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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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

#371

Post by jama211 »

burnerToBetOut wrote: post #341
jama211 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

> …this is a very different kind > of mistake to make compared > to overwriting a file… Both of my quotes are about some automaton deleting some thing that some human didn't want deleted. > …but I digress… Digressing to what the thing is that got deleted when it shouldn't have, is splitting hairs. > …which supports my point… My point is that believing the latest and greatest version of any piece of software from any…

> seems pretty naive

I had cereal for breakfast this morning

> is splitting hairs

I’m a chocolate ice cream guy myself, over strawberry that is.

—

Sorry, just wanted to join the “quote random parts of a comment and then state completely unrelated statements for unknown reasons” club.

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

AuthAuth wrote: post #54
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by jhatemyjob »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

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…

It's by design. If you listen to the rhetoric of David Sacks et al, they are saying that American intellectual property law is holding us back and we need to rethink it in order to compete with China. Large AI models are the Trojan horse to this new legal landscape.

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

#374

Post by Aerroon »

salawat wrote: post #367
Aerroon wrote: post #317

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. 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…

>the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnight. Oh, no, no. You misunderstand my friend. I might loosely be called one of those who was anti-copyright, but turn my desire to see it's draconian enforcement cranked up to 11 on corporations. I believe fundamental reform is necessary, however, if you're running a for profit enterprise, and have not in good faith with the la…

>If a grandma or teen can get saddled with life ruining punitive damages for something as innocent as filesharing

That's the same thing these corporations were found guilty of though. Or well, maybe not even that, since it was about downloading copyrighted material, not necessarily sharing:

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...

>The company has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

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

#375

Post by kajolshah_bt »

That description matches a lot of what we’ve seen in real products. AI does make some parts of development and workflows easier like summarizing data, generating initial drafts, or auto-completing repetitive patterns. Those wins are real.

The hard part that becomes harder is not the technology. It’s the decision-making around it. When teams rush to integrate a model into core workflows without measuring outcomes or understanding user behavior, they end up with unpredictable results. For instance, we built an AI feature that looked great in demo, but in real usage it created confusion because users didn’t trust the auto-generated responses. The easy part (building it) was straightforward, but the hard part (framing it in a way people trusted and adopted) was surprisingly tough.

In real systems, success with AI comes not from the model itself, but from clear boundaries, human checkpoints, and real measurements of value over time.

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

#376

Post by jmt710 »

vohk wrote: post #216
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

These arguments absolutely infuriate me. You're code is not that unique. Lots of people write the same snippet everyday and have no idea that somebody else just wrote the same thing.

It's such a crock that you can somehow claim you're the only person who can write that snippet and now everyone else owes you something. No. No they don't. Get over it.

Writing a book is different. Lifting pages or chapters is different because it's much harder for two people to write the exact same thing. Code is code, it follows a formula and a everyone uses that formula.

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

#377

Post by salawat »

Aerroon wrote: post #374
salawat wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnight. Oh, no, no. You misunderstand my friend. I might loosely be called one of those who was anti-copyright, but turn my desire to see it's draconian enforcement cranked up to 11 on corporations. I believe fundamental reform is necessary, however, if you're running a for profit enterprise, and have not in good faith with the la…

> If a grandma or teen can get saddled with life ruining punitive damages for something as innocent as filesharing That's the same thing these corporations were found guilty of though. Or well, maybe not even that, since it was about downloading copyrighted material, not necessarily sharing: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-... > The company has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 for each o…

Which on the sliding scale of means is bullshit. And I'm pretty sure Grandma/Little Jimmy didn't get the option to negotiate.

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

#378

Post by socketcluster »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122
adithyassekhar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangent, I keep hearing this good base, but I've never seen one, not in the real world. No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. Over time the needs change, there's no sticking to the plan. Often it's a change that requires rethinking a major part. What we loathe as tight coupling was just efficie…

It’s not about perfectly architected code. It’s more about code that is factored in such a way that you can extend/tweak it without needing to keep the whole of the system in your head at all times. It’s fascinating watching the sudden resurgence of interest in software architecture after people are finding it helps LLMs move quickly. It has been similarly beneficial for humans as well. It’s not rocket science. It go…

Very well put.

I've always been interested in software architecture and upon graduating from university, I was shocked to see the 'Software Architect' title disappear. Software devs have been treating software architecture like phrenology or reading tea leaves.

But those who kept learning and refining their architecture skills during this time look at software very differently.

It's not like the industry has been making small, non-obvious mistakes; they've veen making massive, glaringly obvious mistakes! Anticipating a reasonable range of future requirements in your code and adhering to the basic principles of high-cohesion and loose-coupling is really not that hard.

I'm taken aback whenever I hear someone treating software architecture as some elusive quest akin to 'finding Bigfoot'.

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

#379

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #368
tomhow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And you can escape asterisks using backslashes: Italic *Escaped asterisks* \*Double-Escaped asterisks\* *Italic* \*Escaped asterisks\* \\*Double-Escaped asterisks\\* (tomhow seems to have goofed his escapes above. As I've done many times myself...)

GP comment since corrected, for the curious. And/or future me.

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

#380

Post by 20k »

jmt710 wrote: post #376
vohk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

These arguments absolutely infuriate me. You're code is not that unique. Lots of people write the same snippet everyday and have no idea that somebody else just wrote the same thing. It's such a crock that you can somehow claim you're the only person who can write that snippet and now everyone else owes you something. No. No they don't. Get over it. Writing a book is different. Lifting pages or chapters is different…

Writing an exact copy of a nontrivial function by mistake is so rare that i've never seen it happen in 20 years of programming
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