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

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#121

Post by ookblah » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:48 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…

you just need to hop into any AI reltaed thread (even this one) and it's pretty clear no one is revising anything, skepticism is there lol.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#122

Post by mjr00 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:50 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…

"Skeptics" is also a loaded term; what does it actually mean? I find LLMs incredibly useful for various programming tasks (generating code, searching documentation, and yes with enough setup agents can accomplish some tasks), but I also don't believe they have actual intelligence, nor do I think they will eviscerate programming jobs, the same way that Python and JavaScript didn't eviscerate programming jobs despite lowering the barrier to entry compared to Java or C. Does that make me a skeptic?

It's easy to declare "victory" when you're only talking about the maximalist position on one side ("LLMs are totally useless!") vs the minimalist position on the other side ("LLMs can generate useful code"). The AI maximalist position of "AI is going to become superintelligent and make all human work and intelligence obsolete" has certainly not been proven.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#123

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

dejv wrote: post #87

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.

"Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so." Well, lets see how all the economics will play out. LLMs might be really useful, but as far as I can see all the AI companies are not making money on inference alone. We might be hitting plateau in capabilities with money being raised on vision of being this godlike tech that will cha…

> but as far as I can see all the AI companies are not making money on inference alone

The numbers aren’t public, but from what companies have indicated it seems inference itself would be profitable if you could exclude all of the R&D and training costs.

But this debate about startups losing money happens endlessly with every new startup cycle. Everyone forgets that losing money is an expected operating mode for a high growth startup. The models and hardware continue to improve. There is so much investment money accelerating this process that we have plenty of runway to continue improving before companies have to switch to full profit focus mode.

But even if we ignore that fact and assume they had to switch to profit mode tomorrow, LLM plans are currently so cheap that even a doubling or tripling isn’t going to be a problem. So what if the monthly plans start at $40 instead of $20 and the high usage plans go from $200 to $400 or even $600? The people using these for their jobs paying $10K or more per month can absorb that.

That’s not going to happen, though. If all model progress stopped right now the companies would still be capturing cheaper compute as data center buildouts were completed and next generation compute hardware was released.

I see these predictions as the current equivalent of all of the predictions that Uber was going to collapse when the VC money ran out. Instead, Uber quietly settled into steady operation, prices went up a little bit, and people still use Uber a lot. Uber did this without the constant hardware and model improvements that LLM companies benefit from.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#124

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #8

chrishare wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's referring to humanity, I believe

It's ambiguous. It could go the other way. He could be referring to that oldest of science fiction tropes: The Bulterian Jihad, the human revolt against thinking machines.

Meh. I think the more likely scenario is the financial extinction of the AI companies.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#125

Post by fourside » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

seu wrote: post #22

> And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions. I'm not super up-to-date on all that's happening in AI-land, but in this quote I can find something that most techno-enthusiast seem to have decided to ignore: no, code is not free. There are i…

My guess is that “free” is meant in terms of the old definition where you’re not having to pay someone to create and maintain it. But yes, it’s important to realize there really is a cost here and one that can’t just be captured by a dollar amount.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#126

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #122

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…

"Skeptics" is also a loaded term; what does it actually mean? I find LLMs incredibly useful for various programming tasks (generating code, searching documentation, and yes with enough setup agents can accomplish some tasks), but I also don't believe they have actual intelligence, nor do I think they will eviscerate programming jobs, the same way that Python and JavaScript didn't eviscerate programming jobs despite l…

No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context.

The LLM skeptics claim LLM usefulness is an illusion. That the LLMs are a fad, and they produced more problems than they solve. They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them.

The skeptics are the people in every AI thread claiming LLMs are a fad that will go away when the VC money runs out, that the only reason anyone uses LLMs is because their boss forces them to, or who blame every bug or security announcement on vibecoding.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#127

Post by etra0 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

LLMs have certainly become extremely useful for Software Engineers, they're very convincing (and pleasers, too) and I'm still unsure about the future of our day-to-day job.

But one thing that has scared me the most, is the trust of LLMs output to the general society. I believe that for software engineers it's really easy to see if it's being useful or not -- We can just run the code and see if the output is what we expected, if not, iterate it, and continue. There's still a professional looking to what it produces.

On the contrary, for more day-to-day usage of the general pubic, is getting really scary. I've had multiple members of my family using AI to ask for medical advice, life advice, and stuff were I still see hallucinations daily, but at the same time they're so convincing that it's hard for them not to trust them.

I still have seen fake quotes, fake investigations, fake news being spreaded by LLMs that have affected decisions (maybe, not as crucials yet but time will tell) and that's a danger that most software engineers just gross over.

Accountability is a big asterisk that everyone seems to ignore

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#128

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #56

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.

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…

You need to meet more skeptics. (Or maybe I do.) In my world, it's much more rare than you say.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#129

Post by nl » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:55 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…

There is some limited truth in this but we still see claims that LLMs are "just next token predictors" and "just regurgitate code they read online". These are just uninformed and wrong views. It's fair to say that these people were (are!) wrong.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#130

Post by mvkel » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:55 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…

One only has to go read the original vibe coding thread[0] from ...ten months ago(!) to see the resistance and skepticism loud and clear. The very first comment couldn't be more loud about it.

It was possible to create things in gpt-3.5. The difference now is it aligns with the -taste- of discerning programmers, which has a little, but not everything, to do with technological capability.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913909