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AI is stifling new tech adoption?

vale.rocks

411–420 of 442 posts

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#411
Why would AI stifle tech adoption when ~nobody uses it? I think HN is in a bit of a bubble here. People on here seem to often think that everyone is using AI at work, it is really common and widely appreciated, etc.

It really, really isn't. Most people in the software industry do not use it. Its use in other industries and in the professions is even lower. AI coding tools are bad enough at widely used things like Python and JS. They are DOGSHIT at generating C or C++. They are basically terrible at doing anything other than regurgitating things from Medium blogspam tutorials.

The result is not people moving to only using technology that AI is "good" at (relatively, given it is terrible at coding anything at all). It is that the overwhelming majority don't use it at all. The thing is, nobody really talks about this because it isn't interesting _not_ to use something. You can't write many high-engagement blog posts to content-market your company by saying you still just use vim and ctags and documentation to write code, just like you did 10 years ago. That isn't noteworthy and nobody will read it or upvote it. HN is always biased by this towards the new, the noteworthy, changes to practices, etc. Just like browsing HN would lead you to believe people are rewriting their websites in new JS frameworks every 6 months. No, but posts about doing that obviously generate more engagement than 6-monthly "Update: Our website is still written in Ruby on Rails" posts would.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t like that this conclusion seems to be that if humans adopt every new technology before AI can train on it that their jobs will be more secure. That is its own kind of hell. It's the hell we'll be forced into. The powers that be care not one whit for our well being or comfort. We have to duck and weave (or get smashed), while they "creatively" destroy.

We have the power to destroy, too.

No nearly as much. And when we do it, we tend to get punished.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the system prompt tied to the artifacts feature seems to be the reason for it having a preference for react, seems like the solution would be to use the API instead. Plenty of front ends available nowadays that let you use your own API key. I've been using typingmind since I paid for it over a year ago but I'd be interested to know if some good open source alternatives have popped up more recently.

The main blocker to using the API with an alternative frontend is the cost. Daily API usage can easily go above the $20/month subscription cost since output tokens are expensive and each new message reuses the whole message chain as input tokens. Especially true if you often upload images or documents.

Third party providers work through the APIs and thus do not have these issues. I use Kagi but there are many options out there for a price similar to the normal subscription, and plus you get a wider choice of models.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#414
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is almost 12 years old and has dominated frontend development for almost a decade. I'd bet most JS backend projects still use Express as the webserver, and it's even older than React. Can we please retire this meme? It's stale and adds nothing to the conversation.

Yes thanks to React we can finally retire this meme. It was very true before react became dominant though.

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Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate truth is that the one true way these days is React, and if you're doing anything else you're in for a world of pain.

The actual truth is that you don’t need any of these frameworks at all. Vanilla JS & HTML has come a long way, and LLMs like Claude can build Vanilla JS with no trouble.

So AI does stifle adoption of new tech then?

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#416
People used to live in villages and places that were not connected by roads. Now since we have roads, any place that is not connected by a road will be seen a rough place. The difficulty is caused by usage of roads and vehicles, because it was not perceived or felt back in those days. So technology and assistance create new perceived problems.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#417
while it is true that there is a gap between what most LLMs "know" and current time that gap is getting smaller not larger with time, it is also possible to teach a model pass the knowledge cut-off with tools and an LLM might be encouraged to be aware of the gap and reach out for the latest information when it might have changed (pi is still pi but the country with the most people might have changed)

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#418
post #262
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely 50% slower, compounding each year? Jokes aside, I find it curious what does and doesn't gain traction in tech. The slowness of the IPv6 was already an embarrassment when I learned about it in university… 21 years ago, and therefore before the people currently learning about it in university had been conceived. What actually took hold? A growing pantheon of software architecture styles and patterns, and enough…

The slowness to adopt IPv6 is because it's not a great design. Going from 32-bits to 128-bits is complete overengineering. We will never need 128-bits of network address space as long as we are confined to this solar system, and the resulting addresses are extremely cumbersome to use. (Can you tell someone your IPv6 address over the phone? Can you see it on one monitor and type it into a different computer? Can you r…

> extremely cumbersome to use. (Can you tell someone your IPv6 address over the phone? Can you see it on one monitor and type it into a different computer? Can you remember it for the 10 seconds it takes to walk over to the other terminal?)

That's your idea of "extremely cumbersome"?

128 bit is exactly as hard as four groups of 32 bit.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#419
post #303

> OpenAI’s latest models have cutoffs of late 2023. The first paragraph is factually incorrect; the cutoff is June 2024 for 4o. Awww, no more new JavaScript frameworks and waiting only for established technologies to cut through the noise. I don't see that as a bad thing. Technologies need to mature, and maintaining API backward compatibility is another advantage.

What if you are using boring technology, but surprise, it or some of its libraries got updated? React is on version 19. Show some imagination.

I hear you, and I’ve run into similar issues where AI falls short—take aerospace documentation systems or tools like MCP (tiling manager) as prime examples. That said, framing this as a stifling of technology feels like a leap to me. The hypothesis strikes me as anecdotal at best. For instance, I don’t see coworkers abandoning libraries just because LLMs can’t assist—it’s not that hard to dive into the library code yourself, or even attach docs in Cursor if clarity’s a priority. If anything, the friction here feels minor, not existential. To claim AI is holding progress back? That argument needs more robust evidence, in my opinion.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but React is swapping major recommendations / styles ever 18 months still. How do you create a react application these days? Not create-react-app apparently?

IMO create-react-app was a crutch for the last generation of build systems like webpack which were egregiously complex. Nowadays you just use Vite and start with whatever Github template has all the tech you need. Even starting a project from scratch is really simple now since the config files to get started are tiny and simple. There’s always the problem of outdated tutorials on the internet, but as a frontend dev s…

Never been simpler you say? I think that heavily depends on your project. If you are not building an app, but a website, I think it has been simpler for at least a decade, because then you wouldn't worry about lots of the stuff like bundler, build system (for a few scripts!!!) and some plain CSS.

But aside from all that topic, I have a question about Vite. Does it in any way bind you to using their service for hosting, or can one just as well and easy host such an app on ones own bare metal server?

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