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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#211

Post by input_sh »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #101
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hardware industry news is any indication, hardware costs aren't going to be going down for GPUs, RAM, or much of anything over the next 3-5 years.

Maybe, but I seriously doubt that new DRAM and chip FABs aren't being planned and built right now to push supply and demand to more of an equilibrium. NVIDIA and Samsung and whoever else would love to expand their market than to wait for a competitor to expand it for them.

How long do you think it takes for those factories to go from nothing to making state-of-the-art chips at a scale that's large enough to influence the supply even by 1%?

There are plenty of them being built, yes. Some of them will even start outputting products soon enough. None of them are gonna start outputting products at a scale large enough to matter any time soon. Certainly not before 2030, and a lot of things can change until then which might make the companies abandon their efforts all together or downscale their investments to the point where that due date gets pushed back much further.

That's not even discussing how easier it is for an already-established player to scale up their supply versus a brand-new competitor to go from zero to one.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#212

Post by tern »

xeyownt wrote: post #207
tern wrote: post #206

I think this is the wrong mental model. The correct one is: 'AI makes everything easier, but it's a skill in itself, and learning that skill is just as hard as learning any other skill.' For a more complete understand, you also have to add: 'we're in the ENIAC era of AI. The equivalents of high-level languages and operating systems haven't yet been invented.' I have no doubt the next few years will birth a "context e…

Funny how people only looks at the easy part, but not the cost part. "I did it with AI" = "I did it with an army of CPU burning considerable resources and owned by a foreign company." Give me an AI agent that I own and operate 100%, and the comparison will be fair. Otherwise it's not progress, but rather a theft at planetary scale.

If you want to play that game, you need to offer a fair comparison against the cost of "operating" the equivalent human being(s), measured in caloric input, waste output, etc.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#213

Post by palmotea »

AuthAuth wrote: post #54
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal.

Has that been properly adjudicated? That's what the AI companies and their fans wish, but wishing for something doesn't make it true.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#214

Post by Balinares »

le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

Once you realize that coding LLMs are by construction cargo culting as a service, it makes sense what they can and cannot do.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#215

Post by Capricorn2481 »

EnPissant wrote: post #194
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it still fumbles even when limiting context. Asked it to spot check a simple rate limiter I wrote in TS. Super basic algorithm: let one action through every 250ms at least, sleeping if necessary. It found bogus errors in my code 3 times because it failed to see that I was using a mutex to prevent reentrancy. This was about 12 lines of code in total. My rubber duck debugging session was insightful only because I h…

Try again with gpt-5.3-codex xhigh.

Try again with Opus 4.5

Try again with Sonnet 4

Try again with GPT-4.1

Here I thought these things were supposed to be able to handle twelve lines of code, but they just get worse.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#216

Post by vohk »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #210
20k wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#217

Post by bayindirh »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #210
20k wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?

While this is from 2022, here you go:

https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

I'm sure if someone prompts correctly, they can do the same thing today. LLMs can't generate something they don't know.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#218

Post by Capricorn2481 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #157

I swear most of the comments on posts like these are no more original than an LLM, and often less so.

Almost like it's been the exact same debate for two years and it's not worth spamming tech forums about on either side.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#219

Post by sandos »

redox99 wrote: post #55
ekidd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't have a truly global view, and so it slowly degrades even good structure, especially if run without human feedback and review. But you're right that good structure really helps.

AGENTS.md is for that global view.

You can't possibly cram everything into AGENTS, also LLMs still do not perfectly give the same weight to all of its context, ie. it still ignores instructions.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#220

Post by TrackerFF »

My experience has been that if you fully embrace vibe coding...you can get some neat stuff accomplished, but the technical debt you accumulate is of such magnitude that you're basically a slave to the machine.

Once the project crosses a couple of thousands of line of code, none of which you've written yourself, it becomes difficult to actually keep up what's happening. Even reviewing can become challenging since you get it all at once, and the LLM-esque coding style can at times be bloated and obnoxious.

I think in the end, with how things are right now, we're going to see the rise of disposable code and software. The models can churn out apps / software which will solve your specific problem, but that's about it. Probably a big risk to all the one-trick pony SaaS companies out there.

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