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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this new category actually exist? Because, I would think, if you want to be successful at a real company you would need to know how to program.

Knowing how to program is not limited to knowing how to write syntax.

The thing that's assumed in "proompting" as the new way of writing code is how much extrapolation are you going to allow the LLM to perform on your behalf. If you describe your requirements in a context-free language you'll have written the code yourself. If you describe the requirements with ambiguity you'll leave enough of narrowing it down to actual code to the LLM.

Have it your way, but the current workflow of proompting/context engineering requires plenty of hand holding with test coverage and a whole lot of token burn to allow agentic loops to pass tests.

If you claim to be a vibe coder proompter with no understanding of how anything works under the hood and claim to build things using English as a programming language, I'd like to see your to-do app.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume natural language programming only produces code. It is also used to read it.

I don't think you understand why context-free languages are used for programming. If you provide a requirement with any degree of ambiguity the outcome will be non-deterministic. Do you want software that works or kind of works? If someone doesn't understand, even conceptually how requirements

You're making two false assumptions:

That natural language can only be ambiguous: but legal contracts, technical specs, and scientific papers are all written in precise natural language.

And that AI interaction is one-shot where ambiguous input produces ambiguous output, but LLM programming is iterative. You clarify and deliver on requirements through conversation, testing, debugging, until you reach the precise accepted solution.

Traditional programming can also start with ambiguous natural language requirements from stakeholders. The difference is you iterate toward precision through conversation with AI rather than by writing syntax yourself.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a huge AI supporter, and use it extensively for coding, writing and most of my decision making processes, and I agree with you. The AI features in non-AI-first apps tend to be awkward bolt-ons, poorly thought out and using low quality models to save money. I don't want shitty bolt-ons, I want to be able to give chatgtp/claude/gemini frontier models the ability to access my application data and make api calls for…

> The AI features in non-AI-first apps tend to be awkward bolt-ons, poorly thought out and using low quality models to save money. The weirdest location I've found the most useful LLM-based feature so far has been Edge with it's automatic tab grouping. It doesn't always pick the best groups and probably uses some really small model, but it's significantly faster and easier than anything that I've had so far. I hope t…

Was automatic tab grouping missing from your life?

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#354
post #115

I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578 ) It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing…

I am a huge AI supporter, and use it extensively for coding, writing and most of my decision making processes, and I agree with you. The AI features in non-AI-first apps tend to be awkward bolt-ons, poorly thought out and using low quality models to save money. I don't want shitty bolt-ons, I want to be able to give chatgtp/claude/gemini frontier models the ability to access my application data and make api calls for…

> I am a huge AI supporter, and use it extensively for coding, writing and most of my decision making processes

If you use it for writing, what is the point of writing in the first place? If you're writing to anyone you even slightly care about they should wipe their arse with it and send it back to you. And if it's writing at work or for work then you're just proving you are an employee they don't need.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to program is not limited to knowing how to write syntax.

The thing that's assumed in "proompting" as the new way of writing code is how much extrapolation are you going to allow the LLM to perform on your behalf. If you describe your requirements in a context-free language you'll have written the code yourself. If you describe the requirements with ambiguity you'll leave enough of narrowing it down to actual code to the LLM. Have it your way, but the current workflow of pr…

Vibe coding is something other than what I'm referring to, as you're conflating natural language programming, where you do everything that a programmer does except reading and writing syntax, with vibe coding without understanding.

Traditional programming also requires iteration, testing, and debugging, so I don't see what argument you're making there.

Then when you invoke 'token burn' the question is then whether developer time costs more than compute time. Developer salaries aren't dropping while compute costs are. Or whether writing and reading syntax saves more time than pure natural language. I used to spend six figures a month on contracting out work to programmers. Now I spend thousands. I used to wait days for PRs, now the wait is in seconds, minutes and hours.

