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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

#51

Post by foxyv »

dd8601fn wrote: post #4
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…

I just spent multiple evenings talking through a small data model. With the massive number of misses the model had, I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if I had let it yolo the first design of its choice, to build on. The requirements didn’t really change, opus just couldn’t see all the real world potential issues with its various suggestions. But it was helpful for me to talk it out. So I guess it fell in the…

I've found that my requirements and acceptance criteria are much less clear than I think they are. AI reveals when you are being too vague, almost instantly sometimes.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#52

Post by podgorniy »

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

Which ones? That there is no evidence (not personal anecdotes but the numbers) of productivity increase? Or that our subscriptions are heavy subsidized (then try to compare produced value against real price of tokens)? Or that AI companies are burning tonn of cash without clear plan for monetization?

Article has good points which are worth discussing rather than discarding. We need to bring arguments from both sides of the fense.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#53

Post by notnullorvoid »

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…

> One thing I've noticed is, that coding manually is exponentially more stressful than the slow AI approach.

I find the exact opposite. Typically the AI will make too many mistakes (even with latest advanced models), they usually aren't major/program breaking mistakes, but they still require fixing if I want to keep the code quality good enough, and make future changes possible without a falling house of cards. In order to describe the correct approach I have to write more English to describe the problem than the amount of code I could write myself. I could maybe see it working by writing rough pseudo code and having the AI translate, but then I loose out on any code analysis or tab completion as I write. It's also just innately frustrating to have to babysit and correct somethings work all the time. This all may be in part caused by the nature of my current work for the last couple years, which has mostly been on library code rather than application code.

I suspect I'd have a very different experience if I was working on CRUD related tasks like making new API endpoints, interfacing with a DB, or writing FE components. Not to make light of those tasks, I enjoy that work, though it is much more repetitive.

I agree with the parts about using AI to ask questions and gain better understanding though. I do that constantly for APIs and languages that I don't have a clear mental model of. It's like an interactive search.

Also agree on POCs, sometimes there are small tools, demos, or prototype features that I don't need to care deeply about.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#54

Post by tempfile »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #29

These people keep citing that survey from 2025. That kills all arguments from the article instantly. December 2025 through today GenAI has become massively better. I’ve built things with Claude in contracted spans of time that would have been man-years in the before times.

>> although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower

> Maybe that was true in 2025, but it's clearly not true any more - I feel so productive now!

Even if you are right, this is a completely baseless argument. The people in the study felt the exact same way! And "it's 6 months old, so I won't listen to it" is an insanely high standard. You're eliminating all the evidence!

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#55

Post by kalkin »

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'm quite influenced by Ed Zitron's reporting

Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells them what they want to hear.

Useful: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#56

Post by podgorniy »

sho wrote: post #46
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 th…

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 "Pro 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

#57

Post by tempfile »

simonw wrote: post #43

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 orga…

What study do you base your worldview on?

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#58

Post by amarant »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #15
x3haloed wrote: post #12

I think you might be fooling yourself. Personal-plan subscription subsidies do not equate to "it's not viable, and all of it is about to be shut off." If that were true, then Kilo Code, Claude Code, Cline, Pi, and Command Code would not be occupying 5 of the top 10 apps using OpenRouter. People have purchased 20 trillion tokens this month already for coding on OpenRouter alone at full-price market rates. Would you co…

It's like looking at the popularity of sports betting and concluding that it's a viable way to make money.

And it is? Look at kindred group for example, they made >700 million GBP last year. seems viable enough to me!

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#59

Post by lordnacho »

Zitron might be right about the economics of it, maybe it really does come crashing down. But we won't be forgetting about it. Even if AI stopped progressing today, it will still be massively, undeniably, insanely useful.

I could use current models forever. LLM does things for me that couldn't be done in 2023. I don't want to go back to a world without it, but I'm also ok with progress stalling right here.

As for the productivity benefits, I find there is a kind of skeptic that just has his eyes closed. Open an AI page, ask it to write you an app that renames all your scientific papers so they have their title as the filename instead of the weird long number.

Without AI you could easily waste an hour looking for the right PDF library and working out how to use it. Or fiddling with the file search mechanism so that you only get the articles and not every file in your downloads. Now you will have the files renamed in a few minutes, and a tool that keeps them correct every time you have download some more.

How is this not a productivity win? It clearly is. Do we really need a double blind test to check this kind of thing?

Whether it gets squandered in modern orgs is another matter, but the core win is clear for everyone to see.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#60

Post by gwerbin »

dd8601fn wrote: post #4
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…

I just spent multiple evenings talking through a small data model. With the massive number of misses the model had, I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if I had let it yolo the first design of its choice, to build on. The requirements didn’t really change, opus just couldn’t see all the real world potential issues with its various suggestions. But it was helpful for me to talk it out. So I guess it fell in the…

The rubber ducking potential is the first thing that got me interested in AI as a useful tool.

You do have to be very careful of when the AI might be confidently wrong, or leading you down some kind of weird narrow path.

When searching the web to gather info on a topic, all have a tendency to find 2-4 search results and fixate on those as if they represented the entire scope of the topic. No surprise about the fixation because that's kind of how LLMs work (X, Y, and Z are in context -> more tokens about X, Y, and Z). But you have to be aware of it, and I often have to prompt it to do another search and keep turning up more options.

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