Live data from Hacker News

AI Has a Discovery Problem

mhacevedo.com

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#12
If I know the code behind the button, I don't have to press it to know what it will do.

If I know how LLM work, and what it is trained on, I don't have to "explore" it to understand what it can do for me. The only variable is how deeply one knows how "LLMs" work, and that makes up all the on going arguments by lay people...

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#13
post #7

that's super true, it;s very hard for non-tech people to use ai at its peak power

That's our moat, right there. I'm starting doing clean-up jobs now, advising non-technical users on where they're going wrong. I had a guy recently who'd spent well over a month on Claude, running up the wrong tree on a research question. AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.

I'm also convinced software engineering tools like git and markdown are currently the best way to use AI for most things even unrelated to software development. E.g., I think using markdown notes + LaTeX + git for writing contracts is more efficient than using Word + Copilot, which are the tools I would expect a lawyer to use.

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#14
post #7

that's super true, it;s very hard for non-tech people to use ai at its peak power

That's our moat, right there. I'm starting doing clean-up jobs now, advising non-technical users on where they're going wrong. I had a guy recently who'd spent well over a month on Claude, running up the wrong tree on a research question. AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.

it can't basically, because all the ai's are build around the tech community, doing complex coding automation etc. nobody thinking about how normal user gone use it

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#15
I was trying to teach a co-worker some agentic stuff today, and this is totally true. Especially if they are using gimpy tools like Github Copilot.

The harness matters. None of my super-powered CLI + skills stuff worked like how it does in a more powerful harness like Codex or Claude Code.

Try telling someone to imagine it could do something amazing, if they switch to a completely different tool.

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#16
The biggest problem with “AI” is that big corps are shoving it down our throats. AI has existed since nearly invention of computing, notorious example are video games, but no one marketed them with AI, why? because that was not the point, and besides, today’s AI is overloaded term, they are represented as if they are capable of starting new war, but in reality they are repeating the same stuff over and over again they “learned” from Reddit posts, books, codebases etc. in an indeterministic way.

In most cases you don’t even need them. In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's our moat, right there. I'm starting doing clean-up jobs now, advising non-technical users on where they're going wrong. I had a guy recently who'd spent well over a month on Claude, running up the wrong tree on a research question. AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.

I'm also convinced software engineering tools like git and markdown are currently the best way to use AI for most things even unrelated to software development. E.g., I think using markdown notes + LaTeX + git for writing contracts is more efficient than using Word + Copilot, which are the tools I would expect a lawyer to use.

totally agree with the repo idea. working with AI in a git repo and allowing it to write markdown files it slowly builds context over time. i knew a guy who had been using the same session for weeks because he felt he had invested too much time in building the context and was scared to close the session.

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#18

Does it really? Or is it that they're all pretty much good enough and so you just go with what's cheapest or what you're used to? For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage. Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in…

It’s pretty well established by now that harness matters as much as a model. Even if a model is smart enough to work around harness’ limitations, it may take it way more time, context and money.

Re: AI Has a Discovery Problem

#20

  That’s the gap between a skilled AI user and everyone else. Take a non-technical marketing person and someone fluent in agents and tool use. The agent-fluent person can watch the marketer work for an hour and immediately see a dozen things to automate, delegate, or reinvent, including things the marketer hasn’t even tried yet. But put the most intelligent tool in the world in front of the marketer, and they’re staring at a blank prompt, unsure what to type. All that intelligence, and no way to see it.
The author perfectly describes non-technical people who are AI skeptics. Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
Post reply on HN