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Where I'm at with AI

paulosman.me

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Re: Where I'm at with AI

#41

Post by WarmWash »

benrutter wrote: post #32
aspenmartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I hear this a lot, do people genuinely dismiss that there has been step change progress over 6-12 months timescale? I mean it’s night and day, look at benchmark numbers… “yea I don’t buy it” ok but then don’t pretend you’re objective

I think I'd be in the "don't buy it" camp, so maybe I can explain my thinking at least. I don't deny that there's been huge improvements in LLMs over the last 6-12 months at all. I'm skeptical that the last 6 months have suddenly presented a 'category shift' in terms of the problems LLMs can solve (I'm happy to be proved wrong!). It seems to me like LLMs are better at solving the same problems that they could solve 6…

The improvement in LLMs has come in the form of more successful one shots, more successful bug finding, more efficient code, less time hand-holding the model.

"Problem solving" (which definitely has improved, but maybe has a spikey domain improvement profile) might not be the best metric, because you could probably hand hold the models of 12 months ago to the same "solution" as current models, but you would spend a lot of time hand holding.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#42

Post by ryandrake »

yalogin wrote: post #40

There really are no other use cases for generative AI than software flows. The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable. One think I am convinced of is that software engineering salaries will fall and we have seen the peak salaries for this industry, they will only fall going forward. Sure there will be a few key senior folks that continue to make a lot, bu…

> The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable.

"Software Engineers" isn't a single group, here. Some software engineers (making millions of dollars at top AI companies) are automating other software engineers' workflows and making those software engineers replaceable. The people who are going to be mostly negatively affected by these changes are not the people setting out to build them.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#43

Post by micromacrofoot »

Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

I think maybe people who write that it's not being discussed really mean that people aren't doing anything based on the discussions. Overall all of this is just sort of happening.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#44

Post by dr-detroit »

aspenmartin wrote: post #21
rootnod3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN. Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do no…

[dead]

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#45

Post by Aurornis »

ivanstojic wrote: post #4

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.” I’m tired of the hype boss.

I’m a light LLM user myself and I still write most of the important code by myself.

Even I can see there has been a clear advancement in performance in the past six months. There will probably be another incremental step 6 months from now.

I use LLMs in a project that helps give suggestions for a previously manually data entry job. Six months ago the LLM suggestions were hit or miss. Using a recent model it’s over 90% accurate. Everything is still manually reviewed by humans but having a recent model handle the grunt work has been game changing.

If people are drinking a firehose of LinkedIn style influencer hype posts I could see why it’s tiresome. I ignore those and I think everyone else should do. There is real progress being made though.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#46

Post by CuriouslyC »

leoedin wrote: post #16
skydhash wrote: post #11

> that most software will be built very quickly, and more complicated software should be developed by writing the specification, and then generating the code. We may still need to drop down to a programming language from time to time, but I believe that almost all development will be done with generative AI tools My strongly held belief is that anyone who think that way, also think that software engineering is readin…

I've been playing around with "vibe coding" recently. Generally react front end and Rust back end. Rust has the nice benefit that you only really get logic bugs if it compiles. In the few apps I've built, progress is initially amazing. And then you get to a certain point and things slow down. I've built a list of things that are "not quite right" and then, as I work through each one all the strange architectural deci…

This is a big part of why vibe coded projects fall over. AI creates big balls of mud because it's myopic as hell. Linters help but they're still pretty limited. I've had good success using https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/valknut to automate the majority of my refactoring work. I still do a style/naming pass on things, but it handles most issues that can be analytically measured.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#47

Post by KptMarchewa »

yalogin wrote: post #40

There really are no other use cases for generative AI than software flows. The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable. One think I am convinced of is that software engineering salaries will fall and we have seen the peak salaries for this industry, they will only fall going forward. Sure there will be a few key senior folks that continue to make a lot, bu…

> The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable.

Do you really think we should be like ancient egyptian scribes and gatekeep the knowledge and skills purely for our sake?

I don't think there has been other field that is this open with trade secrets. I know a dentist who openly claims they should be paid for training dental interns (idk what the US terminology is) despite them being productive, simply because they will earn a lot of money in the future. I did not want and do not want software engineering to become that.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#48

Post by Aurornis »

Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

> You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed

It’s not just being discussed, it’s dominating the conversation on sites like Hacker News. It’s actually hard to find the useful and informative LLM content because it doesn’t get as many upvotes as the constant flow of anti-LLM thought pieces like this.

There was even the strange period when the rationalist movement was in the spotlight and getting mainstream media coverage for their AI safety warnings. They overplayed their hand with the whole call to drop bombs on data centers and the AI 2027 project with Scott Alexander that predicted the arrival of AGI and disastrous consequences in 2027. There was so much extreme doom and cynicism for a while that a lot of people just got tired of it and tuned out.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#49

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

This article is different because it actually talks about code review, which I don’t see very often. Especially in the ultra-hype 1000x “we built an operating system in a day using agentic coding”, it seems like code review is implied to be a thing of the past.

As long as code continues to need to be reviewed to (mostly) maintain a chain of liability, I don’t see SWE going anywhere like both hypebros and doomers seem to be intent on posting about.

Code review will simply become the bottle neck for SWE. In other words, reading and understanding code so that when SHTF the shareholders know who to hold accountable.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#50

Post by jofla_net »

deweller wrote: post #7
ivanstojic wrote: post #4

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.” I’m tired of the hype boss.

The second half of that argument was not in this article. The author was just relating his experience. For what it is worth, I have also gone from a "this looks interesting" to "this is a regular part of my daily workflow" in the same 6 month time period.

"The challenge isn’t choosing “AI or not AI” - that ship has sailed."
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