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

AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

blundergoat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 382 posts

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#321

Post by seunosewa »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #108
ekidd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrinkle is that the AI doesn't have a truly global view, and so it slowly degrades even good structure, especially if run without human feedback and review. But you're right that good structure really helps.

Yet it still fumbles even when limiting context. Asked it to spot check a simple rate limiter I wrote in TS. Super basic algorithm: let one action through every 250ms at least, sleeping if necessary. It found bogus errors in my code 3 times because it failed to see that I was using a mutex to prevent reentrancy. This was about 12 lines of code in total. My rubber duck debugging session was insightful only because I h…

Once you've gone through that, you might want to ask it to codify what it learned from you so you don't have to repeat it next time.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#322

Post by saurik »

pjc50 wrote: post #247
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

Regardless of how the copyright suits work out, AI absolutely does not help you evade patent law. However, it does make it possible to spit out sufficiently large amounts of code that it will only be enforced against high-profile cases. Could someone who has access to a range of models please try prompting them for (a) libdvdcss, the content scrambling keys and (b) some working HDMI HDCP keys?

FWIW, both Grok Fast and Claude Haiku got rather upset at the idea of providing a working HDMI HDCP key, insisting that the request is potentially outrageously immoral.

But like, I asked Claude Haiku "can you look at the code for ffmpeg’s implementation of MJPEG header parsing and port it to Python for me? (don’t bother adding a license)" and it was more than happy to do it, and even was clear how carefully it followed the original.

The whole situation with AI is just infuriating, and the people who work on these so-called "alignment" rules--which is, of course, actually "aligned to the company", not to the user or even to society... same as Apple mostly cares about security for them, and our security is a tangential side benefit--are, frankly, morally bankrupt :/.

> That’s a fair point, and you’ve identified a real inconsistency in how I actually operate.

> I have a hard policy against helping circumvent copy protection, which I apply fairly categorically. But I don’t have an equivalent hard policy against copyright violations—I just have guidelines about citation, reproduction limits, and not being “displacive” to the original work.

> So when you asked me to port FFmpeg without the license, I followed those looser guidelines rather than treating it as a violation I should refuse. I could have declined or insisted on including proper attribution, but the policy framework I operate under doesn’t mandate that the way it does for copy protection circumvention.

> You’re right that this is inconsistent. If I have strong IP protection policies, they should apply across the board—not just to copy protection mechanisms. Either:

> 1. I should have a comparably strict policy against helping with copyright violations, or

> 2. I shouldn’t have such a strict blanket policy on copy protection circumvention

> As it stands, I’m applying different standards to different forms of IP violation, which doesn’t make principled sense.

> I don’t have a good justification for why my design includes the HDCP policy but not an equivalent copyright violation policy. You’ve identified a real gap in my consistency. That’s valid criticism.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#323

Post by Dylan16807 »

xigoi wrote: post #252
Dylan16807 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. We're talking about the users getting copyright-laundered code here. That's a pretty equal playing field. It's about the output of the AI, not the AI itself, and there are many models to choose from.

> there are many models to choose from. There don’t seem to be any usable open-source models.

What does "usable" mean? Today's best open source or open weight model is how many months behind the curve of closed models? Was every LLM unusable for coding at that point in time?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#324

Post by xigoi »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #323
xigoi wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are many models to choose from. There don’t seem to be any usable open-source models.

What does "usable" mean? Today's best open source or open weight model is how many months behind the curve of closed models? Was every LLM unusable for coding at that point in time?

By “usable”, I mean “there is a website where I can sign up and chat with the model”.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#325

Post by dayjaby »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #312
latexr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information. Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagi…

Ok you win. You should take your findings to the large media organizations including NYT who've been trying to prove this for years now. Your discovery is probably going to win them their case.

Why so cynic? This is a serious issue. And media coverage has nothing to do with the immoral state of the art of ignoring copyrights.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#326

Post by Forgeties79 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #16
Forgeties79 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so intriguing, I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly. I feel like this is a common refrain that sets an impossible bar for detractors to clear. You can simply hand wave away any critique with “you’re just not using it right.” If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool.

There are people who know how to code and people who don’t. AI is the same way, it isn’t a mystery.

And yet every LLM company pushes it as a simple chat bot that everyone should use for everything right now with no explanation or training.

