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Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

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Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#21

Post by notachatbot123 »

janaagaard wrote: post #12

A Danish audio newspaper host / podcaster had the exact apposite conclusion when he used ChatGPT to write the manuscript for one his episodes. He ended up spending as much time as he usually does because he had to fact check everything that the LLM came up with. Spoiler: It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so. To him, it was the most fun part, that is writing the…

> It made up a lot of stuff despite it being very clear in the prompt, that it should not do so.

LLMs are not sentient. They are designed to make stuff up based on probability.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#22

Post by rijoja »

PeterStuer wrote: post #13
forrestthewoods wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends entirely on the type of programming you do. If all you build is CRUD apps then sure. Personally I’ve never actually made any of those things — with or without AI

You are both right. B2B for instance is mostly fairly template stuff built from CRUD and some business rules. Even some of the more perceived as 'creative' niches such as music scoring or 3D games are fairly route interactions with some 'engine'. And I'm not even sure these 'template adjacent' regurgitations are what the crude LLM is best at, as the output needs to pass some rigorous inflexible test to 'pass'. Halluc…

> "And if as a CIO you believe that your prohibition on using LLMs for coding because of 'divulging company secrets' holds, you are either strip searching your employees on the way in and out, or wilfully blind."

Right so if you are in certain areas you'll be legally required not to send your work to whatever 3:rd party that promises to handle it the cheapest.

Also so since this is about actually "interesting" work if you are doing cutting edge research on lets say military or medical applications** you definitely should take things like this seriously.

Obviously you can do LLM's locally if you don't feel like paying up for programmers who likes to code, and who wants to have in-depth knowledge of whatever they are doing.

** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2eeg9gygyno

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#23

Post by mattmanser »

viccis wrote: post #18

The one thing AI is good at is building greenfield projects from scratch using established tools. If want you want to accomplish can be done by a moderately capable coder with some time reading the documentation for the various frameworks involved, then I view AI as fairly similar to the scaffolding that happened with Ruby on Rails back in the day when I typed "rails new myproject". So LLMs are awesome if I want to s…

I get what point you're trying to make, and agree, but you've picked a bad example.

That boilerplate heavy, skill-less, frontend stuff like configuring a map control with something like react-leaflet seems to be precisely what AI is good at.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#24

Post by PeterStuer »

rijoja wrote: post #22
PeterStuer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are both right. B2B for instance is mostly fairly template stuff built from CRUD and some business rules. Even some of the more perceived as 'creative' niches such as music scoring or 3D games are fairly route interactions with some 'engine'. And I'm not even sure these 'template adjacent' regurgitations are what the crude LLM is best at, as the output needs to pass some rigorous inflexible test to 'pass'. Halluc…

> "And if as a CIO you believe that your prohibition on using LLMs for coding because of 'divulging company secrets' holds, you are either strip searching your employees on the way in and out, or wilfully blind." Right so if you are in certain areas you'll be legally required not to send your work to whatever 3:rd party that promises to handle it the cheapest. Also so since this is about actually "interesting" work i…

Of course you should not violate company policy, and some environments will indeed have more stringent controls and measures, but there is a whole world of grey were the CIO has put in place a moratorium on LLM but where some people will quickly crunch out the day's work at home with an AI anyways so they look more productive.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#25

Post by rijoja »

PeterStuer wrote: post #24
rijoja wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "And if as a CIO you believe that your prohibition on using LLMs for coding because of 'divulging company secrets' holds, you are either strip searching your employees on the way in and out, or wilfully blind." Right so if you are in certain areas you'll be legally required not to send your work to whatever 3:rd party that promises to handle it the cheapest. Also so since this is about actually "interesting" work i…

Of course you should not violate company policy, and some environments will indeed have more stringent controls and measures, but there is a whole world of grey were the CIO has put in place a moratorium on LLM but where some people will quickly crunch out the day's work at home with an AI anyways so they look more productive.

You can of course run consider running your own LLM.

I suppose the problem isn't really the technology itself but rather the quality of the employees. There would've been a lot of people cheating the system before, lets say just by copy pasting or tricking your coworkers into doing the work for you.

However if you are working with something actually interesting, chances are that you're not working with disingenuous grifters and uneducated and lazy backstabbers, so that's less of a concern as well. If you are working on interesting projects hopefully these people would've been filtered out somewhere along the line.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#26

Post by viccis »

mattmanser wrote: post #23
viccis wrote: post #18

The one thing AI is good at is building greenfield projects from scratch using established tools. If want you want to accomplish can be done by a moderately capable coder with some time reading the documentation for the various frameworks involved, then I view AI as fairly similar to the scaffolding that happened with Ruby on Rails back in the day when I typed "rails new myproject". So LLMs are awesome if I want to s…

I get what point you're trying to make, and agree, but you've picked a bad example. That boilerplate heavy, skill-less, frontend stuff like configuring a map control with something like react-leaflet seems to be precisely what AI is good at.

Yeah it will make a map and plot some stuff on it. It might do well at handling 20 millions pins on the map gracefully even. I doubt it's gonna know to use alpha shapes to complement DBSCAN quite so gracefully.

edit: Just spot checked it and it thinks it's a good idea to use convex hulls.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#27

Post by JimDabell »

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#28

Post by wolvesechoes »

ianbicking wrote: post #8

There's a hundred ways to use AI for any given work. For example if you are doing interesting work and aren't using AI-assisted research tools (e.g., OpenAI Deep Research) then you are missing out on making the work that more interesting by understanding the context and history of the subject or adjacent subjects. This thesis only makes sense if the work is somehow interesting and you also have no desire to extend, e…

> This thesis only makes sense if the work is somehow interesting and you also have no desire to extend, expand, or enrich the work. That's not a plausible position.

Or your interesting work wasn't appearing in training set often enough. Currently I am writing a compiler and runtime for some niche modeling language, and every model I poke for help was rather useless except some obvious things I already know.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#29

Post by n4r9 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20
ssivark wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to see examples of interesting non-boilerplate work that is now possible with AI. Most examples of what I've seen are a repeat of what has been done many times (i.e. probably occurs many times in the training data), but with a small tweak, or for different applications. And I don't mean cutting-edge research like funsearch discovering new algorithm implementations, but more like what the typical coder can now…

> Curious to see examples of interesting non-boilerplate work that is now possible with AI. Previously discussed on HN - oAuth library at cloudflare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166

For a review of this library see https://neilmadden.blog/2025/06/06/a-look-at-cloudflares-ai-...

Upshot: though it's possible to attempt this with (heavily supervised) LLMs, it's not recommended.

Re: Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI

#30

Post by mhuffman »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

If AI can do the easiest 50% of our tasks, then it means we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks. This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

>This has a lot of implications, but it does generally result in the job being more interesting overall.

One implication is that when AI providers claim that "AI can make a person TWICE as productive!"

... business owners seem to be hearing that as "Those users should cost me HALF as much!"

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