91–100 of 218 posts
I agree with most of TFA but not this: > This means cheaters will plateau at whatever level the AI can provide From my experience, the skill of using AI effectively is of treating the AI with a "growth mindset" rather than a "fixed" one. What I do is that I roleplay as the AI's manager, giving it a task, and as long as I know enough to tell whether its output is "good enough", I can lend it some of my metagcognition…
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Oo, the "pets vs. livestock" analogy really works better than the "craftsmen vs. slop-slinger" arguments. Because using an LLM doesn't mean you devalue well-crafted or understandable results. But it does indicate a significant shift in how you view the code itself. It is more about the emotional attachment to code vs. code as a means to an end.
I don't think it's exactly emotional attachment. It's the likelihood that I'm going to get an escalated support ticket caused by this particular piece of slop/artisanally-crafted functionality.
I don't have a crystal ball and I can't predict the actual future. But I can see the list of potential futures and I can assign likelihoods to them. And among the potential futures is one where the need for humans to fix the problems created by poor AI coding agents dwindles as the industry completely reshapes itself.
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The graphic has four studies that show increased inequality and six that show reduced inequality.
Read my comment again. keyword here is "recent". The second link also expands on why it's relevant. It's best to read the whole article, but here's a paragraph that captures the argument: >The shift in recent economic research supports his observation. Although early studies suggested that lower performers could benefit simply by copying AI outputs, newer studies look at more complex tasks, such as scientific researc…
AI is chairs.
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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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article is neither spam nor off topic.
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Read my comment again. keyword here is "recent". The second link also expands on why it's relevant. It's best to read the whole article, but here's a paragraph that captures the argument: >The shift in recent economic research supports his observation. Although early studies suggested that lower performers could benefit simply by copying AI outputs, newer studies look at more complex tasks, such as scientific researc…
All of the studies were done 2023-2024 and are not listed in order that they were conducted. The studies showing reduced equality all apply to uncommon tasks like material discovery and debate points, whereas the ones showing increased equality are broader and more commonly applicable, like writing, customer interaction, and coding.
There 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…
> people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice. I have friends who are highly educated professionals (PhDs, MDs) who just assume that AI\LLMs make no mistakes. They were shocked that it's possible for hallucinations to occur. I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise?
There 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…
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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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are a lot of stories that aren't worthy of flagging, but they're just low-quality.
And I've seen people abuse flagging because they treat it like downvoting. Flagging removes a story from the front page entirely, whereas ideally downvoting would simply deprioritize it, i.e. a bunch of downvotes would move it from #5 rank to #60 or something, not get rid of it entirely.
I've definitely had to e-mail the mods a number of times to restore a flagged story that was entirely appropriate, but which a few users simply didn't like. It would be much better to have a downvote button, and reserve flagging for actual spam and inappropriate content.
The 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...
There's also a gap in addressing vibe coded "side projects" that get deployed online as a business. Is the code base super large and complex? No. Is AI capable of taking input from a novice and making something "good enough" in this space? Also no.