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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

#71

Post by solumunus »

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 feel sorry for anyone who isn’t experiencing the gains I’m experiencing. I can see why AI could suck in massive teams, or software with very messy and inconsistent architecture. As a 2 man developer team working on a mono repo with clear and simple architecture, consistent schema conventions, and heavy context available, it’s becoming ludicrous how fast we can pump out stable features. We must be 3-4x faster at this point. I had estimated that I would have to take on at least 2 or 3 more developers at X customers, now it seems at even double that quantity of customers we’ll be absolutely fine with just 2 developers. It’s been a tremendous boon for my small business, beyond any possible imagination. And then all the time I hear the claim that there’s no productivity gain to be had. I guess me and my customers are living some kind of mass delusion.

Just the other day there was data corruption discovered and a relatively urgent fix required. Just a few years ago I would have been working deep into the night to make sure everything was fixed for the morning. Within an hour Fable had it all wrapped up neatly and the fix deployed…

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#72

Post by simonw »

podgorniy wrote: post #52
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…

> Which ones?

The ones that shout about that one METR study, use it to imply that millions of developers are deceiving themselves in believing that tools they use every day are useful, then admit that they don't like and don't use the tools themselves.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#73

Post by Aurornis »

kalkin wrote: post #34

> 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'…

By now, anyone writing articles in 2026 but ignoring the 2026 study is either intentionally trying to mislead people, or so uninformed on the topic that they're just regurgitating old anti-AI content.

If you want to talk about studies, we need to be talking about current studies with current tools. Not studies about how the situation was in the past with different tools.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#74

Post by krupan »

sho wrote: post #69
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"?

There is no longer, in my opinion, any scope for reasonable debate that AI models like Fable 5 are net productivity increases for many, if not most, if not ALL, programming tasks. Anyone can, or should be able to, prove this to themselves in about 5 minutes. And so if someone like the author is trying to argue the contrary, that leads me to believe they either: (1) have not bothered to spend even 5 minutes validating…

I just attempted to verify this myself, but they want my hard earned dollars first. I didn't see any satisfaction guarantee or anything. That already feels like a scam.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#75

Post by felipebrnd »

I agree with the point about we don't have clear/perceivable increase in value I.e. companies are not 10x profitable due AI.

But, I don't understand the position of that has no value or that is going to be "turned off", that is just doomsday prophecy at this point.

We focus so much in code, but AI have changed many if not most of the work. It made possible to take a chance in challenges that would once be dismissed of the bat.

I do think we are still get used to the new ways of work, which IMO is a moving target. Once that we overcome that, results may come clear, but that may not be in companies making 10x more revenue.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#76

Post by sho »

danesparza wrote: post #33
cognitiveinline wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#77

Post by krupan »

dcow wrote: post #39
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 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…

"Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day."

Lol! Feynman's quote is in fact for everyone. Refusing to consider that it might apply to yourself is proof of that!

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#78

Post by jimmaswell »

somenameforme wrote: post #62
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 think there's a simple dichotomy based on use cases. For things you're already highly skilled at LLMs can be handy but the overall gains, after all is accounted for, are not so clear. But for things you aren't good at, they're zomg amazing. So for somebody evaluating things based on what they do at work (where they're probably quite competent) or on personal projects well within their own domain, then it's 'hey wha…

> For things you're already highly skilled at LLMs can be handy but the overall gains, after all is accounted for, are not so clear.

Preposterous. I can tell 5.6 Sol to do something like "optimize this entire subsystem to have no ongoing memory allocations, fix these 5 bugs, implement these 2 features" and go work on other code or do something else entirely, and it does it all flawlessly. All things I could have done myself but nowhere near as fast and right the first time with such thorough test cases. We've reached the point where the AI is usually faster and always less effort overall compared to the old days, even if you have to send a few followup prompts.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#79

Post by foxyv »

gwerbin wrote: post #47
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 c…

I agree, the speed at which the agents work is a problem. It creates an interrupt workflow instead of a flow workflow. This works for some people but I notice that I don't do well that way. Typically I'll have an agent working on a task while I use a separate one in Ask mode just kind of satisfying my curiosity while I wait. This keeps me engaged but makes the interrupts less jarring.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#80

Post by CM30 »

Eh, I feel the productivity argument kinda depends what sort of project you're using it for. If it's a local tool that only needs to solve a very specific problem you personally have, or you're treading well trodden ground represented in the data set (like WordPress plugin or React component development), you could probably just let an LLM handle almost everything and get a perfectly adequate solution in minutes.

And if you don't know anything about programming, or don't care that the solution it'll come up with is potentially flawed, then it's a lot quicker to vibe code up some sort of hack job answer than learn how to do everything manually. I'm pretty sure that my non-technical parents or grandparents could ask Claude or ChatGPT to build a simple website for their small business or charity, and have something workable within an hour or two.

For a software engineer, AI might not make them any more productive. For a non-engineer, it's basically magic.

The unsustainability thing is more of a concern though, and the external effects of AI are a huge problem. It's just that pure productivity wise, a lot of people will be significantly more productive with these systems than without them.

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