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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#51

Post by graemep »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #37
altern8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be because there are less Swift projects to train with. But I've seen Claude write crazy code in Python and JavaScript, too

My theory is that most of the Swift code in the public domain, is basically demo code. Short, idealized, code samples to demonstrate issues and solutions; much like you would see in StackOverflow. PHP has huge, entire frameworks and systems, refined over years.

There is also a lot of low quality PHP code out there, and a lot of legacy code in a language that I am told (I have not used if for years myself though) has changed a lot.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#52

Post by wamatt »

One thing I'd personally like to see a little more discussion of (at least within my social circles) is.. what exactly does "using AI" mean?

How does this connect to everyone's high level ideas/thoughts about "tech", "AI" and "morals and feels" etc. These lines can start to seem a little blurry, at least for me.

For example, would we say my partner is "using AI" (for all intents and purposes), if she's frequently using Google.com throughout the day, and then ends up picking and believing the AI generated answer overview at the top of the SERPs almost every time?

Or do we feel "uses AI", is more along the lines of the vampire kids running 1000 sub-agents on a mattress floor in SF?

I kind of find the whole spectrum really interesting because even basic phone use is now stuffed with AI, whether we choose to label it or not.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#53

Post by gedy »

variety8675 wrote: post #2

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

With inexperienced or non-technical people, talking to them about AI can be very confusing, as a LOT of their "AI" usecases are basically they didn't realize or know how to write a program for this straightforward logic.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#54

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mrtksn wrote: post #47
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

In my experience the language has become irrelevant for me, I created a system like mix of revenuecat and firebase and I’m not even sure what language which part is. It has client side libraries that are swift and kotlin, the Identity management is Swift but the iAP/Subscription tracking is go IIRC. It’s all integrated somehow and works very well.

That's the thing, the Swift works fine, but is incredibly brittle. I think it would collapse, at the first bump in the road.

That's fine, for a lot of corporate applications, but not for the stuff I write. I'm anal, I know, but that's how I roll.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#55

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

argee wrote: post #31
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

That's just one way to use LLMs though. Recently on a flight I could not figure out how to connect my wife's earphones (i.e. put them in pairing mode) to my macbook since I was used to the old Airpods Pro case. So I asked Gemma4 26B A4B (offline, LM Studio) and was told to use the 'two tap on front of case' gesture, which worked. This situation would have been significantly more frustrating without (local) LLMs. I'm…

Absolutely. I use it often, for stuff I used to "just Google." Other than a predilection for giving me CLI walkthroughs, it is usually fine.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#56

Post by ablob »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

I'd like to add that there is almost no way of "running away" from it. If I search for anything on the internet I am almost guaranteed to be handed pages and pages of AI generated content. In lieu of that I found that directly prompting for an answer tends to yield better results nowadays. Not because it's good per-se, but because having control over the prompt beats having little to no control over it though search by proxy.

It saddens me to see that high quality content is drowned in this sea of garbage to the point of being almost impossible to find.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#57

Post by z3c0 »

simonw wrote: post #11

Bit of an odd decision to build an entire article around a clickbait headline from July 2025. Talk about a strawman. That aside, this piece is interesting and ties together some useful numbers and studies. I hadn't seen the recent Microsoft paper showing: > 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [...] with at least 90 minutes of usage time in a given month. I'm honestly impressed at how high that num…

It's a retrospective analysis of an assertion made by NYTimes. The original headline wasn't clickbait, just presumptive, and even so, it's a pretty significant publication that spends a lot of time on the HN front page (alongside you, I'll add). I think it's perfectly fair, and nowhere close to a strawman, to deconstruct that claim a year later.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#58

Post by witx »

z3c0 wrote: post #22
witx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant really understand if this is trolling or outright AI psychosis

They are a self-described 10x coder who moves AI slop, so almost certainly the latter. I think we might be facing a cultural reckoning on what being "productive" actually means. Creating more products doesn't mean more production.

Amen

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#59

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

graemep wrote: post #51
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that most of the Swift code in the public domain, is basically demo code. Short, idealized, code samples to demonstrate issues and solutions; much like you would see in StackOverflow. PHP has huge, entire frameworks and systems, refined over years.

There is also a lot of low quality PHP code out there, and a lot of legacy code in a language that I am told (I have not used if for years myself though) has changed a lot.

Same with C++. You don't want to write C++, the way that I used to.

That's one of the things that I appreciate about the PHP that the LLM provides. It uses modern idioms that make better use of the modern language.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#60

Post by dukeyukey »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #20
camdenreslink wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real best case scenario is using LLMs to help build deterministic systems. Instead of asking an LLM to do some task that you know will be repeated, instead ask the LLM to build a program (Python script or whatever) to do the task.

Or just write it yourself?

If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?
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