Reflections on AI at the End of 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#111

Post by blibble » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

djdishsv wrote: post #97

cinntaile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but quite a few claims in the article are about AI research. He does not have any qualifications there. If the focus was more on usefulness, that would be a different discussion and then his experience does add weight.

> smart, intelligent person gives opinion > woah buddy this persons opinion isn’t worth anything more than a random homeless person off the street. they’re not an expert in this field Is there a term for this kind of pedantry? Obviously we can put more weight behind the words a person says if they’ve proven themselves trustworthy in prior areas - and we should! We want all people to speak and let the best idea win. I…

> Obviously we can put more weight behind the words a person says if they’ve proven themselves trustworthy in prior areas - and we should!

no, you shouldn't

this is how you end up with crap like vaccine denialism going mainstream

"but he's a doctor!"

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#112

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

20k wrote: post #106

bachmeier wrote: post #99

> Programmers resistance to AI assisted programming has lowered considerably. Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway: now the return on the investment is acceptable for many more folks. I'm not a fan of this phrasing. Use of the terms "resistance" and "skeptics" implies they were wrong. It's important we don't eng…

Its also significantly lowered because management is forcing AI on everyone at gunpoint, and saying that you'll lose your job if you don't love AI That's a very easy way to get everyone to pinky promise that they absolutely love AI to the ends of the earth

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#113

Post by erichocean » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85

progval wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there output is (usually) executable code, and is not committed in a VCS. So the source code is still readable. When people use LLMs to improve their code, they commit their output to Git to be used as source code.

...hmm, at some point we'll need to find a new place to draw the boundaries, won't we? Until ~2022 there was a clear line between human-generated code and computer-generated code. The former was generally optimized for readability and the latter was optimized for speed at all cost. Now we have computer-generated code in the human layer and it's not obvious what it should be optimized for.

> it's not obvious what it should be optimized for

It should be optimized for readability by AI. If a human wants to know what a given bit of code does, they can just ask.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#114

Post by danielbln » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

rckt wrote: post #76

barnabee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even where they are not directly using LLMs to write the most critical or core code, nearly every skeptic I know has started using LLMs at very least to do things like write tests, build tools, write glue code, help to debug or refactor, etc. Your statement suffers not only from also coming only from your brain, with no evidence that you've actually tried to learn to use these tools, but it also goes against the weig…

I just want people making statements like the author to be more specific how exactly the llms are being used. Otherwise they contribute to this belief that llms are a magical tool that can do anything. I am aware of simple routine tasks that LLMs can do. This doesn’t change anything about what I said.

All you had to do is scroll down further and read the next couple of posts where the author is being more specific on how they used LLMs.

I swear, the so called critics need everything spoon fed.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#115

Post by danielbln » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

xiconfjs wrote: post #48

rckt wrote: post #36

> Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway Here we go again. Statements with the single source in the head of the speaker. And it’s also not true. The llms still produce bad/irrelevant code at such rate that you can spend more time prompting than doing things yourself. I’m tired of this overestimation of llms.

My person experience: if I can find a solution on stackoverflow etc. the LLM will produce working and fundamentally correct code. If I can‘t find a already fullfilled solution on these sites, the LLM is hallucinating like crazy (newer existing functions/modules/plugins, protocol features which aren’t specified and even github-repos which never existed). So, as stated my many people online before: for low-hanging frui…

I don't remember the last time Claude Code hallucinated some library, as it will check the packages, verify with the linter, run a test import and so on.

Are you talking about punching something into some LLM web chat that's disconnected from your actual codebase and has tooling like web search disabled? If so, that's not really the state of the art of AI assisted coding, just so you know.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#116

Post by erichocean » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

> 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt.

This one is bizarre, if true (I'm not convinced it is).

The entire purpose of the attention mechanism in the transformer architecture is to build this representation, in many layers (conceptually: in many layers of abstraction).

> 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say.

The only place for this to go is in the model weights. More parameters means "more places to remember things", so clearly that's at least a representation.

Again: who was pushing this belief? Presumably not researchers, these are fundamental properties of the transformer architecture. To the best of my knowledge, they are not disputed.

> I believe [...] it is not impossible they get us to AGI even without fundamentally new paradigms appearing.

Same, at least for the OpenAI AGI definition: "An AI system that is at least as intelligent as a normal human, and is able to do any economically valuable work."

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#117

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

dhpe wrote: post #43

I have programmed 30K+ hours. Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so. The secret sauce is that you'd know exactly what to do without them.

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#118

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

squidbeak wrote: post #109

Fraterkes wrote: post #26

It’s interesting that half the comments here are talking about the extinction line when, now that we’re nearly entering 2026, I feel the 2027 predictions have been shown to be pretty wrong so far.

> I feel the 2027 predictions have been shown to be pretty wrong so far Does your clairvoyance go any further than 2027?

I don't know that it's "clairvoyance". We're two weeks from 2026. We might be able to see somewhat more than we do now if this was going to turn into AGI by 2027.

If you assume that we're only one breakthrough away (or zero breakthroughs - just need to train harder), then the step could happen any time. If we're more than one away, though, then where are they? Are they all going to happen in the next two years?

But everybody's guessing. We don't know right now whether AGI is possible at current hardware levels. If it is N breakthroughs away, we all have our own guesses of approximately what N is.

My guess is that we are more than one breakthrough away. Therefore, one can look at the current state of affairs and say that we are unlikely to get to AGI by 2027.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#119

Post by bilsbie » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

dhpe wrote: post #43

I have programmed 30K+ hours. Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so. The secret sauce is that you'd know exactly what to do without them.

I mean if you leaned heavily on stack overflow before AI then nothing really changes.

It’s basically the same idea but faster.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#120

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #99

> Programmers resistance to AI assisted programming has lowered considerably. Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway: now the return on the investment is acceptable for many more folks. I'm not a fan of this phrasing. Use of the terms "resistance" and "skeptics" implies they were wrong. It's important we don't eng…

> The change occurred because LLMs are useful for programming in 2025

But the skeptics and anti-AI commenters are almost as active as ever, even as we enter 2026.

The debate about the usefulness of LLMs has grown into almost another culture war topic. I still see a constant stream of anti-AI comments on HN and every other social platform from people who believe the tools are useless, the output is always unusable, people who mock any idea that operator skill has an impact on LLM output, or even claims that LLMs are a fad that will go away.

I’m a light LLM user ($20/month plan type of usage) but even when I try to share comments about how I use LLMs or tips I’ve discovered, I get responses full of vitriol and accusations of being a shill.