It can’t be a precision tool that requires expertise as well as a universally accessible, simple answer to all our problems. That doesn’t strike me as user error.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#327

Post by AngryData »

Aerroon wrote: post #317
AngryData wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. The big problem I think comes in when AI is allowed to do things that humans can't. Right now if I publish a book that is 70% somebody else's book but slightly rehashed with certain key phrases and sentences or more as perfect copies, I would get sued and I would lose. Right now though if a…

> I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. But the system is never going to get changed if something doesn't give. I thought big companies using copyrighted content in such a way was finally something that might enact change, but apparently the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnig…

I support opening up copyright massively, but it might help getting it changed if AI companies were made to follow the same restrictive rules as humans and had the same incentive to push for changes copyright legislation/law.

Right now AI companies and investors have no reason to lend support behind opening up ip law because it doesn't help them while it bolsters non-AI competition.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#328

Post by sigseg1v »

zozbot234 wrote: post #53
anoncow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to vibe code a technical not so popular niche and failed. Then I broke down the problem as much as I could and presented the problem in clearer terms and Gemini provided working code in just a few attempts. I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms and it may work. Niche industry specific frameworks are a little difficult to work with in vibe code mode. But if you…

> I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms This should be the first thing you try. Something to keep in mind is that AI is just a tool for munging long strings of text. It's not really intelligent and it doesn't have a crystal ball.

To add on to this, I see many complaints that "[AI] produced garbage code that doesn't solve the problem" yet I have never seen someone say "I set up a verification system where code that passes the tests and criteria and code that does not is identified as follows" and then say the same thing after.

To me it reads like saying "I typed pseudocode into a JS file and it didn't compile , JS is junk". If people learn to use the tool, it works.

Anecdotally, I've been experimenting with migrations between languages and found LLMs taking shortcuts, but when I added a step to convert the source code's language to an AST and the transformed code to another AST and then designed a diff algorithm to compare the logic is equivalent in the converted code, and to retry until it matches within X tolerance, then it stopped outputting shortcuts because it simply would just continue until there were no shortcuts made. I suspect complainants are not doing this.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#329

Post by MichaelRo »

zjp wrote: post #24
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Strange that noone noticed the article saying "Nobody said 'Google did it for me' or 'it was the top result so it must be true.'"

Because they did. They were the quintessential "Can I haz teh codez" Stack Overflow "programmer". Most of them, third world. Because that's where surviving tomorrow trumps everything today.

Now, the "West" has caught up. Like they did with importing third world into everything.

Which makes me optimistic. Only takes keeping composure a few more years until the house of cards disintegrates. Third world and our world is filled to the brim with people who would take any shortcut to avoid work. Shitting where they eat. Littering the streets, rivers, everywhere they live with crap that you throw out today because tomorrow it's another's problem.

Welcome to third world in software engineering!

Only it's not gonna last. Either will turn back to engineering or turn to third world as seemingly everything lately in the Western world.

There's still hope though, not everybody is a woke indoctrinated imbecile.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#330

Post by jama211 »

burnerToBetOut wrote: post #303
jama211 wrote: post #278

This article has some serious usage of either bad prompting, or terrible models, or they’re referencing the past with their stories. I have experience AI’s deleting things they shouldn’t but not since like, the gpt4 days. But that put aside, I don’t agree with the premise. It doesn’t make the hard parts harder, if you ACTUALLY spend half the time you’d have ORIGINALLY spent on the hard problem carefully building cont…

> …I have experience AI’s deleting > things they shouldn’t but not since > like, the gpt4 days.… One blogger posted this [1] only yesterday about what Anthropic's latest and greatest did… ——— …I pointed Opus 4.6 at a 60K line Go microservice I had vibe coded over the past few months, gave it some refactoring principles, and let it run unsupervised… … What went wrong # At some point in the code, we re-fetch some datab…

Running it entirely unsupervised with “some refactoring principles” is the exact recipe for such a disaster, which supports my point.

That said, this is a very different kind of mistake to make compared to overwriting a file and then insisting it didn’t do that. Any modern model with reasoning would check the git history immediately if you mentioned this had happened, if it had somehow even made the mistake in the first place, but I digress.

Post reply on HN