My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

I have been using agentic AI to help me get started writing an OpenGL-targeted game from scratch (no engine). I have almost no background experience with computer graphics code, but I understand most of the fundamentals pretty well and I have almost 13 years of software experience. It's just that the exact syntax as well as the various techniques used to address common problems are not in my arsenal yet.

My experience has been decent. I don't know that it has truly saved me much time but I can understand how it FEELS like it has. Because it's writing so much code (sometimes), it's hard to vet all of it and it can introduce subtle bugs based on faulty assumptions it made about different things. So, it will dump a lot of code at once, which will get me 90% of the way there, but I could spend an hour or two trying to nudge it to fix it to get it to 100%. And then I will probably still need to go back and reorganize it, or have it go back and reorganize it. And then sometimes it will make small adjustments to existing, committed code that will subtly break other things.

Something that has surprised me (in hindsight, it isn't surprising) is that sometimes when I feel like it misunderstood something or made a faulty assumption, it was actually me that had the misunderstanding or ignorance which is humbling at times and a good learning experience. It is also pretty good at bug hunting and DEFINITELY very good at writing unit tests.

I count myself as pretty lucky that this domain seems to be very well covered in training. Given the law of averages, most people's domains will probably be covered. I'm not sure how it would fare with a niche domain.

The problem with LLMs for code is that they are still way too slow and expensive to be generally practical for non-trivial software projects. I'm not saying that they aren't useful, they are excellent at filling out narrow code units that don't require a lot of context and can be quickly or automatically verified to be correct. You will save a lot of time using them this way.

On the other hand, if you slip up and give it too much to chew on or just roll bad RNG, it will spin itself into a loop attempting many variations of crap, erasing and trying over, but never actually coming closer to a correct solution, eventually repeating obviously incorrect solutions over and over again that should have been precluded based on feedback from the previous failed solutions. If you're using a SOTA model, you can easily rack up $5 or more on a single task if you give it more than 30 minutes of leeway to work it out. Sure, you could use a cheaper model, but all that does is make the fundamental problem worse - i.e. you're spending money but not actually getting any closer to completed work.

Yes, the models are getting smarter and more efficient, but we're still at least a decade away from being able to run useful models at practical speeds locally. Aggressively quantized 70b models simply can't cut it, and even then, you need something like 10k tps to start building LLM tools that can overcome the LLM's lack of reasoning skills through brute force guess and check techniques.

Perhaps some of the AI skeptics are a bit too harsh, but they're certainly not crazy in the context of breathless hype.

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

Seriously? Is this argument in all earnestly "No profession has been more contemptuous therefore we should keep on keeping on"? Should we as an industry not bother to try and improve our ethics? Why don't we all just make munitions for a living and wash our hands of guilt because "the industry was always like this".

Seems a bit ironic against the backdrop of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek>:

> All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved.

(although perhaps this is tongue-in-cheek given the last year)

"If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing"

I am actually doing this the whole day long. For example i have setup today a fresh new debian vps for some interns. U had to provide them with a docker system, support for go, nginx stuff and i made a quick hello world app in angular with a go backend. I could have done it myself. But i asked chatgpt to provide me with all the commands and code. No idea how an agent could do this for me. I got everything running in like 30 minutes.

This guy may be right about a lot of things said here but he's smug and it's off-putting. preaching to the choir.