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

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#131

Post by nl » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 3:57 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…

Anthropic - for one - is making lots of money on inference.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#132

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:02 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…

Yes, it's a strange take. It's not that programmers have changed their mind about unchanging LLMs, but rather that LLMs have changed and are now useful for coding, not just CoPilot autocomplete like the early ones.

What changed was the use of RLVR training for programming, resulting in "reasoning" models that are now attempting to optimize for a long-horizon goal (i.e. bias generation towards "reasoning steps" that during training let to a verified reward), as opposed to earlier LLMs where RL was limited to RLHF.

So, yeah, the programmers who characterized early pre-RLVR coding models as of limited use were correct. Now the models are trained differently and developers find them much more useful.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#133

Post by pton_xd » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so.

It's interesting that Terrence Tao just released his own blog post stating that they're best viewed as stochastic generators. True he's not an AI researcher, but it does sound like he's using AI frequently with some success.

"viewing the current generation of such tools primarily as a stochastic generator of sometimes clever - and often useful - thoughts and outputs may be a more productive perspective when trying to use them to solve difficult problems" [0].

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115722360006034040

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#134

Post by zahlman » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

mvkel wrote: post #130

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.…

> The difference now is it aligns with the -taste- of discerning programmers

This... doesn't match the field reports I've seen here, nor what I've seen from poking around the repos for AI-powered Show HN submissions.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#135

Post by mjr00 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #126

mjr00 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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

That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you!

I agree though, there's a certain class of "AI denialism" which pretends that LLMs don't do anything useful, which in almost-2026 is pretty hard to argue.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#136

Post by zahlman » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #129

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.

Objecting to these claims is missing their point. Saying these things is really about denying that the LLMs "think" in any meaningful sense. (And the retorts I've seen in those discussions often imply very depressing and self-deprecating views of what it actually means to be human.)

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#137

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #135

Aurornis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you! I agree though, there's a certain class of "AI denialism" which pretends that LLMs don't do anything useful, which in almost-2026 is pretty hard to argue.

> That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you!

The context was the article quoted, not HN comments.

I’ve been called all sorts of things on HN and been accused of everything from being a bot to a corporate shill here. You can find people applying labels and throwing around accusations in every thread here. It doesn’t mean much after a while.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#138

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

mvkel wrote: post #130

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.…

"Look Ma, no hands!" vibe coding, as described by Karpathy, where you never look at the code being generated, was never a good idea, and still isn't. Some people are now misusing "vibe coding" to describe any use of LLMs for coding, but there is a world of difference between using LLMs in an intelligent considered way as part of the software development process, and taking a hit on the bong and "vibe coding" another "how many calories in this plate of food" app.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#139

Post by zahlman » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #132

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…

Yes, it's a strange take. It's not that programmers have changed their mind about unchanging LLMs, but rather that LLMs have changed and are now useful for coding, not just CoPilot autocomplete like the early ones. What changed was the use of RLVR training for programming, resulting in "reasoning" models that are now attempting to optimize for a long-horizon goal (i.e. bias generation towards "reasoning steps" that d…

I thought I'd read a lot of these threads this year, and also discussed off-site the use of coding agents and the technology behind them; but this is genuinely the first time I've seen the term "RLVR".

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#140

Post by antirez » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

pton_xd wrote: post #133

> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so. It's interesting that Terrence Tao just released his ow…

What happened recently is that all the serious AI researches that were in the stochastic parrot side changed point of view but, incredibly, people without a deep understanding on such matters, previously exposed to such arguments, are lagging behind and still repeat arguments that the people who popularized them would not repeat again.

Today there is no top AI scientist that will tell you LLMs are just stochastic parrots.