Live data from Hacker News

AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

elroy.bot

131–140 of 218 posts

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#131
post #50

The blog post has a bunch of charts, which gives it a veneer of objectivity and rigor, but in reality it's just all vibes and conjecture. Meanwhile recent empirical studies actually point in the opposite direction, showing that AI use increases inequality, not decrease it. https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250215_FNC... https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/13/h...

> inequality

It's free for everyone with a phone or a laptop.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#132
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this as interloper. What's an extraloper?

An interloper being someone who intrudes or meddles in a situation (inter "between or amid) + loper "to leap or run" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loper ), an extraloper would be someone who dances or leaps around the outside of a subject or meeting with similar annoyances.

Are you sure the extraloper doesn't just run away on tangents?

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the graphs make some really big assumptions that don't seem to be backed up anywhere except AI maximalist head canon. There's also a gap in addressing vibe coded "side projects" that get deployed online as a business. Is the code base super large and complex? No. Is AI capable of taking input from a novice and making something "good enough" in this space? Also no.

The later remarks are very strong assumptions underestimating the power AI tools offer. AI tools are great at unblocking and helping their users explore beyond their own understanding. The tokens in are limited to the users' comprehension, but the tokens out are generated from a vast collection of greater comprehension. For the novice, it's great at unblocking and expanding capabilities. "Good enough" results from no…

> For the novice, it's great at unblocking and expanding capabilities. "Good enough" results from novices are tangible. There is no doubt the volume of "good enough" is perceived as very low by many.

For personal tools or whatever, sure. And the tooling or infrastructure might get there for real projects eventually, but it’s not currently. The prospect of someone naively vibe coding a side business including a payment or authentication system or something that stores PII— all areas developers learn the dangers of through the wisdom gained only by experience— sends shivers down my spine. Even amateur coders trying that stuff try old fashioned way must read their code and the docs and info on the net and such and will likely get some sense of the danger. Yesterday I saw someone here recounting a disastrous data breach of their friend’s vibe coded side hustle.

The big problem I see here is people not knowing enough to realize that something functioning is almost never a sign that it is “good enough” for many things they might assume it is. Gaining the amount of base knowledge to evaluate things like form security nearly makes the idea of vibe coding useless for anything more than hobby or personal utility projects.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#134
I mean it makes sense that if the AI is trained on human-created things it can never actually do better than that. Can't bust through the ceiling of what it was trained on. And at the same time, it AI gives that power to people that just aren't very smart or good at something.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#136
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interloper being someone who intrudes or meddles in a situation (inter "between or amid) + loper "to leap or run" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loper ), an extraloper would be someone who dances or leaps around the outside of a subject or meeting with similar annoyances.

Are you sure the extraloper doesn't just run away on tangents?

They run on secants towards the outside.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what "flag" is for: > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No it's not. There are a lot of stories that aren't worthy of flagging, but they're just low-quality. And I've seen people abuse flagging because they treat it like downvoting. Flagging removes a story from the front page entirely, whereas ideally downvoting would simply deprioritize it, i.e. a bunch of downvotes would move it from #5 rank to #60 or something, not get rid of it entirely. I've definitely had to e-mail…

i have seen a lot of speculation about my "false" comment on this story. i think the story is bullshit and AI 100% it raises the ceiling and doesn't help incompetent people that much. you see it over and over where incompetent people use AI and submit legal docs with hallucinations or have egregious security holes in their vibe coded projects. but i have seen highly skilled folks get month long projects done in a day with higher quality, more tests and more features than they would in the past. explaining all that didn't seem necessary since the whole thing is just not true.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#139

It’s definitely about wage stagnation.

Wage suppression. The capital ownership class knows exactly how to weaponize the hype as an excuse now. It's also curious how software engineers working on it are cheerfully building their potential future replacements and long-term insecurity.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#140

In things that I am comparatively good at (e.g., coding), I can see that it helps 'raise the ceiling' as a result of allowing me to complete more of the low level tasks more effectively. But it is true as well that it hasn't raised my personal bar in capability, as far as I can measure. When it comes to things I am not good at at, it has given me the illusion of getting 'up to speed' faster. Perhaps that's a personal…

> When it comes to things I am not good at at, it has given me the illusion of getting 'up to speed' faster. Perhaps that's a personal ceiling raise?

Disagree. It's only the illusion of a personal ceiling raise.

---

Example 1:

Alice has a simple basic text only blog. She wants to update the styles on his website, but wants to keep his previous posts.

She does research to learn how to update a page's styles to something more "modern". She updates the homepage, post page, about page. She doesn't know how to update the login page without breaking it because it uses different elements she hasn't seen before.

She does research to learn what the new form elements and on the way sees recommendations on how to build login systems. She builds some test pages to learn how to restyle forms and while she's at it, also learns how to build login systems.

She redesigns her login page.

Alice believes she has raised the ceiling what she can accomplish.

Alice is correct.

---

Example 2:

Bob has a simple basic text only blog. He wants to update the styles on his website, but wants to keep his previous posts.

He asks the LLM to help him update styles to something more "modern". He updates the homepage, post page, about page, and login page.

The login page doesn't work anymore.

Bob asks the LLM to fix it and after some back and forth it works again.

Bob believes she has raised the ceiling what he can accomplish.

Bob is incorrect. He has not increased his own knowledge or abilities.

A week later his posts are gone.

---

There are only a few differences between both examples:

1. Alice does not use LLMs, but Bob does. 2. Alice knows how to redesign pages, but Bob does not. 3. Alice knows how login systems work, but Bob does not.

Bob simply asked the LLM to redesign the login page, and it did.

When the page broke, he checked that he was definitely using the right username and password but it still wasn't working. He asked the LLM to change the login page to always work with his username and password. The LLM produced a login form that now always accepted a hard coded username and password. The hardcoded check was taking place on the client where the username and password were now publicly viewable.

Bob didn't ask the LLM to make the form secure, he didn't even know that he had to ask. He didn't know what any of the footguns to avoid were because he didn't even know there were any footguns to avoid in the first place.

Both Alice and Bob started from the same place. They both lacked knowledge on how login systems should be built. That knowledge was known because it is documented somewhere, but it was unknown to them. It is a "known unknown".

When Alice learned how to style form elements, she also read links on how forms work which lead her to links on how login systems work. That knowledge for her went from an unknown known to a "known known" (knowledge that is known, that she now also knows).

When Bob asked the LLM to redesign his login page, at no point in time does the knowledge of how login systems work become a "known known" for him. And a week later some bored kid finds the page, right clicks on the form, clicks inspect and sees a username and password to log in with.

Post reply on HN