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I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

louwrentius.com

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Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#31

Post by mholm »

chilmers wrote: post #19

This is the perfect archetype of an intellectually lazy anti-AI post. The author ends with his admission of bias, but he'd be better off starting with it, as it's clear that his reasoning flows entirely from it. AI is bad for productivity, says this single study from 2025. AI is unsustainable, says this article I found. AI will all just disappear one day... because I hope so? Ironically, the author would have been be…

The study itself from late 2025 is also written to be _highly_ favorable to non-ai usage. Developers on a codebase they're already experienced with, largely using these tools for the first time. Of course they aren't faster! They've already done the hard part! They're also open-source maintainers, which, ime, means they're already a cut above the average dev.

I'd be much more curious on a study that used regular developers on brand new-to-them codebases for significant features or migrations. I'm personally encountering what I'd describe as a 200%+ productivity boost.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#32

Post by bwat49 »

cognitiveinline wrote: post #20
danesparza wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all" So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article) I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?

The part that says > AI will just be turned off.

I've been seeing a lot of this in online discourse where people are like "the bubble's gonna pop and then this will all be over!"

it's a combination of wishlful thinking and straightup delusion to think that AI will just poof and disappear (maybe the specific LLM approach eventually, but not the general idea of AI/the industry/product as a whole)

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#33

Post by danesparza »

cognitiveinline wrote: post #20
danesparza wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all" So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article) I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?

The part that says > AI will just be turned off.

Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it.

So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#34

Post by kalkin »

> Meanwhile, a study (late 2025) seems to report that although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower.

METR reran the study early this year and, while they caveat it, this time they found a speedup, which is consistent with subjective estimates of productivity also having increased -- the simplest explanation is that subjective estimates exaggerate, but there's still a speedup with current models: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adopti...

(Nobody seems to cite the followup since it's not such a fun counterintuitive finding.)

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#35

Post by amarant »

johngoode wrote: post #23
aogaili wrote: post #9

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..

I stopped reading at the productivity comment, it's just deeply unserious stuff.

Citing a study published in '25, and thus conducted before that, basically before AI got good.

Yeah this article is safe to ignore

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#36

Post by orangecat »

jackb4040 wrote: post #21
dcow wrote: post #11

AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s ab…

> AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. People said this a year ago, then all the companies admitted they were incinerating cash and had to increase to token pricing. Consumers basically mutinied and managed to push back a bit, but that is the struggle right now - to keep prices from increasing 25+ times, not to see them decrease. If you're premising this on some future technology like ASICs, ev…

People said this a year ago

A year ago Opus 4.1 was $75 per million tokens, and now Opus 4.8 is $25 and Fable is $50.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#37

Post by zobzu »

aogaili wrote: post #9

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..

id say they're not 100% wrong:

- a lot of folks use ai poorly and innudate you with slop, reducing your own efficiency

- because you can just prompt it doesn't mean you should. many let the machine crank out tokens until it works, rather than thinking about the problem first.

of course, if AI solves my second point automatically, it'll solve the first as well, and we'll call that AGI. But we don't have that yet.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#38

Post by maccard »

vadansky wrote: post #8
foxyv wrote: post #2

I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…

This, I'm working on a game engine as a hobby project. I can do one "big" feature over a weekend, most of it including designing and manual testing that it's working as expected, but then it takes me 2 weekends to break up the changes into smaller commits using jj, which also gives me the chance to review and understand the code myself. So it's a weird mix of fast and slow, but I think I've grown to prefer reviewing…

Genuine question a why are you using AI for a hobby project like that? It seems like the worst of both worlds.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#39

Post by dcow »

danesparza wrote: post #14
aogaili wrote: post #9

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..

"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all" So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article) I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?

The entire thing is an AI skeptic saying “I’m skeptical I found some outdated anecdata that supports my point”. Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day. It’s not reasonable to point at a chatgpt subscription and say “look the entire industry isn’t sustainable”. We all know those are subsidized just like uber was. And there are plenty of people paying API rates for tokens and getting along just fine. Further, if there was a single point in history where an environmental concern killed an entire industry please point me to it. What happens in reality is that humans compromise and innovate under new sets of constraints.
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