301–310 of 588 posts
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Yeah, sure buddy :)
Disrespect the trend line and get rolled over by the steamroller. Labs are cooking and what is available commercially is lobotomized for safety and alignment. If your baseline of current max capability is sonnet 4.5 released just this summer you’re going to be very surprised in the next few months.
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What you wrote here was relevant about 9 months ago. It’s now outdated. The pace and velocity of improvement of Ai can only be described as violent. It is so fast that there are many people like you who don’t get it.
The last big release from OpenAI was a big giant billion-dollar flop. Its lackluster update was written about far and wide, even here on HN. But maybe you're living in an alternate reality?
My experience comes from the fact that after over a decade of working as a swe I no longer write code. It’s not some alternate reality thing or reading headlines. It’s my daily life that has changed.
After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions. LLMs pretend to do this with big confidence and fail miserably. For every problem I need to turn my brain to ON MODE and wake up, the…
"they are completely useless for real programming" You and I must have completely different definitions of "real programming". In this very comment, you described a problem that the model solved. The solution may not have involved low-level programming, or discovering a tricky bug entrenched in years-worth of legacy code, but still a legitimate task that you, as a programmer, would've needed to solve otherwise. How i…
If an LLM controlling a pair of robot hands was able to make a passable PB&J sandwich on my behalf, I _guess_ that could be useful to me (how much time am I really saving? is it worth the cost? etc.), but that's very different from those same robo-hands filling the role of a chef de cuisine at a fine dining restaurant, or even a cook at a diner.
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Yea, LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer. They take direction, their models act as the “do the research” part, and they output lots of code: code that has to be carefully scrutinized and refined. They are like very ambitious interns who never get tired and want to please, but often just produce crap that has to be totally redone or refactored heavily in order to go int…
> LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer This is a common take but it hasn't been my experience. LLMs produce results that vary from expert all the way to slightly better than markov chains. The average result might be equal to a junior developer, and the worst case doesn't happen that often, but the fact that it happens from time to time makes it completely unreliable fo…
Or rather, it's more like a contractor. If I don't like the job they did, I don't give them the next job.
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> They're busy building small inconsequential side projects Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental e…
But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
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Do you tell AI the patterns/tools/architecture you want? Telling agents to "build me XYZ, make it gud!" is likely to precede a mess, telling it to build a modular monolith using your library/tool list, your preferred folder structure, other patterns/algorithms you use, etc will end you up with something that might have some minor style issues or not be perfectly canonical, but will be approximately correct within a r…
Honestly, even this isn't really true anymore. With Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex CLI, "just do the thing" is a viable strategy for a shockingly large category of tasks.
> Edgar Dijkstra called it nearly 50 years ago: we will never be programming in English, or French, or Spanish. Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough. Semantic ambiguity and language entropy will always defeat this ambition. This is the most important quote for any AI coding discussion. Anyone that doesn't understand how the tools they use came to be is doomed to reinvent them…
But so many problems (programming, but also physics and math) start as informal word problems. A major skill is being able to turn the informal into something formal and precise.
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Right, like I was steamrolled by the "Team of Pocket Ph.D Experts" announced earlier this year with ChatGPT 5 ? Remember that underwhelming experience? The Grok to which you could "paste your entire source code file"? The constantly debilitating Claude models? Satya Nadella desperately dropping down to a PO role and bypassing his executives to try and micro-manage Copilot product development because the O365 Copilot…
First examine your post. Can you create a 3D avatar with legs that can walk and talk? If not, then for this area you’ve been steam rolled. Anyway main point is, you’re looking at the hype headlines which are ludicrous. Where most optimists come from is that they are using it in the daily to code. To them it’s right in front of their eyes. I’m not sure what your experience is but my opinion on AI doesn’t come from spe…
> I no longer write code. I’ve been a swe for over a decade. AI writes all my code following my instructions. My code output is now expected to be 5x what it was before because we are now augmented by AI. All my coworkers use AI. We don’t use ChatGPT we use anthropic. If I didn’t use AI I would be fired for being too slow.
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But isn't that exactly the kind of learned helplessness being discussed? As a fellow distracted individual, I have seen instant gratification erode all of my most prized hobbies and skills. Why read a book when I can scroll on my phone? My distress tolerance is lower than ever. LLMs feel like a bridge too far, for me anyway.
Nothing has been eroded for me, in fact it had the opposite effect. It's easier to get into new hobbies, easier to develop skills, I value reading on my own more than I did before. At least for me, LLMs act as multipliers of what I can and want to do, it hasn't removed my passion for music production, 3D, animation or programming one bit, if anything it's fueled those passions and let me do stuff within them faster a…