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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

#111

Post by krupan »

sho wrote: post #86
krupan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know, if I held an important opinion about something, and there was a fairly easy way to conclusively validate or falsify it one way or the other, and all it was going to take was a couple of bucks, I'd just pay it. Having good info about the world I live in is important to me. Just saying.

So you'll buy the supplements I'm selling? They'll cure everything that ails you, I promise ;-)

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#112

Post by packetlost »

lordnacho wrote: post #59

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…

Zitron is a hack who sells anger to people who don't know any better. Just because he's right about some things doesn't mean you should give him the time of day.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#113

Post by eudamoniac »

Aurornis wrote: post #105
eudamoniac wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those tools were adopted organically by users because they were obviously good. AI is pushed from leaders onto users despite the users not thinking they are good. If my boss decides the whole company is switching to emacs I think he should have some evidence to support that decision, yes.

> AI is pushed from leaders onto users despite the users not thinking they are good. Developers are pushing companies to give them access to AI tools and increase their token budgets.

That phenomenon is more rare than what I mentioned. Every* tech company is forcing AI. A few AI enthusiasts want more of it. Those are two unrelated situations. I can find developers pushing companies to use F#; that does not mean anything, and is very different from my boss switching the whole stack to F# suddenly. The former is someone wanting to use something he likes, the latter is forcing everyone to use something they may not like and that probably has big effects on the company, so should require evidence that the change is beneficial.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#114

Post by sho »

eudamoniac wrote: post #95
sho wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you think so many people who have used the same models you do, who are otherwise intelligent, and who should be able to prove to themselves your position in five minutes, don't? I'm somewhat agnostic about the whole thing, and I find the utter confidence you display strange and arrogant. Some really good devs say AI is not that great. Some other really good devs say it is great. Why is one side of them automat…

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?

I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest.

No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring.

The only honest answer to the question, "Is modern frontier AI helpful in most software engineering?" is "Yes, of course it is." Anyone answering differently than that is, by now, simply wrong. Why they are wrong may vary, but they are wrong.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#115

Post by eudamoniac »

solumunus wrote: post #110
eudamoniac wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pump out stable features >data corruption...urgent fix required Do you people hear yourselves?

Are you claiming you’ve never been responsible for a bug that caused data corruption? Perhaps not, but it’s hardly a novel post-LLM bug. It’s regular stuff and obviously you know that.

As a 2 man developer team working on a mono repo with clear and simple architecture, no I have never caused urgent data corruption or seen it happen. That is more something that happens in codebases that are too big and complex to fully grasp. That it has already happened to you in this scenario does not bode well for the future stability of your codebase, in my opinion.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#116

Post by sho »

krupan wrote: post #111
sho wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if I held an important opinion about something, and there was a fairly easy way to conclusively validate or falsify it one way or the other, and all it was going to take was a couple of bucks, I'd just pay it. Having good info about the world I live in is important to me. Just saying.

So you'll buy the supplements I'm selling? They'll cure everything that ails you, I promise ;-)

Let's try another tack. What would it take to change your mind?

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#117

Post by sho »

podgorniy wrote: post #56
sho wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Cute, but I'm not the one who wrote the blog post.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#118

Post by kalkin »

krupan wrote: post #70
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'…

"Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools." That's more than a caveat. That says, this study is unreliable. And why? "The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without…

The people who chose to use AI would be the ones who would be fooling themselves, right? But they measured actually positive productivity there.

METR's concern makes most sense if it's about the inability to measure a consistent trend over time, not about the validity of the study for the population that participated.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#119

Post by kalkin »

leecommamichael wrote: post #96
krupan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately, given participant feedback and surveys, we believe that the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools." That's more than a caveat. That says, this study is unreliable. And why? "The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without…

Don't let the downvotes get you down. They don't know who funds or constitutes METR. If you actually read these papers, you'll find they cite themselves 4-5 times each publication. They also consider "hosting an HTTP server using Python" to be a "long time horizon" task.

The OP cited a METR study... if you don't think they're credible, fine, but it's hard for me to see how it could be intellectually honest to cite them when their research is helpful to your argument and discredit them when it's not. One might even call this approach "fooling yourself".

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#120

Post by eudamoniac »

sho wrote: post #114
eudamoniac wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think so many people who have used the same models you do, who are otherwise intelligent, and who should be able to prove to themselves your position in five minutes, don't? I'm somewhat agnostic about the whole thing, and I find the utter confidence you display strange and arrogant. Some really good devs say AI is not that great. Some other really good devs say it is great. Why is one side of them automat…

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't? I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest. No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring. The only honest answer to the question…

I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering".

Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough.

Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it? Well, I don't know. In this case I understand the code less, and the code is probably in a poor state, but it is further along in the feature list. Whether that tradeoff is a net benefit to whatever metric you care about is debatable.

I think most will agree that the extreme case in which you understand zero and the codebase is spaghetti (true vibecoding), but it has a bunch of features, is not good for most professional contexts, because we have seen this results in a high bugrate and eventual loss of trust in the tool and inability for the AI to maintain invariants due to context size.

So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

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