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What if useful AI is a fantasy?
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#12Useful AI is.
Useful LLM is not.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#13> What if ?
I find it baffling that some people had to find this out the hard way. You already knew that it's — if not more work — then at least more tedious to study existing code than write your own.
People have been choosing greenfield rewrites over grokking legacy code since forever.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#14We can already see (net) useful so-called AI is more than a fantasy.
It's a psychotic delusion.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#15Anecdotally, my 81 year old father was able to point his phone at the boiler and ask Gemini what the error message meant. It correctly identified the boiler model, identified the error code being displayed on the screen, explained what it meant, provided him with a way to confirm the problem by checking the water pressure guage and then asked to be shown the underside. It again correctly identified and described to h…
> That kind of thing is no fantasy and was amazing to witness.
How about the case where the "AI" misided the error code?
Did you test that? Result could be even more amazing...
> He was able to do all this instead of spending hundreds on getting a plumber out at night
... or consulting the manual.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#16I seriously don’t understand the naysayers around here. Have they just not used anything past gpt4? You can’t just outsource all of your thinking to them, but they’re obviously useful.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#17It's obviously useful - we have to figure out best practices.
It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#18Anecdotally, my 81 year old father was able to point his phone at the boiler and ask Gemini what the error message meant. It correctly identified the boiler model, identified the error code being displayed on the screen, explained what it meant, provided him with a way to confirm the problem by checking the water pressure guage and then asked to be shown the underside. It again correctly identified and described to h…
Seems we are many to have had the exact same experience with the boiler and an LLM (Claude in my case). +1.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#19It's obviously useful - we have to figure out best practices.
It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.
It's delusional for someone to contemplate that millions of developers out there are just churning out 'non usable stuff' and don't care about quality and that somehow you have some 'magic insight' they don't have.
And lacking in self awareness to publicize that.
Obviously some people are using it recklessly, it's the same with everything.
Do you think it's more likely that 'the entire world is wrong and you are right' ... OR ... that you just personally have not figured out how to use the technology in way that makes sense and/or you have a bad sense of of what quality means in most contexts.
AI produces easily 'better than human' code where it has a lot of guardrails, and is probably 10x better than humans at hunting down and fixing bugs.
Software is 90% 'maintenance' , and a well maintained code base provide ample basis for the AI to understand what design and formatting to use for a given solution.
It definitely falls down on it's own architecture, it's not that hard to work along with the AI.
It doesn't matter what we think of Altman or whoever, or whatever or AGI or 'the bubble' - that's all noise. It's literally the most blatantly obvious 'useful' thing to happen to tech since the advent of machines - it takes a 'collapse of intellectual contextualization' to not realize that.
You're watching cars replace horses, they are not the same thing.
Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?
#20Usefulness depends on intended job to be done. A hair dryer isn't very useful at drying clothes. If someone spent a lifetime mastering woodworking with hand tools, and then was shown a couple very early rudimentary power tools (lacking safety features, crude features, etc) they would rightly conclude they weren't useful. The artisan can do better work faster with less risk of dismemberment without them. Prior to LLMs…
The author of the article mainly talks about agentic programming, code generation, and reasoning. Ans very rightly identifies a big problem with agentic programming, in my experience. If developers can't maintain the software without AI, it's doubtful they can steer AI to maintain it either. Maybe this is not true and we can tell AI something like 'reduce the number of lines of code' until the essential software is exposed and pared down to a quantity and modularity that humans can then participate.
No doubt, most of the value creation is outside of creating software. But if Nvidia and Anthropic do succeed in making better hardware and better software, then the positive reinforcement loop does seem like it could take off. And coding is a big part of that.
Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom.