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Is it all just vapourware?

kirahowe.com

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#201

Post by dd8601fn »

ImaCake wrote: post #157
dd8601fn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are Amazon and Walmarts mobile apps still janky crap that costs them money? Why does Meta still have four redundant, broken sign-up flows before you can give them money to advertise? Wherever these “10000x” engineering gains are… I’m wondering why they’re only for shit nobody sees or touches.

Those websites are janky despite having all the (non AI) solutions available already. They suck for reasons independent of the quality of LLMs. I have not worked inside a megacorp but my understanding is they suck because of what are essentially political roadblocks within the organisation.

Ok, let’s assume that’s the case and we’d never see those improve under any circumstances.

Where are all the killer new things? All we see are glorified hobby projects (guilty as charged) and an unimpressive pace of equally unimpressive feature additions to all the same old stuff.

Businesses with resources out there should tackling huge things we all want, that they never could have undertaken. But I’m not seeing it. Everything is just… more or less the same. And this tooling didn’t arrive last Wednesday.

Or did we get magical AI at a time when we’re also completely out of ideas? That seems unlikely.

This shit just isn’t adding up. We’re not seeing anything that isn’t more “here’s some more ai tools and services… they’re basically the same as the ones you saw last month.”

What for? Someone show me.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#202

Post by cmyk_student »

internet2000 wrote: post #125
gr_norm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, where are all the new features in the open-source projects I use? Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? Why hasn't CUDA been fully reverse-engineered as an open source toolchain? These are unreasonable expectations, but only in response to unreasonable claims of productivity. What before took ten years should now only take one, right? It seems likely that the gains from generating tons of code are being offset…

> Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? My guess is that open source folks overindex on being anti-AI.

Just my experience, but the relatively few fully AI-generated merge requests we've received that were "big features" were all really bad.

For instance, we had one person submit a merge request to convert the entire GIMP codebase into Python, and it was just tons of files with stubcode implementations. Another person submitted a fix for our OpenEXR plug-in to load YCbCr images, and when I reviewed it, they'd "imported" a non-existent version of the library that had an imaginary "OpenYCbCrOpenEXR ()" function. :)

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#203

Post by satvikpendem »

20k wrote: post #184
satvikpendem wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is whether it's a false dichotomy now, because models like Fable can write better code than most devs I know.

Then why isn't it showing up in open source at all? The people who file PRs are just regular average devs, but the quality of LLM PRs seems to be universally crap in comparison

It is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237476

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#205

Post by ImaCake »

dd8601fn wrote: post #201
ImaCake wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those websites are janky despite having all the (non AI) solutions available already. They suck for reasons independent of the quality of LLMs. I have not worked inside a megacorp but my understanding is they suck because of what are essentially political roadblocks within the organisation.

Ok, let’s assume that’s the case and we’d never see those improve under any circumstances. Where are all the killer new things? All we see are glorified hobby projects (guilty as charged) and an unimpressive pace of equally unimpressive feature additions to all the same old stuff. Businesses with resources out there should tackling huge things we all want, that they never could have undertaken. But I’m not seeing it.…

>Where are all the killer new things?

I agree they are over-hyped. Maybe the problem is that all the things LLMs are great for are essentially quality of life improvements. There are a dozen killer apps worth of functionality I get out of LLMs - near instant proofreader, one-shot code bugfixer, excellent cursory research tool, bibtext generator, etc. All of these things extend what I can do a bit but none of them instantly result in me being able to generate category killing apps. They still make stupid mistakes, they don't reduce my workload, but they reduce cognitive load on mundane tasks.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#206

Post by padjo »

raffael_de wrote: post #199
padjo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, much like having access to a circular saw won't make me a carpenter, having access to an LLM won't make the average person a software engineer.

you're moving the goal post as language models and agents aren't marketed as something like circular saw but a team of carpenters that you just tell what you want and they do it for you.

I never claimed to agree with the marketing.
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