My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

I think this is my key point of disagreement. Professional software developers often don't see themselves as artisans, because Steve Jobs's unseen feet are implemented through our implicit standards of ourselves. I don't go out of my way to be a perfectionist on the job, but neither will I try to push 1000 lines of spaghetti to solve a minor problem that seems like it ought to be a simple fix.

I've worked with people in the past who don't have this instinct, and it's my experience that their productivity is quite low if not negative, even though they often perceive themselves to be 10x developers who can handle all kinds of edge cases super fast. I suspect that most AI-generated code today ends up in this niche.

An interesting thing about many of these types of posts is they never actually detail the tools they use and how they use them to achieve their results. It shouldn’t even be that hard for them to do, they could just have their agent do it for them.

I'm 100% certain most if not all of them are, there is simply too much money flying around and I've seen things that marketing does in the past for way less hyped products. Though in this specific case I think the writer may simply be shilling AI to create demand for their service. Pay us monthly to one click deploy your broken incomplete AI slop. The app doesn't work? No problem just keep prompting harder and paying us more to host/build/test/deploy it...

I've also tried the agent thing and still am with only moderate success. Cursor, Claud-squad, goose, dagger AI agents. In other words all the new hotness, all with various features claiming to solve the fact that agents don't work. Guess what? they still don't.

But hey this is HN? most of the posters are tech fearing luddies right? All the contention on here must mean our grindset is wrong and we are not prompting hard enough.

There is even one shill Ghuntly that claims you need to be "redlining" ai at the cost of $500-$1000 per day to get the full benefits. LOL if that is not a veiled advertisement I don't know what is.

That is the real takeaway.

I use LLM’s for dozens of things. It took time to find how model strengths best connect with mine.

People who only evaluate models for one purpose over short timespans are going to have a hard time.

It’s like models come from a different cognitive & communication culture. Eliminating that barrier takes more experimentation and experience than logic.

I think their creativity is also often a function of the prompters creativity.

The harder you (creatively) push them into a creative corner, the more genuinely creative they get.

Not unlike how a good teacher can get unexpected positive results from students when they are channeled and pushed.