Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two kinds of AI users are emerging

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 358 posts

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#241

Post by AdamN »

majormajor wrote: post #24
defrost wrote: post #12

The "upside" description: On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally. I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code. Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simul…

One of the dirty secrets of a lot of these "code adjacent" areas is that they have very little testing. If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? Or maybe you'll be too worried about getting chided for "not being data driven" enough. If an exec tells an i…

I would say that although Claude may hallucinate at least it can be told to test the scripts. Many data scientists will just balk at the idea of testing a crazy excel workbook with lots of formulas that they themselves inherited.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#242

Post by AdamN »

veunes wrote: post #172

This is the birth of Shadow AI, and it’s going to be bigger than Shadow IT ever was in the 2000s Back then, employees were secretly installing Excel macros and Dropbox just to get work done faster. Now they’re quietly running Claude Code in the terminal because the official Copilot can’t even forma a CSV properly. CISOs are terrified right now and that’s understandable. Non-technical people with root access and agent…

"they’re quietly running Claude Code" ... with their tokens or even worse full on usernames and passwords that have write/execute privileges.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#243

Post by TaupeRanger »

veunes wrote: post #180
danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

All of this speedrun hits a wall at the context window. As long as the project fits into 200k tokens, you’re flying. The moment it outgrows that, productivity doesn’t drop by 20% - it drops to zero. You start spending hours explaining to the agent what you changed in another file that it has already forgotten. Large organizations win in the long run precisely because they rely on processes that don’t depend on the me…

This reads as if written by someone who has never used these tools before. No one ever tries to "fit" the entire project into a single context window. Successfully using coding LLMs involves context management (some of which is now done by the models themselves) so that you can isolate the issues you're currently working on, and get enough context to work effectively. Working on enormous codebases over the past two months, I have never had to remind the model what it changed in another file, because 1) it has access to git and can easily see what has changed, and 2) I work with the model to break down projects into pieces that can be worked on sequentially. And keep in mind, this the worst this technology will ever be - it will only get larger context windows and better memory from here.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#245

Post by fcantournet »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #237
chrisjj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, he said almost one-shot. It's like a CPU that's almost 100% reliable... in that it fails only once every 1 million clock cycles.

For a 4 GHz CPU that’s 4 failures a second..

4 thousand :)

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#246

Post by mrbluecoat »

> What I've come to realise is that the power of having a bash sandbox with a programming language and API access to systems, combined with an agentic harness, results in outrageously good results for non technical users.

I would argue if they're using all that tooling, they _are_ technical users.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#247

Post by senordevnyc »

benjijay wrote: post #205
majormajor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the dirty secrets of a lot of these "code adjacent" areas is that they have very little testing. If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? Or maybe you'll be too worried about getting chided for "not being data driven" enough. If an exec tells an i…

> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? I recently watched a demo from a data science guy about the impending proliferation of AI in just about all related fields, his position was highly sceptical but with a "let's make the most of it while we can" T…

Like every anecdote out there where an LLM makes a basic mistake, this one is worthless without knowing the model and prompt.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#248

Post by enemyz0r »

okokwhatever wrote: post #231

You can see the fear all around this thread. And, tbh, it makes total sense. There is nothing we can do to stop this dropping ball, we can accept it or leave the room but the industry has changed for all of us. I mean, you can use it one way or another but the concept of critical thinking is our only survival tool if your relaying on a it job this days. How long it will last? Who cares, we're fucked anyways...

Yep

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#249

Post by actsasbuffoon »

holoduke wrote: post #186
PunchyHamster wrote: post #142

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

I think you miss one third user. That's a developer generating entire systems and still have an understanding on the output. The dev person is in control of the architecture, code quality, functional quality and more. These persons are still rare. But I have seen them already. They are the new 10x developers.

Ironically, I find LLMs far better at helping me dive into unfamiliar code than at writing it.

A few weeks ago a critical bug came in on a part of the app I’d never touched. I had Claude research the relevant code while I reproduced the bug locally, then had it check the logs. That confirmed where the error was, but not why. This was code that ran constantly without incident.

So I had Claude look at the Excel doc the support person provided. Turns out there was a hidden worksheet throwing off the indices. You couldn’t even see the sheet inside Excel. I had Claude move it to the end where our indices wouldn’t be affected, ran it locally, and it worked. I handed the fixed document back to the support person and she confirmed it worked on her end too.

Total time to resolution: 15 minutes, on a tricky bug in code I’d never seen before. That hidden sheet would have been maddening to find normally. I think we might be strongly overestimating the benefits of knowing a codebase these days.

I’ve been programming professionally for about 20 years. I know this is a period of rapid change and we’re all adjusting. But I think getting overly precious about code in the age of coding agents is a coping mechanism, not a forward-looking stance. Code is cheap now. Write it and delete it.

Make high leverage decisions and let the agent handle the rest. Make sure you’ve got decent tests. Review for security. Make peace with the fact that it’s cheaper to cut three times and measure once than it used to be to measure twice and cut once.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#250

Post by senordevnyc »

_1tan wrote: post #95
s-lambert wrote: post #9

I don't see a divergence, from what I can tell a lot of people have only just started using agents in the past 3-4 months when they got good enough that it was hard to say otherwise. Then there's stuff like MCP, which never seemed good and was entirely driven by people who talked more about it than used it. There also used to be stuff like langchain or vector databases that nobody talks about anymore, maybe they're s…

What‘s used instead of MCP in reality? Just REST or other existing API things?

Yeah, I suspect the people railing against MCP don’t actually use agents much at all. MCP is super useful for giving your agent access to tools. The main alternative is CLI tools, if they exist, but they don’t always, or it’s just more awkward than a well-designed MCP. I let my agent use the GitHub CLI, but I also have MCPs for remote database access and bugsnag access, so they can debug issues on prod more easily.
Post reply on HN