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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#381

Post by libraryofbabel »

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…

This isn't a particularly useful filter, because it applies to many very successful technologies as well. Early automobiles generated a lot of hype and excitement, but they were not very good (unreliable, loud, and dangerous, and generally still worse than horses). They got steadily better until eventually they hit an inflection point where the skeptics were dug in repeating the same increasingly old complaints, while Henry Ford was building the Model T.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#382

Post by orionsbelt »

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…

At what point would you be impressed by a human being if you asked it to help you with a task every 6 months from birth until it was 30 years old?

If you ask different people the above question, and if you vary it based on type of task, or which human, you would get different answers. But as time goes on, more and more people would become impressed with what the human can do.

I don't know when LLMs will stop progressing, but all I know is they continue to progress at what is to me a similar astounding rate as to a growing child. For me personally, I never used LLMs for anything, and since o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, I use them all the time for all sorts of stuff.

You may be smarter than me and still not impressed, but I'd try the latest models and play around, and if you aren't impressed yet, I'd bet money you will be within 3 years max (likely much earlier).

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#383

Post by nickpsecurity »

ckiely wrote: post #38

The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.

I'll add it's not true for programmers with morality. For instance, people who follow Jesus Christ are commanded to obey the law and treat people right. Many think respecting copyright is both. While I oppose copyright law, I do uphold it and like supporting content creators.

Also, I think there's an argument similar to cryptocurrency companies that run like pyramid schemes. I could've made easy money doing security work for them. Yet, I felt like I'd be participating in helping them rob people or advancing their con. (Some jobs, like building assurance tools, might be OK.) Likewise, using tools built on massive, copyright infringement might be supporting or promoting that.

So, I gotta use legally-trained models or wait for legal reforms that make LLM training legal. Especially the data sets they distribute which is currently illegal, file sharing.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#384

Post by mholm »

threePointFive wrote: post #305

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?

Try Cursor.ai or Windsail. They have free trials for the good models, and are pretty cheap to use if you decide you like them.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#385

Post by haiku2077 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've bee…

Zed has a great four minute demo showing how it works: https://zed.dev/agentic

I personally have my Zed set up so the agent has to request every command be manually reviewed and approved before running.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#386

Post by carpo »

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…

I think they just meant it hit an inflection point. Some people were copying pasting to ChatGPT and saying it was crap and others were using agents that could see the context of the code and worked much, much better. It's the workflow used not just the specific LLM.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#388

Post by xg15 »

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…

The way the responses to this subthread show the classical "the problem doesn't exist - ok, it does exist but it's not a big deal - ok, it is a big deal but we should just adapt to it" progression makes me wonder if we found one of the few actually genuine objections to LLM coding.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#389

Post by mattl »

lolinder wrote: post #350

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. This kind of guilt-by-association play migh…

I’m a free software developer and have been for over 25 years. I’ve worked at many of the usual places too and I enjoy and appreciate the different licenses used for software.

I’m also a filmmaker and married to a visual artist.

I don’t touch this stuff at all. It’s all AI slop to me. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to work with it or use it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#390

Post by mathgorges »

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…

In my experience it's less about the latest generation of LLMs being better, and more about the tooling around them for integration into a programmer's workflow being waaaay better.

The article doesn't explicitly spell it out until several paragraphs later, but I think what your quoted sentence is alluding to is that Cursor, Cline et al can be pretty revolutionary in terms of removing toil from the development process.

Need to perform a gnarly refactor that's easy to describe but difficult to implement because it's spread far and wide across the codebase? Let the LLM handle it and then check its work. Stuck in dependency hell because you updated one package due to a CVE? The LLM can (often) sort that out for you. Heck, did the IDE's refactor tool fail at renaming a function again? LLM.

I'm remain skeptical of LLM-based development insofar as I think the enshitification will inevitably come when the Magic Money Machine breaks down. And I don't think I would hire a programmer that needs LLM assistance in order to program. But it's hard to deny that it has made me a lot more productive. At the current price it's a no-brainer to use it.

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