741–750 of 1001 posts
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> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test. Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.
If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.
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> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. I have solved more problems with tools like sed and awk, you know, actual tools, more than I’ve entered tokens into an LLM. Nobody seemed to give a fuck as long as the problem was solved. This it getting out of hand.
Just because you can solve problems with one class of tools doesn’t mean another class is pointless. A whole new class of problems just became solvable.
This is almost by definition not really true. LLMs spit out whatever they were trained on, mashed up. The solutions they have access to are exactly the ones that already exist, and for the most part those solutions will have existed in droves to have any semblance of utility to the LLM.
If you're referring to "mass code output" as "a new class of problem", we've had code generators of differing input complexity for a very long time; it's hardly new.
So what do you really mean when you say that a new class of problems became solvable?
I've also heard complaints about the mandatory use of the tools in the office and the pageantry involved.
I've seen people in love with garbage they produced with AI.
I'm annoyed by the way they are being pushed in my face but hate is really too strong. I've tried using them and gotten total garbage. I think that's because my prompting sucks because I know people that love the tools and have shared great output from them. Those people are a minority in my opinion.
Trying to over simplify the experiences of humanity is a fool's game.
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>a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset. The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease . The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more a…
This sounds a lot like the Marxist concept of alienation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen…
As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…
I sure hope so. But until the hallucination problem is solved, there's still going to be a lot of toxic waste generated. We have got to get AI systems which know when they don't know something and don't try to fake it.
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Outside of tech, I think the opinion is generally negative. AI has lost a lot the narrative due to things like energy prices and layoffs.
ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?
Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite: 1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs. 2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs. 3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever U…
As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen…
As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight…
This is the ultimate hypester’s motte to retreat to whenever the bailey of claimed utility of a technology falls. It’a trivially true of literally any technology, but also completely meaningless on its own.
> Engineers don't try because they think they can't. This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to. There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excite…
the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to…
I've tried implementing features with Claude Code Max and if I had let that go on for a week instead of just a couple of days I would've lost a week's worth of work (it was pretty immediately obvious that it was too slow at doing pretty much everything, and even the slightest interaction with the LLM caused very long round-trips that would add additional time, over and over and over again). It's possible people simply don't do the kind of things I do. On the extreme end of that, had I spent my days making CRUD apps I probably would've thought it was magic and a "game changer"... But I don't.
I actually don't have a problem believing that there are people who basically only need to write 25% of their code now; if all you're doing for work is gluing together libraries and writing boilerplate then of course an LLM is going to help with that, you're probably the 1000th person that day to ask for the same thing.
The one part I would say LLMs seem to help me with is medium-depth questions about DirectX12. Not really how to use it, but parts of the API itself. MSDN is good for learning about it, but I would concede that LLMs have been useful for just getting more composite knowledge of DX12.
P.S.:
I have found that very short completions, 1-3 lines, is a lot more productive for me personally than any kind of "generate this feature", or even function-sized generation. The reason is likely that LLMs just suck at the things I do, but they can figure out that a pattern exists in the pretty immediate context and just spit out that pattern with some context clues nearby. That remains my best experience with any and all LLM-assisted coding. I don't use it often because we don't allow LLMs for work, but I have a keybind for querying for a completion when I do side projects.