And these aren't to do apps, these are distributed, fault tolerant, load tested, fully observable and auditable, compliance controlled systems.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is not natural language programming , it's the use of incantations discovered by accident or by trial and error. It's alchemy, not chemistry. That's what people mean when they say it's not reproducible. It's not reproducible according to any useful logical framework that could be generally applied to other cases . There may be some "power" in knowing magical incantations, but mostly it's going…

You are being stubborn, the method is absolutely reproducible. But across models, of course not, that is not how they operate. > It's not reproducible according to any useful logical framework that could be generally applied to other cases. It absolutely is, you are refusing to accept that natural language contains this type of logical structure. You are repeatedly trying to project "magic incantations" allusions, wh…

I'm not angry, I'm just extremely skeptical. If a programming language varied from version to version the way LLMs do, to the extent that the same input could have radically different consequences, no one would use it. Even if the "compiled code" of the LLM's output is proven to work, you will need to make changes in the "source code" of your higher level natural language. Again it's one thing to divorce memory management from logic; it's another to divorce logic from your desire for a working program. Without selecting the logic structures that you need and want, or understanding them, pretty much anything could be introduced to your code.

The point of coding, and what developers are paid for, is taking a vision of a final product which receives input and returns output, and making that perfectly consistent with the express desire of whoever is paying to build that system. Under all use cases. Asking questions about what should happen if a hundred different edge cases arise, before they do, is 99% of the job. Development is a job well suited to students of logic, poorly suited to memorizers and mathematicians, and obscenely ill suited to LLMs and those who attempt to follow the supposed reasoning that arises from gradient descent through a language's structure. Even in the best case scenario, edge case analysis will never be possible for AIs that are built like LLMs, because they demonstrate a lack of abstract thought.

I'm not hostile to LLMs so much as toward the implication that they do anything remotely similar to what we do as developers. But you're welcome to live in a fantasy world where they "make apps". I suppose it's always obnoxious to hear someone tout a quick way to get rich or to cook a turkey in 25 minutes, no knowledge required. Just do be aware that your intetnet fame and fortune will be no reflection on whether your method will actually work. Those of us in the industry are already acutely aware that it doesn't work, and that some folks are just leading children down a lazy pied piper's path rather than teaching them how to think. That's where the assumption comes from that anyone promoting what you're promoting is selling snake oil.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#357
>A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.

I cannot take OP seriously when the post started like so. If you are using Microsoft services and products in 2025, well, it serves you right.

Big companies can force Microsoft, Google and alike to don't use companies data for AI training, small companies have no chance.

Everything nowadays is cloud based, all you need is internet and a browser. But nope, people and companies still using Windows, spending millions with AV software that they wouldn't have to if a decent Linux distro was being used instead.

By decent I mean user friendly such as Linux Mint or even worse Ubuntu (Ubuntu lost its way years ago, still a solid option for basic users, not for advanced users)

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#359

The major issue with AI technology is the people. The enthusiasts that pretend issues don't exist, the cheap startups trying to sell snake oil. The AI community treats potential customers as invaders. If you report a problem, the entire thing turns on you trying to convince you that you're wrong, or that you reported a problem because you hate the technology. It's pathetic. It looks like a viper's nest. Who would wan…

Ah, so it's Crypto 2.0 then. Any minor comment or constructive criticism is FUD and met with "oh better go destroy a loom there, Ned Ludd". It's pathetic and I grow tired of it.

It is quite mysterious that a sequence of similar phenomena would appear with such similarity and in sequence. It must be something deeper than, that caused both of those groups to appear. At least, it's worth thinking about.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#360
post #124
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even ddg has integrated AI now and while it can be disabled, the privacy aspect seems to mean that ddg regularily forgets my settings and re-enables the ai features. maybe i'm doing something wrong here, but even ddg is annoying me with this.

I agree it’s annoying that the setting seem to change all the time, but you can use noai.duckduckgo.com

Wow! Thank you for that url, I didn't know that. Changed my default search engine to this and am - finally - rid of ddg settings getting annoyingly reset all the time!
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