What if useful AI is a fantasy? • Hacker News Board

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#31

Post by FloorEgg » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:01 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #26

hermitShell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the article mainly talks about agentic programming, code generation, and reasoning. Ans very rightly identifies a big problem with agentic programming, in my experience. If developers can't maintain the software without AI, it's doubtful they can steer AI to maintain it either. Maybe this is not true and we can tell AI something like 'reduce the number of lines of code' until the essential software is e…

> Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom. Doesn't seem too crazy. This is the life of every customer (and most managers) of a software dev. To fathom it, think of yourself as the unicorn customer that can define projects, specs, and methods with competence, and even make architectural calls, with the AI being the dev. To me, this is the incredibly clear eventuality of our profession, within…

I'm a decent full stack web developer, who knows almost nothing about kernel architecture or machine code. Before LLMs I could make a functional app, despite not understanding several layers the app ran on top of.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#32

Post by wizzledonker » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #24

It's so interesting that people are so divided on this. He even said he generated multiple applications. Yet he has found a way to just about dismiss it somehow. AI is not going to go away and it's not going to stop improving. That would go against the entire history of computing. We have levels of improvements in the R&D pipeline in every area: hardware, software, model architecture and training. The models will get…

I guess, just to play devils advocate, what if code turns out to just be the minimally expressive communication medium required for a human to maintain agency over the function of a system?

If we consider (and I’m not saying this is true, just for arguments sake) that this agency is important as other humans enjoy talking to humans about a goal, rather than machines, and we think this will never change.

In this peculiar case, it actually doesn’t matter how “good” llms get - they will never cross a barrier fundamental to human nature?

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#33

Post by win311fwg » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #17

bluegatty wrote: post #7

It's obviously useful - we have to figure out best practices.

It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.

> you have to spend so much time reviewing the code

Why? Unless you foolishly choose to target something like Javascript, or Python, or the like where the training corpus was full of poor quality code then the LLMs stay pretty true to how you'd write the code yourself. LLMs are only as good as what they were trained on, but luckily there was already a strong movement towards "all codebases should be the same" before LLMs, and as long as you hone in on those ecosystems then LLMs trained on those ecosystems can work quite well at producing quality code without the need for heavy oversight.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#34

Post by stwsk » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:12 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #24

It's so interesting that people are so divided on this. He even said he generated multiple applications. Yet he has found a way to just about dismiss it somehow. AI is not going to go away and it's not going to stop improving. That would go against the entire history of computing. We have levels of improvements in the R&D pipeline in every area: hardware, software, model architecture and training. The models will get…

There are already extreme edge case uses for AI that are incredibly, freakishly efficient compared to literally any human. Just for say, book or film recommendations... If you want obscure in the sense that no critical re-appraisal or any kind of cult following or curiosity towards it doesn't exist at all period, I'm talking about movies with literally 7 comments across the entire internet. Great films, loved by noone, usually too old to catch any meaningful wave by now... Nothing will ever compare. I've not been able to read nearly as many books as I've watched films but every single recommendation has been fantastic and tailored to my taste in such a way that only very few people have ever achieved, and even then those people are not capable of giving you a brand new list of books to read or movies to watch every single night.

In a broader sense, computational chemistry and drug discovery is already exploding- very, very hard to see that genie being put in the bottle. They've probably created such a large backlog of potentially useful outputs that it would take centuries for humans to sift through.

Useful AI is already here! Get over it. Your term "jagged intelligence" is very good, I will have to write that one down. Jagged indeed.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#35

Post by latentsea » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:13 AM UTC

nomel wrote: post #26

hermitShell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the article mainly talks about agentic programming, code generation, and reasoning. Ans very rightly identifies a big problem with agentic programming, in my experience. If developers can't maintain the software without AI, it's doubtful they can steer AI to maintain it either. Maybe this is not true and we can tell AI something like 'reduce the number of lines of code' until the essential software is e…

> Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom. Doesn't seem too crazy. This is the life of every customer (and most managers) of a software dev. To fathom it, think of yourself as the unicorn customer that can define projects, specs, and methods with competence, and even make architectural calls, with the AI being the dev. To me, this is the incredibly clear eventuality of our profession, within…

Those layers are deterministic though...

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#36

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

bluegatty wrote: post #19

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.

