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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#271

Post by georgemcbay »

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 don't know if you are the same (S.G.) greyarea I'm familiar with but I hope so because the idea of having a couple of 90s era irc people take opposing viewpoints on LLMs in 2025 amuses me.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#272

Post by terminatornet »

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

Loved this style of writing in 2005 from Maddox on the best site in the universe or whatever.

Sorry if I don't want google and openAI stealing my or anyone else's work.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#273

Post by greybox »

> As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap.

If the kind of work this person is doing requires no thought, then of course an LLM will be perfect for it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#274

Post by mrcwinn »

>It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.

Are you kidding me? Mosaic was released in 1993. In 1998 Apple released the iMac on a theory, based on some marketing research, that people might be really interested in "getting online." Five years. And that's about a decade before we realized we might want a touch phone. More than a decade before an App Store.

This is very much still the top the first. AI will make even the internet seem small. Which makes sense — the entire whole internet is merely one input into this technology.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#275

Post by cube2222 »

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…

Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from?

You set up a strawman (AI only companies, agents doing everything on their own) which is irrelevant to the point the article is making. One excerpt:

> Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.

I think this article is very on point, I relate with basically every paragraph. It's not a panacea, it's not a 10x improvement by any means, but it's a very meaningful improvement to both productivity (less than 2x I'd say, which would already be a ton) and fun for me. As I've mentioned in the past here

> I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated.

which is a point the article makes too (tables), in a slightly different way.

Also, to be clear, I agree that 90% of the marketing around AI is overblown BS. But that's again beside the point, and the article is making no outlandish claims of that kind.

Overall, I hope this article (as intended) will make more people lose their dismissiveness and wake up their curiosity, as I expect the future of those is akin to that of people today saying they're "not really good at computers". It's a paradigm-shift, and it takes getting used to and productive in, as some imo smart people are mentioning even in this thread[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#276

Post by therealpygon »

ofjcihen wrote: post #7

I feel like we get one of these articles that addresses valid AI criticisms with poor arguments every week and at this point I’m ready to write a boilerplate response because I already know what they’re going to say. Interns don’t cost 20 bucks a month but training users in the specifics of your org is important. Knowing what is important or pointless comes with understanding the skill set.

“Valid” criticism rarely come from the people barely capable of understanding the difference between AI and LLMs, and using them interchangeably.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#277

Post by onepremise »

These systems do work, quite well. Especially the latest release of Claude. Palantir is using AI to process your IRS information without your consent, https://archive.is/QAY9E. This should concern everybody. Not only can this information be used to determine specific account details. They can use this to target individuals which don't align with the current administration's agenda, as well exclude hiring base of political alignment. They could also use this data to exclude and discriminate those against Peter Theil's network state agenda aka "Freedom Cities", but it seems everybody is complacent with that.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#278

Post by Wowfunhappy »

The most salient part of the article IMO:

Under the heading: "but you have no idea what the [LLM's] code is."

> Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code.

> People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. [...] The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result

> Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates [...] how are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#280

Post by jedberg »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #90

The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great. Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI? The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implication…

If I were a professor, I would make my homework start the same -- here is a problem to solve.

But instead of asking for just working code, I would create a small wrapper for a popular AI. I would insist that the student use my wrapper to create the code. They must instruct the AI how to fix any non-working code until it works. Then they have to tell my wrapper to submit the code to my annotator. Then they have to annotate every line of code as to why it is there and what it is doing.

Why my wrapper? So that you can prevent them from asking it to generate the comments, and so that you know that they had to formulate the prompts themselves.

They will still be forced to understand the code.

Then double the number of problems, because with the AI they should be 2x as productive. :)

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