My AI skeptic friends are all nuts • Hacker News Board

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#301

Post by idan » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

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…

This has all the energy of people saying "ah, you take such great photos, you must have a good camera"

_People_ are getting outsized value from AI in the ways they apply it. Photographs come from the photographer, not the camera.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#302

Post by Mofpofjis » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

This is it. Reading AI slop does not form synapses in your brain like writing the code yourself does.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#303

Post by Karrot_Kream » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

tedious-coder wrote: post #267

AI makes me sad. When I started my CS degree, I didn't even know what silicon valley was. I was unaware of what the SWE job landscape was like. I went to school in a no-name town. Computer science was an immensely fun subject to learn. I moved to one of the big cities and was bewildered with how much there was to learn, and loved every second of it. I gradually became good enough to help anyone with almost anything,…

I think the important thing here is you're being honest about how you're feeling. You bring up a very real anxiety and possibility and even folks who are using LLMs probably feel some degree of this alienation. That LLMs are yet another tool to push us to move as fast as possible rather than have our brains get into the nooks and crannies of hard problems that may take longer but are more rewarding to us.

But again, you're being honest. The problem with a lot of the AI skeptic arguments I see is a lack of this honesty. Others have noted that there are a lot of contradictory skeptical arguments, and I suspect the contradictions come because the authors have negative emotions about AI which they're using to create negative arguments.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#304

Post by 1970-01-01 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:17 PM UTC

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…

Nail on head. Before, innovations in code were extensions of a human's capabilities. The LLM-driven generation could diminish the very essence of writing meaningful code, to the point where they will live in the opposite of a golden era. The dead internet theory may yet prevail.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#305

Post by threePointFive » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:17 PM UTC

Can someone comment on the cost of running agentic models? Not for a company but for an individual. I tried "vibe coding" a personal project I was struggling with and left even more frustrated because I kept running into token rate limits with Claude (used inside of Zed if it matters). Did I pick the wrong model, the wrong editor, or do I just need to not be so tight with my money?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#306

Post by anxoo » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:17 PM UTC

davidclark wrote: post #145

>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why…

name 5 tasks which you think current AIs can't do. then go and spend 30 minutes seeing how current AIs can do on them. write it on a sticky note and put it somewhere that you'll see it.

otherwise, yes, you'll continue to be irritated by AI hype, maybe up until the point where our civilization starts going off the rails

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#307

Post by gyomu » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:19 PM UTC

aykutcan wrote: post #295

> Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time. Ughh. That "own time." Spoken like a true middle manager who thinks passion is a liability.

The author also wrote

“Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.”

This tells you all you need to know about the kind of work the author values.

Next time you wonder why so much software is buggy, slow, half considered slop, you’ll know exactly who it was made by.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#308

Post by beej71 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:20 PM UTC

> 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'm glad I got out when I did. :) This simply isn't something I want to do for a living. I'm glad there are people who do, though.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#309

Post by gyomu » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:20 PM UTC

ChicagoDave wrote: post #238

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 ment…

Yes, this is a solid succinct summary.

I’d also extend the last point:

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

The delta in that money going to the investor/tech exec instead. Yet another wealth transfer from the middle class to the 0.01%.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#310

Post by palata » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 11:21 PM UTC

Without AI, software is getting worse every year. My question is: will AI resolves that problem, or will it make it worse?

My feeling is that AI will keep the software industry in the same trend: produce more software of lower quality while being more profitable.

People sometimes say "perfect is the enemy of good". But this implies that putting less effort is "good enough". I believe it goes the other way: why would a company put efforts into selling you something good, if it can make you pay the same for something worse? It's all about maximising profit, and AI is no exception there.