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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

thoughts.hmmz.org

131–140 of 252 posts

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly ann…

Ah yes the “you’re not paying the ai labs enough” argument.

My total usage for this month is less than one days pay.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

Compilers are orders of magnitude more reliable than LLMs. There's a reason the saying is "it's not a compiler error".

I have a standing challenge to my co-workers that valid compiler errors will be rewarded like a birthday party, with the baked goods, alcohol, or sweets of their choice. It's only been redeemed once, and I've found less than a dozen unreported compiler bugs myself.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#133

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

Well, making throw-away things you never use could also be the definition of a hobby ... and hobbies are arguably good, and differ from "work" in that your goal is not to ship a product, but to scratch an itch. For some people AI assisted vibe coding scratches an itch. For others, not. Of course some hobbies turn into an unhealthy obsession, but that's not a new phenomenon.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be more convincing if you put up two or more examples of what is there to learn.

Go off and run a comparison of Qwen 3.6 27B and GLM 5.1 GGUF ( https://huggingface.co/ubergarm/GLM-5.1-GGUF ) at IQ2_KL 261.988 GiB (2.985 BPW) and let me know if you learn anything. Or maybe just compare Hermes vs OpenClaw for long-horizon personal agentic tasks. Which one performs better in offline inference personal finance analysis tasks? Or read up on how the `/code-review` workflow works in Opus 4.8 and give me…

> Go off and run a comparison of Qwen 3.6 27B and GLM 5.1 GGUF

You may as well ask to run a comparison between gnu libc 2.42 and musl 1.2.5.

> Hermes vs OpenClaw for long-horizon personal agentic tasks. Which one performs better in offline inference personal finance analysis tasks

What are those tasks? This and the paragraph just after seems very much like a XY problem where all the energy is focusing on resolving the Y, not the X. It's like discussing how we can reach the moon using cannons.

> If you can figure out how to secure agents with simultaneous access to personal data and the internet to run unsupervised while avoiding the lethal trifecta (Willison, 2025) let me know.

If you can figure out how to run user submitted JavaScript inside a webpage with access to the internet and other user personal data, you will have your answer. There's a reason we escape user input before rendering it within the browser. The browser is an executing agent and it doesn't differentiate between your markup and other data you choose to embed in it. Same things happens with the processor if you choose to mix input data with executable code.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#135

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use. In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

Has it been part of a longer term shift or just something for the past few weeks? What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lived experience over the past few months is proving you wrong. I started with your position and have since been able to see how good the tools are when properly used. I've also noticed a huge gap in ability among engineers and I think the gap is widening. My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly ann…

> My theory is that some folks have the premium tools and some don't and the ones that don't are sort of in this weird limbo where they are sort of stubbornly annoyed at the idea of having to pay for these things so they lash out. At my last job the employer paid for OpenAI access for all of us. Baby sitting an LLM is not my idea of meaningful use of time. And reviewing code that someone else had an LLM spew out even…

So tldr you don't have it now and have no frame of reference.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#137

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, an…

I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code. People who want to write code hate AI because it's doing the part they wanted to do. People who want the end product of the code love AI because they want anything that helps them get to the end product faster. The person who wrote this post feels oddly in neither camp. They like playing with the…

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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so. Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

> Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

r/programminghumor mostly. It was always tongue in cheek, but people took it too seriously.

However, the number of times I’ve gone over to help a colleague and realized they were trying to copy/paste code from SO, without even reading the context of the thread is baffling. Like, why did you expect it to work in the first place? I really try to be humble and not make assumptions about people competencies but it’s really hard to have those experiences and not think the average programmer is just an idiot. It’s no wonder AI is helping people when this was the baseline.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#139
maybe this is the future now, your list of achievement could be anyone's list of achievements. heck even the salespersons at work can do this with AI now. There is no affinity to it. Future will potentially be like this, marked will be overflooded by artificiel software.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#140
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

I started coding before Stack Overflow existed, and those were the days when coding was most fun for me. Learning HyperCard Basic from the manual that came with the computer was so full of joyful moments.

Stack Overflow had it's heyday, but by the time AI came around I already wasn't using it. Stack Overflow for a long time has been inundated with the kind of people who think everything is the XY problem[1], and arrogantly assume they know what your problem is better than you do. Stack Overflow was all-but-useless for at least 5 years before AI broke into the public eye.

[1] https://xyproblem.info/

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