It's delusional for someone to contemplate that millions of developers out there are just churning out 'non usable stuff' and don't care about quality and that somehow you have some 'magic insight' they don't have. And lacking in self awareness to publicize that. Obviously some people are using it recklessly, it's the same with everything. Do you think it's more likely that 'the entire world is wrong and you are righ…

> Do you think it's more likely that 'the entire world is wrong and you are right' ... OR ... that you just personally have not figured out how to use the technology in way that makes sense and/or you have a bad sense of of what quality means in most contexts.

Yeah, see, I've seen this movie before. I've seen it with Lisp. "You just haven't used it enough to reach enlightenment! We all have! Keep going; you'll see it too!"

And then with Haskell. Exact same looking down on everyone who doesn't agree as unenlightened, as people who Just Don't Get It.

Both Lisp and Haskell are useful languages. Neither is the future of mainstream programming, not just because the mainstream is unenlightened, but because those languages don't fit the way most programmers think.

People are different. Different languages fit different people. If Lisp fits how you think, when you find it after wandering through procedural languages, it feels incredibly freeing. But if it doesn't fit...

So I get very nervous about "you just haven't figured out how to use it" claims. Maybe it's true. Or maybe it just doesn't fit a bunch of people, and browbeating them with claims that they're unskillful does not make it fit them any better.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#37

Post by nomel » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #35

nomel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom. Doesn't seem too crazy. This is the life of every customer (and most managers) of a software dev. To fathom it, think of yourself as the unicorn customer that can define projects, specs, and methods with competence, and even make architectural calls, with the AI being the dev. To me, this is the incredibly clear eventuality of our profession, within…

Those layers are deterministic though...

Determinism is NOT a requirement, as proven by your existence of software devs. Again, shift the perspective to the people you work for, or to your fellow dev. They get along fine with you, who are also not deterministic. They check your output by setting requirements that you can prove are true in a way that satisfies them. You yourself guarantee correctness by tests, because you learned long ago that you yourself are not to be trusted, and are not capable of writing 100% correct code on first pass, except for the most trivial tasks. Your lack of determinism is built into your workflow, with tools like linters, code analysis, etc, to help deal with it all.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#38

Post by vivekd » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

FloorEgg wrote: post #10

Usefulness depends on intended job to be done. A hair dryer isn't very useful at drying clothes. If someone spent a lifetime mastering woodworking with hand tools, and then was shown a couple very early rudimentary power tools (lacking safety features, crude features, etc) they would rightly conclude they weren't useful. The artisan can do better work faster with less risk of dismemberment without them. Prior to LLMs…

I agree. Although the author didn't delve into it he seems to hint that it may not prove useful enough to the companies that spend money on tokens to justify the huge investments in AI. For me yes, it's very useful. But what remains to be seen is is it useful to the entities and people willing and able to spend huge amounts of money in AI in exchange for increased productivity or profit... And if so is it useful to generate a cash return on the huge cost investments in datacenters that AI demands

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#39

Post by bluegatty » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

win311fwg wrote: post #33

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.

> you have to spend so much time reviewing the code Why? Unless you foolishly choose to target something like Javascript, or Python, or the like where the training corpus was full of poor quality code then the LLMs stay pretty true to how you'd write the code yourself. LLMs are only as good as what they were trained on, but luckily there was already a strong movement towards "all codebases should be the same" before…

For bespoke things you 100% have to read the code, and for very straight forward SaaS stacks you still have to read.

It depends on how much 'rails' there are.

More rails, then there is a lot less to examine.

Re: What if useful AI is a fantasy?

#40

Post by win311fwg » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #35

nomel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom. Doesn't seem too crazy. This is the life of every customer (and most managers) of a software dev. To fathom it, think of yourself as the unicorn customer that can define projects, specs, and methods with competence, and even make architectural calls, with the AI being the dev. To me, this is the incredibly clear eventuality of our profession, within…

Those layers are deterministic though...

Not really. It is true that supply chain attack concerns has put increased pressure on compiler makers to make compilers deterministic, but historically they haven't been, generally speaking. It was long thought that determinism didn't matter. Where compilers do differ from LLMs is that compiler output correctness is binary, while LLM output correctness is probabilistic.

However, compilers have long suffered from inputs not being correct, so we have put a lot of effort into finding ways to validate that the input is correct relative to the output. Which turns out works just as well for LLMs, to the point that validating that the input is correct relative to the output ends up offering the same assurances for both compilers and LLMs alike. Compiler output correctness alone is not actually all that beneficial in practice because, again, it is only as useful as the correctness of the input and inputs are not trustworthy without "double entry accounting" to go along with it. Once you have "double entry accounting" in place then you already have what you need to turn LLM correctness into being binary as well.