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I don't care how well your "AI" works

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Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#391

Post by grayhatter »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #221
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of chan…

> It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

I've lost your fight, but won mine before, you can sell this as risk reduction to your boss. I've never seen eng win this argument on quality grounds. Quality is rarely something that can be understood by company leadership. But having a risk reduction team that moves a bit slower and protects the company from extreme exposures like this, is much harder to cut from the process. "Imagine the law suits missing something like this would cause." and "we don't move slower, we do more than the other teams, the code is more visible, but the elimination of mistakes that will be very expensive legally and reputationally is what we're the best at"

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#392

Post by spot5010 »

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment."

Any software engineer who shares this sentiment is doing their career a disservice. LLMs have their pitfalls, and I have been skeptical of their capabilities, but nevertheless I have tried them out earnestly. The progress of AI coding assistants over the past year has been remarkable, and now they are a routine part of my workflow. It does take some getting used to, and effectively using an AI coding assistant is a skill in and of itself that is worth mastering.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#393

Post by fancyfredbot »

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes.

If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#394

Post by AlexandrB »

0xFEE1DEAD wrote: post #155

I honestly don't get vibe coding. I've tried it multiple times, but even after spending 4 hours on a fresh project I don't feel like I know what the hell is going on anymore. At that point I'm just guessing what the next prompt is to make it work. I have no critical knowledge about the codebase that makes me feel like I could fix an edge case without reading the source code line by line (which at that point would pro…

It's interesting that this is a similar criticism to what was levelled at Ruby on Rails back in the day. I think generating a bunch of code - whether through AI or a "framework" - always has the effect of obscuring the mental model of what's going on. Though at least with Rails there's a consistent output for a given input that can eventually be grokked.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#395

Post by ronsor »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

The only thing more insufferable than the "AI do everything and replace everyone" crowd is the "AI is completely useless" crowd. It's useful for some things and useless for others, just like any other tool you'll encounter.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#396

Post by bluefirebrand »

hamdingers wrote: post #374
ceejayoz wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different? Who says we haven't tried it out ?

> I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment. FTA. I know tons of people where "tried it out" means they've seen Google's abysmal search summary feature, or merely seen the memes and read news articles about how it's wrong sometimes, and haven't explored any further.

Personally I'm watching people I used to respect start to rely on AI more and more and their skills and knowledge are declining rapidly while their reliance is growing, so I'm really not interested in following that path

They seem just as enthusiastic as many of the pro AI voices here on HN, while the quality of their work declines. It makes me extremely skeptical of anyone who is enthusiastic about AI. It seems to me like it's a delusion machine

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#397

Post by ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 »

easterncalculus wrote: post #244

> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…

I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way.

I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#398

Post by AlexandrB »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #292

HN loves this "le old school" coder "fighting the good fight" speak but it seems sillier and sillier the better and better LLM's get. Maybe in the GPT 4 era this made sense but Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are substantively different, and anyone who can extrapolate a few years out sees the writing on the wall. A year ago, no reasonable person would use AI for anything but small-scoped autocomplete. Now it can author entire…

Where are these LLM-authored projects though? I was expecting to see a fresh flood of cheap shovelware in the App Store after LLMs appeared.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#399

Post by IshKebab »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #393

I feel like in a sci-fi world with robots, teleportation and holodecks these people would decide to stay at home and hand wash the dishes. If an amazing world changing technology like LLMs shows up on your doorstep and your response is to ignore it and write blog posts about how you don't care about it then you aren't curious and you aren't really a hacker.

I don't touch dishwashers with a stick. No matter how well they work. I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the dishwasher brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive cleaning circles.

Edit: Ha I see you edited "empty the dishwasher" to "hand wash the dishes". My thoughts exactly.

There's no hope for these people.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#400

Post by intended »

Aurornis wrote: post #255
TrackerFF wrote: post #188

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small…

> Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here. I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM writ…

I didnt read the parent comment as celebrating this state. More like they were decrying it, and the blindness of people who just run on metrics.
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