Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 608 posts

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#291

Post by tovej »

danielbln wrote: post #211
overgard wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt it. So far these things are good at remixing old ideas, not coming up with new ones.

Generally us humans come up with new things by remixing old ideas. Where else would they come from? We are synthesizing priors into something novel. If you break the problem space apart enough, I don't see why some LLM can't do the same.

LLM's cannot synthesize text, they can only concatenate or mix statistically. Synthesis requires logical reasoning. That's not how LLMs work.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#292

Post by nielsole »

LoganDark wrote: post #288
xnorswap wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can't find actual flaws in your code I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix issues in source. It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with sequencing and logic. That might not be what is actually happening at a technical level, but it is indi…

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

> moreso than humans

Citation needed.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#293

Post by IX-103 »

RealityVoid wrote: post #270
fdefitte wrote: post #163

[dead]

You can build prototypes real fast, and that's cool. You can't really build products with it. You can use it at most as an accelerant, but you need it in skilled hands else it goes sideways fast.

I think you could build a product with it, but you need to carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual engineering work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them together.

In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for any moderately complex piece of software.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#295

Post by ForHackernews »

dandellion wrote: post #247
danielbln wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent swarms are what, a couple of months old? What are you even talking about. Yes, people/humans still drive this stuff, but if you think there isn't useful software out there that can be handily implemented with current gen agents that need very little or no review, then I don't know what to tell you, apart from "you're mistaken". And I say that as someone who uses three tools heavily but has otherwise no stake in…

The next thing after agent swarms will be swarm colonies and people will go "it's been a month since agentic swarm colonies, give it a month or two". People have been moving the goal posts like that for a couple years now, it's starting to grow stale. This is like self driving cars which were going to be workingin 2016 and replace 80% of drivers by 2017, all over again. People falling for hype instead of admitting th…

I generally agree, but counterpoint: Waymo is successfully running robocabs in many cities today.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#297

Post by leoedin »

jimbokun wrote: post #201
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game. [0] https://steve-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

I think we are. There's definitely been an uptick in "show HN" type posts with quite impressively complex apps that one person developed in a few weeks.

From my own experience, the problem is that AI slows down a lot as the scale grows. It's very quick to add extra views to a frontend, but struggles a lot more in making wide reaching refactors. So it's very easy to start a project, but after a while your progress slows significantly.

But given I've developed 2 pretty functional full stack applications in the last 3 months, which I definitely wouldn't have done without AI assistance, I think it's a fair assumption that lots of other people are doing the same. So there is almost certainly a lot more software being produced than there was before.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#299

Post by sensanaty »

ukuina wrote: post #227
jimbokun wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

Why do you assume there isn't? Enterprise (+API) usage of LLMs has continued to grow exponentially.

I work for one of those enterprises with lots of people trying out AI (thankfully leadership is actually sane, no mandates that you have to use it, just giving devs access to experiment with the tools and see what happens). Lots of people trying it out in earnest, lots of newsletters about new techniques and all that kinda stuff. Lots of people too, so there's all sorts of opinions from very excited to completely indifferent.

Precisely 0 projects are making it out any faster or (IMO more importantly) better. We have a PR review bot clogging up our PRs with fucking useless comments, rewriting the PR descriptions in obnoxious ways, that basically everyone hates and is getting shut off soon. From an actual productivity POV, people are just using it for a quick demo or proof of concept here and there before actually building the proper thing manually as before. And we have all the latest and greatest techniques, all the AGENTS.mds and tool calling and MCP integrations and unlimited access to every model we care to have access to and all the other bullshit that OpenAI et al are trying to shove on people.

It's not for a lack of trying, plenty of people are trying to make any part of it work, even if it's just to handle the truly small stuff that would take 5 minutes of work but is just tedious and small enough to be annoying to pick up. It's just not happening, even with extremely simple tasks (that IMO would be better off with a dedicated, small deterministic script) we still need human overview because it often shits the bed regardless, so the effort required to review things is equal or often greater than just doing the damn ticket yourself.

My personal favorite failure is when the transcript bots just... Don't transcript random chunks of the conversation, which can often lead to more confusion than if we just didn't have anything transcribed. We've turned off the transcript and summarization bots, because we've found 9/10 times they're actively detrimental to our planning and lead us down bad paths.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#300

Post by danielbln »

tovej wrote: post #291
danielbln wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally us humans come up with new things by remixing old ideas. Where else would they come from? We are synthesizing priors into something novel. If you break the problem space apart enough, I don't see why some LLM can't do the same.

LLM's cannot synthesize text, they can only concatenate or mix statistically. Synthesis requires logical reasoning. That's not how LLMs work.

Yes it is, LLMs perform logical multi step reasoning all the time, see math proofs, coding etc. And whether you call it synthesis or statistical mixing is just semantics. Do LLMs truly understand? Who knows, probably not, but they do more than you make it out to be.
Post reply on HN