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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#231

Post by sanderjd »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #166

> Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania It's not that it's a fad. It's that the hype has gotten way ahead of the capability. CEOs laying off double digit percentages of their workforce because they believe that in 6 months AI will actually be able to do all those jobs and they want to get the message out to Wall St to juice the stock price today…

Both things can be true, and in my view, they are. I think there is a lot of "there" there with these tools, and increasingly so, and also that lots of people are out over their skis with the hype.

The key is to learn the useful tools and techniques while remaining realistic and open-eyed about their limitations.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#233

Post by ryukoposting »

mjburgess wrote: post #77

Can we get a video of a workday conducted by these people? Unless there's a significant sense of what people are working on, and how LLMs are helping -- there's no point engaging -- there's no detail here. Sure, if your job is to turn out tweaks to a wordpress theme, presumably that's now 10x faster. If its to work on a new in-house electric motor in C for some machine, presumably that's almost entirely unaffected. N…

I write embedded firmware for wireless mesh networks and satcom. Blend of Rust and C.

I spent ~4 months using Copilot last year for hobby projects, and it was a pretty disappointing experience. At its best, it was IntelliSense but slower. At its worst, it was trying to inject 30 lines of useless BS.

I only realized there was an "agent" in VS Code because they hijacked my ctrl+i shortcut in a recent update. You can't point it at a private API without doing some GitHub org-level nonsense. As far as my job is concerned, it's a non-feature until you can point it your own API without jumping through hoops.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#234

Post by mvdtnz »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

> If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things.

I don't think this follows. Anyone can see that 10-ton excavator is hundreds or even thousands of times more efficient than a man with a shovel. That doesn't mean you can start a company up staffed only with excavators. Firstly you obviously need people operating the excavator. Secondly the excavator is incredibly efficient at moving lots of dirt around, but no crew could perform any non-trivial job without all the tasks that the excavator is not good out - planning, loading/unloading, prepping the site, fine work (shovelling dirt around pipes and wires), etc.

AI is a tool. It will mean companies can run much leaner. This doesn't imply they can do everything a company needs to do.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#235

Post by steego »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

Approximately speaking, what do you want to see put up?

I ask this because it reads like you have a specific challenge in mind when it comes to generative AI and it sounds like anything short of "proof of the unlimited powers" will fall short of being deemed "useful".

Here's the deal: Reasonable people aren't claiming this stuff is a silver bullet or a panacea. They're not even suggesting it should be used without supervision. It's useful when used by people who understand its limitations and leverage its strengths.

If you want to see how it's been used by someone who was happy with the results, and is willing to share their results, you can scroll down a few stories on the front-page and check the commit history of this project:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits...

Now here's the deal: These people aren't trying to prove anything to you. They're just sharing the results of an experiment where a very talented developer used these tools to build something useful.

So let me ask you this: Can we at least agree that these tools can be of some use to talented developers?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#236

Post by tom_ »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…

And today everybody has a smartphone, pretty much. So what difference did it make, the opinion you had, whatever it was? In the end, none at all.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#237

Post by marxism »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

I think we're talking past each other. There's always been a threshold: above it, code changes are worth the effort; below it, they sit in backlog purgatory. AI tools so far seem to lower implementation costs, moving the threshold down so more backlog items become viable. The "5x productivity" crowd is excited about this expanded scope, while skeptics correctly note the highest value work hasn't fundamentally changed.

I think what's happening is two groups using "productivity" to mean completely different things: "I can implement 5x more code changes" vs "I generate 5x more business value." Both experiences are real, but they're not the same thing.

https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/ai-productivity-parado...

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#238

Post by ChicagoDave »

There are many aspects to AI push back.

- all creatives are flat against it because it’s destroying their income streams and outright stealing their intellectual property

- some technical leaders are skeptical because early returns were very bad and they have not updated their investigations to the latest tools and models, which are already significantly ahead of even six months ago

- a tech concern is how do we mentor new developers if they don’t know how to code or develop logic. LLMs are great IF you already know what you’re doing

- talent is deeply concerned that they will be reduced and replaced, going from high paying careers to fast food salaries

We have a lot of work to balance productivity with the benefits to society. “Let them eat cake,” is not going to work this time either.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#239

Post by rybosome »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

Many, many people are in fact “using the code it generated on its own”. I’ve been putting LLM-assisted PRs into production for months.

With no disrespect meant, if you’re unable to find utility in these tools, then you aren’t using them correctly.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#240

Post by lelandbatey »

grey-area wrote: post #169

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to…

If you read post, the article is mostly agreeing with you. What they're pointing out is not "the AI can do everything you do", it's that "an AI coder can do a lot of the boring typing a lot faster than you, leaving you right at the point of 'real implementation'".

Having something else write a lot of the boring code that you'll need and then you finish up the final touches, that's amazing and a huge accelerator (so they claim).

The claim is not "AI will replace us all", the claim of the parent article is "AI is a big deal and will change how we work, the same way IDEs/copy-paste/autocomplete/online documentation have radically changed our work."

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