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AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

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Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#111

Post by PaulHoule »

manmal wrote: post #86
PaulHoule wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you describe is not using agents at all, which my comment was aimed at if you read the first sentence again.

Julie is marketed as an “agent” and it definitely works harder than the Jetbrains AI assistant.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#113

Post by resters »

AI is going to cause a regression to the most anodyne output across many industries. As humans who had to develop analytical skills, writing skills, etc., we struggle to imagine the undeveloped brains of those who come of age in the zero-intellectual-gravity world of AI. OpenAI's study mode is at best a fig leaf.

edit: this comment was posted tongue-in-cheek after my comment reflecting my actual opinion was downvoted with no rebuttals:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44749957

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#114

Post by skhameneh »

devonbleak wrote: post #100
gruez wrote: post #50

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...

Yeah, the graphs make some really big assumptions that don't seem to be backed up anywhere except AI maximalist head canon. 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.

The later remarks are very strong assumptions underestimating the power AI tools offer.

AI tools are great at unblocking and helping their users explore beyond their own understanding. The tokens in are limited to the users' comprehension, but the tokens out are generated from a vast collection of greater comprehension.

For the novice, it's great at unblocking and expanding capabilities. "Good enough" results from novices are tangible. There is no doubt the volume of "good enough" is perceived as very low by many.

For large and complex codebases, unfortunately the effects of tech debt (read: objectively subpar practices) translate into context rot at development time. A properly architected and documented codebase that adheres to common well structured patterns can easily be broken down into small easily digestible contexts. i.e. a fragmented codebase does not scale well with LLMs, because the fragmentation is seeding the context for the model. The model reflects and acts as an amplifier to what it's fed.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#115

Post by elcritch »

resters wrote: post #113

AI is going to cause a regression to the most anodyne output across many industries. As humans who had to develop analytical skills, writing skills, etc., we struggle to imagine the undeveloped brains of those who come of age in the zero-intellectual-gravity world of AI. OpenAI's study mode is at best a fig leaf. edit: this comment was posted tongue-in-cheek after my comment reflecting my actual opinion was downvoted…

I would say the modern digital world itself has already had the bigger impact on human thinking, at least at work.

It seems with computers we often think and reason far less than without. Everything required thought previously, now we can just copy and paste out word docs for everything. PowerPoints are how key decisions are communicated in most professional settings.

Before modern computers and especially the internet we also had more time for deep thinking and reasoning. The sublimity of deep thought in older books amazes me and it feels like modern authors are just slightly less deep on average.

So then LLMs are in my view an incremental change rather than a stepwise change with respect to its effects on human cognitive.

In some ways LLMs allow us to return a bit to more humanistic deep thinking. Instead of spending hours looking up minutia on Google, StackOverflow, etc now we can ask our favorite LLM instead. It gives us responses with far less noise.

Unlike with textbooks we can have dialogues and have it take different perspectives. Whereas textbooks only gave you that authors perspective.

Of course, it’s up to individuals to use it well and as a tool to sharpen thinking rather than replace it.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#116

Post by pharrington »

DougBTX wrote: post #98
LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

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…

Yeah, the chess example is interesting. The best specialised AIs for chess are all clearly better than humans, but our best general AIs are barely able to play legal moves. The ceiling for AI is clearly much higher than current LLMs.

Large Language Models aren't general AIs. Its in the name.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#117

Post by leptons »

margalabargala wrote: post #69
leptons wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Unfortuna…

I agree with the whole first half, but I disagree that LLM usage is doomed to ad-filled shittyness. AI companies may be hemmoraging money, but that's because their product costs so much to run; it's not like they don't have revenue. The thing that will bring profitability isn't ads, it will be innovations that let current-gen-quality LLMs run at a fraction of the electricity and power cost. Will some LLMs have ads? S…

Silicon will improve, but not fast enough to calm investors. And better silicon won't change the fact that the current zeitgeist is basically a word guessing game.

$20 month won't get you much, if you're paying above what it costs to run the "AI", and for what? Answers that are in the ballpark of suspicious and untrustworthy?

Maybe they just need to keep spending until all the people who can tell slop from actual knowledge are all dead and gone.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#118

Post by LeftHandPath »

famouswaffles wrote: post #110
LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

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…

LLMs playing chess isn't a big deal. You can train a model on chess games and it will play at a decent ELO and very rarely make illegal moves(i.e 99.8% legal move rate). There are a few such models around. I think post training messes with chess ability and Open ai et al just don't really care about that. But LLMs can play chess just fine. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.15498v2 [1] https://github.com/adamkarvonen/che…

Jeez, that arxiv paper invalidates my assumption that it can't model the game. Great read. Thank you for sharing.

Insane that the model actually does seem to internalize a representation of the state of the board -- rather than just hitting training data with similar move sequences.

...Makes me wish I could get back into a research lab. Been a while since I've stuck to reading a whole paper out of legitimate interest.

(Edit) At the same time, it's still worth noting the accuracy errors and the potential for illegal moves. That's still enough to prevent LLMs from being applied to problem domains with severe consequences, like banking, security, medicine, law, etc.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#119

Post by recursive »

stillpointlab wrote: post #92
recursive wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to slip too far into analogy, but that argument feels a bit like a horse-drawn carriage operator saying he can't wait to pick up all of the stranded car operators when their mechanical contraptions break down on the side of the road. But what happened instead was the creation of a brand new job: the mechanic. I don't have a crystal ball and I can't predict the actual future. But I can see the list of potential fu…

Both can be true. There were probably a significant number of stranded motorists that were rescued by horse-powered conveyance. And eventually cars got more convenient and reliable.

I just wouldn't want to be responsible for servicing a guarantee about the reliability of early cars.

And I'll feel no sense of vindication if I do get that support case. I will probably just sigh and feel a little more tired.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#120

Post by pdntspa »

LtWorf wrote: post #108
pdntspa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to sign up for an API account and pay per-call, or even nothing. Free offerings out there are great (Gemini, OpenRouter...) and a few are even suitable for agentic development.

And how long until they raise the prices?

API prices have moving in a downward direction, not upward.
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