low-medium difficulty cases it can one-shot a decent PR. For most of my work I still find that I need to pair with it to get sufficiently good results (and that's why I still prefer it to something cloud-based like Codex [2], but otherwise it's quite good too), and I expect the situation to flip over the coming couple of years.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#43There are some things that you still can't do with LLMs. For example, if you tried to learn chess by having the LLM play against you, you'd quickly find that it isn't able to track a series of moves for very long (usually 5-10 turns; the longest I've seen it last was 18) before it starts making illegal choices. It also generally accepts invalid moves from your side, so you'll never be corrected if you're wrong about…
It's super obvious even if you try and use something like agent mode for coding, it starts off well but drifts off more and more. I've even had it try and do totally irrelevant things like indent some code using various Claude models.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#44The greatest use of LLMs is the ability to get accurate answers to queries in a normalized format without having to wade through UI distraction like ads and social media. It's the opposite of finding an answer on reddit, insta, tvtropes. I can't wait for the first distraction free OS that is a thinking and imagination helper and not a consumption device where I have to block urls on my router so my kids don't get suc…
I don't find the "AI" answers all that accurate, and in some cases they are bordering on a liability even if way down below all the "AI" slop it says "AI responses may include mistakes".
>It's the opposite of finding an answer on reddit, insta, tvtropes.
Yeah it really is because I can tell when someone doesn't know the topic well on reddit, or other forums, but usually someone does and the answer is there. Unfortunately the "AI" was trained on all of this, and the "AI" is just as likely to spit out the wrong answer as the correct one. That is not an improvement on anything.
> wade through UI distraction like ads and social media
Oh, so you think "AI" is going to be free and clear forever? Enjoy it while it lasts, because these "AI" companies are in way over their heads, they are bleeding money like their aorta is a fire hose, and there will be plenty of ads and social whatever coming to brighten your day soon enough. The free ride won't go on forever - think of it as a "loss leader" to get you hooked.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#45Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine how useful it would be we could just add a button show our approval or disapproval of a piece of content without having to type true or false in the comment section. Let’s call it upvote or downvote button. /s
I agree it wasn't a helpful comment. On the other hand, I don't know what this mythical downvote button for stories is you describe. I've certainly never seen it. Would be nice if HN actually had that.
It's what "flag" is for:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#47This mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1]. I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article. He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he sugge…
Great point, but just mentioning (nitpicking?) that I never heard about machines/containers referred to as "livestock", but rather in my milieu it's always "pets" vs "cattle". I now wonder if it's a geographical thing.
Yeah, the CERN talk* [0] coined the term Pets vs. Cattle analogy, and it was way before VMs were cheap on bare metal. I think the word just evolved as the idea got rooted in the community.
We use the same analogy for the last 20 years or so. Provisioning 150 cattle servers take 15 minutes or so, and we can provision a pet in a couple of hours, at most.
[0]: https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle/
*: Engine Yard post notes that Microsoft's Bill Baker used the term earlier, though CERN's date (2012) checks out with our effort timeline and how we got started.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point, but just mentioning (nitpicking?) that I never heard about machines/containers referred to as "livestock", but rather in my milieu it's always "pets" vs "cattle". I now wonder if it's a geographical thing.
Boxen? (Oxen)
AFAIK, Boxen is a permutation of Boxes, not Oxen.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#49AI is an interpolator, not an extrapolator.
Very concise, thank you for sharing this insight.
Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
#50The blog post has a bunch of charts, which gives it a veneer of objectivity and rigor, but in reality it's just all vibes and conjecture. Meanwhile recent empirical studies actually point in the opposite direction, showing that AI use increases inequality, not decrease it.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250215_FNC...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/13/h...