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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

#41

Post by Jtarii »

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"?

Using LLMs in a similar way to already existing IDE features like refactor, find/replace, search is unambiguously a productivity increase. Whether using them for actual task completion purposes is good or not is unknown.

But imagine that Ctrl+F was just introduced as a feature and you had a bunch of people saying "All these people saying Ctrl+F is increasing their productivity are fooling themselves", it's just a silly thing to say.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#42

Post by ervine »

duendefm wrote: post #22

I think it really depends on your knowledge and skill, and the kind of work you are using it for. It's hard to measure because the more you use it the more you lose some skills. But I have to admit that I can do much more parallel work when using the best models. It's messy, because sometimes I feel that I get lazier and just prompt them and go do some random stuff and sometimes even skip the part of verifying what t…

Yes! Everything else aside, whatever you think of its output and value, shipping largely AI-coded features now doesn't really give me the satisfaction that putting things together myself used to.

I'll just have to move up a level of abstraction to get that same feeling, I guess.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#43

Post by simonw »

I read this headline and thought "METR study"... and sure enough, a few paragraphs in:

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

I think you might be fooling yourself if you build your entire worldview concerning the productivity benefits of AI-assisted programming around that one study from one organization that confirms your priors.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#44

Post by dilyevsky »

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"?

"do not fool yourself" proceeds to fool himself... if you are honest about your bias that's still fooling yourself if your conclusions are just demonstrably wrong.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#45

Post by hsuduebc2 »

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 had the same reaction. It is the same kind of argument people use to claim that computer science is useless because, “What would you do if the electricity went out?”

The same thing as you, man. Die in the chaos.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#46

Post by sho »

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 find it fascinating how humans search for meaning in the unlikeliest of places, and how ancient tribal instincts will turn anything, anything at all, into an excuse for an in-group, an out-group, and a search for kinship on the most ridiculous little hill.

This "Anti AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point.

It's a very human thing really.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#47

Post by gwerbin »

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…

AI has been a big boost for my data science productivity.

I can have an agent put together a shitty prototype of something just to get a general idea of what I'm looking at, and save probably half a day of work and avoid physically typing potentially hundreds of lines of code. And I can rubber duck with it, and very quickly search through software packages and literature, produce summary reports, dig through my own company source code and wiki and Slack messages to figure out how some specific detail works, etc. These things are important but take my time and energy away from focusing on the hard parts of what I'm supposed to be doing.

My new favorite thing with AI is that my pile of random helper functions is now a thoughtfully-designed library with an extensive test suite for every single thing. I'm not auditing every line of code but I'm reading the plans carefully and I do take a glance at what the agent wrote before I start using it. Most of the time it's not perfect or it's ugly in some way I wouldn't have done, but it's good enough to do research with, and it's way better than what I could have put together by hand, and in much less time. I trust my own research results more because I can put together these kinds of helper libraries much faster, and if I have to make changes I have a big test suite to catch me when I make a mistake.

The only hard part is managing the context switching where instead of putting my work on pause to go write a helper routine, I now have to account for periodically interrupting my work in order to keep an eye on what the agent is doing. For now my approach has been to just ignore it for a while and then take a break to cycle through AI work sessions/chats.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#48

Post by orthogonal_cube »

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.

I hear this a lot and it seems to be far too optimistic. Call me skeptical but plan pricing continues to increase with tighter usage constraints. We’re still at the point in time that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub charge seemingly reasonable prices in order to get people hooked onto AI before raising prices to get their return on investment.

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