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

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 320 posts

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#311

Post by zipy124 »

dash2 wrote: post #25

> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. > Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it w…

The last point is unfortunately very real in many scenarios in life. It's also the reason why successfully doing something that others can't leads to attacks, since they see your competence as an attack on their ability.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#312

Post by badsectoracula »

ethin wrote: post #230
badsectoracula wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft API docs are a special case where i'd say you pretty much need LLMs nowadays because after a bunch of document format conversions over the years they degraded massively . If you can find some MSDN CDs/DVDs from the early 2000s, the content is much better (and you can clearly see that the current docs are often missing descriptions and names for method arguments or even entire paragraphs).

What places would you suggest where I can get digital copies of that? I don't have a physical CD/DVD reader so... :)

archive.org probably, just search for "archive msdn" and you'll find a bunch of stuff

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#313

Post by daveguy »

simonw wrote: post #293
daveguy wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company. Oh come on, Simon. Are your glasses so rose coloured they are opaque? They fired, and…

Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired. Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here. The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of LLMs do you think they were using back then? > Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short I think my record is looking pr…

3 years ago is about when the BS "AI can do anything!" hype started. So, it is not a misinterpretation, but an accurate assessment of the hype cycle. Exactly the kind of things managers are bumbling into because "AGI any day now!" for the last 3-4 years. GPT 3.5 was released May 2022. I'm curious how many AI project in industry have crashed and burned during this hype-Summer before the Winter. Speaking of which, whatever happened to that "software dark factory" you were gushing over a while back?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#314

Post by simonw »

daveguy wrote: post #313
simonw wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired. Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here. The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of LLMs do you think they were using back then? > Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short I think my record is looking pr…

3 years ago is about when the BS "AI can do anything!" hype started. So, it is not a misinterpretation, but an accurate assessment of the hype cycle. Exactly the kind of things managers are bumbling into because "AGI any day now!" for the last 3-4 years. GPT 3.5 was released May 2022. I'm curious how many AI project in industry have crashed and burned during this hype-Summer before the Winter. Speaking of which, what…

When I said "misinterpretation" here I was talking about people assuming that the Ford story was a simple case of "Ford fired their employees because they thought AI could replace them, then had to hire them all back again". That's not what happened.

A TON of AI projects have crashed and burned in the past few years. This stuff is really hard to adopt at an organizational level, much more so than for individuals.

I've been pretty consistent in saying that I think the dark factory stuff is interesting more as an exploration of the edges of what this stuff can do. It's a great way to highlight the question of how we can get agents to demonstrate their work without reviewing every line of their code.

I've released two pieces of software inspired by those ideas myself - Showboat https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/10/showboat-and-rodney/ and shot-scraper video: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/30/shot-scraper-video/

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#315

Post by sodapopcan »

RiverStone wrote: post #302
hliyan wrote: post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

This is overly dramatic and not true. This exact situation occurred to me. I blocked all PRs with “request changes”. Most engineers don’t like AI slop, most take pride in their work. The occasional AI slop engineer can be contained by rejecting their PRs, having team discussions around norms, bringing up feedback on retros, etc.

Sorry for the reply almost two weeks later, I missed when this was posted.

> Most engineers don’t like AI slop, most take pride in their work.

Do you work in an industry that requires good code? Perhaps you are just really talented and gotten hired by companies who demand excellence OR you're just really lucky. I'm a pretty run-of-the-mill developer (I care a lot about my craft but I'm not a "10xer" or whatever) and in my 20 years at, uhm, 5 or 6 different companies (once which was FULL of people who gave a shit), I would not say that "most" engineers don't take pride in their work, not even close. Most just want to finish up and get home.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#316

Post by Thanemate »

preg_match wrote: post #229
dehsge wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance. Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same…

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable. And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might ma…

>I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains.

I think there's a sample bias that affects this perception.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#317

Post by keeganpoppen »

ryandrake wrote: post #254
keeganpoppen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…

that's a great point. i personally am toward the "i go to sleep and it does my work for me" side, but share the same confusion about how we went from 100x-0.1x programmers to 100000x-0.0001x ... vibe coders. to be clear: i am aware of what my side of the fence vs the other looks like, and i don't find anything about "meh iono it doesn't work that great for me" unreasonable at all.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#318

Post by keeganpoppen »

sph wrote: post #268
ryandrake wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most wild parts of the "Is AI useful" arguments is how different people are getting so astoundingly different results from it. One guy will claim that he can one-shot "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android," go do the dishes, and come back to a working application. And the next guy will say, "I can't get it to do anything groundbreaking and have to micro-babysit it every step of the way to…

> Assuming both people are truthful and operating in good faith, how can this be explained? Quite simply, difference in skill. The sysadmin that has configured a few applications in their career would likely get annoyed at how many mistakes an LLM makes. The manager who barely knows their way around a shell, uses an LLM to configure an application in less than the three business days it will take them, and will claim…

well, they were 0x productive before, so they are technically inifinitely x more productive now. i guess. hah.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#319

Post by keeganpoppen »

nemosaltat wrote: post #241
keeganpoppen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

that’s perhaps a bit harsh, and I’m late (intentionally) to all this as I’ve worried about personal atrophy, security, and feeding the shoggoth but also with my instructions it will churn on prompts for hours. It makes use of my local rags by domain (which it also helped me build and maintain). Most recent example: it’s been on my list to set up headscale for like 5 years now. I know how to do it, I’ve read the docs…

surely this is closer to the common experience with LLMs... i don't know how people don't see it for the miracle it is. it's like if God himself came down from the heavens and said "no one will ever die of hunger ever again, but you have to run 5 miles a week" and we all got bogged down in how hard it is to run 5 miles...

god, that analogy was awful. sorry. xD

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#320

Post by keeganpoppen »

dnemmers wrote: post #253
keeganpoppen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"it must be some sort of weird badge of honor to be so profoundly incommunicative that you can't get the ai that desperately wants to sycophantically pump you up about all your brilliant ideas to be that useless. that is genuinely harder to do than simply using the technology even passably." Definitely incomprehensible that someone might have a different take than you about the 'goodness' of your prompt outcome...

ah, so the soft implication that you are simply smarter than me. fine. there's at least a 1/100,000 chance of that. no one forced you to be that smug and dismissive, though-- seems like a few traits that are fairly antithetical to learning. but i guess you don't need to learn, since you have already ascended to Enlightenment.
Post reply on HN