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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#421

Post by Aurornis »

paradox242 wrote: post #392

I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to indepe…

> I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere

Some of the arguments in the article are so bizarre that I can’t believe they’re anything other than engagement bait.

Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows? Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language?

I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but it feels like the author decided to go full ragebait/engagement bait mode with the article instead of trying to have a real discussion. It’s weird to see this language on a company blog.

I think he knows that he’s ignoring the more complex and nuanced debates about LLMs because that’s not what the article is about. It’s written in inflammatory style that sets up straw man talking points and then sort of knocks them down while giving weird excuses for why certain arguments should be ignored.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#423

Post by killerstorm »

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…

Bullshit. We have absolute numbers, not just vibes.

The top of SWE-bench Verified leaderboard was at around 20% in mid-2024, i.e. AI was failing at most tasks.

Now it's at 70%.

Clearly it's objectively better at tackling typical development tasks.

And it's not like it went from 2% to 7%.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#424

Post by runjake »

mlsu wrote: post #362

I tried the agent thing on: - Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix) - Small rust codebase (new feature) - Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API - Small fixes to an existing frontend It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of…

You’re not providing a key piece of information to provide you with an answer: what were the prompts you used? You can share your sessions via URL.

A prompt like “Write a $x program that does $y” is generally going to produce some pretty poor code. You generally want to include a lot of details and desires in your prompt. And include something like “Ask clarifying questions until you can provide a good solution”.

A lot of the people who complain about poor code generation use poor prompting.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#425

Post by leecarraher »

It depends on what level of nuts you mean. Some are AGI skeptics about LLMs, theyre probably right, there is likely more breakthroughs required before true AGI. But AGI isn't required to completely disrupt a ton of good, well-paid professions. That is the more worrying scenario. AI is already widening the wealth gap irreparably and with more progress it will only continue.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#426

Post by Aurornis »

dvt wrote: post #409

Fully agree with @tptacek here: > But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right. However, I just don't think the AI coding part is that interesting or future-thinking. We're seeing so much more progress in semantic search, tool calling, general purpose uses, robotics, I…

> I'm going to go ahead and press (X) to doubt on this anecdote. You've had an issue for months and the logs were somehow so arcane, so dense, so unparseable, no one spotted these "metadata corruption issues?" I'm not going to accuse anyone of blatant fabrication, but this is very hard to swallow.

I have this problem with a lot of LLM miracle anecdotes. There’s an implication that the LLM did something that was eluding people for months, but when you read more closely they don’t actually say they were working on the problem for months. Just that they were complaining about it for months.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#427

Post by cookiengineer »

Seeing everything these days being about vibe coding, I feel a little old with my VIM setup and my LSP servers who I already thought were a nice productivity increase.

The problems I have with the stuff relating to MCP is that the tech around it is developing so fast that it's hard for outsiders to catch up with what the best working setup is, for example.

What would you do, for example, if you want to selfhost this?

- which models (qwen ai coder?)

- which api (with ollama? Bolt? Aider? Etc)

- how to integrate PRs with a local gitlab/gogs/forgejo instance? Do you need another MCP agent for git that does that?

- which hardware dependencies to run it?

I am currently trying to figure out how to implement a practical workflow for this. So far I'm using still a synchronous MCP agent setup where it basically runs on another machine in the network because I have a too unperformant laptop to work with.

But how would I get to the point of async MCP agents that can work on multiple things in my Go codebases in parallel? With the mentioned PR workflows so that I can modify/edit/rework before the merges?

The author makes a lot of claims and talks always about that their opponents in the argument are not talking about the same thing. But what exactly is the same thing, which is reproducible locally for everyone?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#428

Post by Verdex »

Hundreds of comments. Some say LLMs are the future. Others say they don't work today and they won't work tomorrow.

Videogame speed running has this problem solved. Livestream your 10x engineer LLM usage, a git commit annotated with it's prompt per change. Then everyone will see the result.

This doesn't seem like an area of debate. No complicated diagrams required. Just run the experiment and show the result.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#429

Post by 79a6ed87 »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

>To those of us who like Free Software because of the freedom it gives us, this is a severe regression.

It's fair to be worried about depending on LLM. But I find the dependance on things like AWS or Azure more problematic, if we are talking about centralized and proprietary

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#430

Post by gerdesj »

Try getting your fav LLM to do something useful with PowerCLI. That's the VMware PowerShell thing. It is quite popular but not enough, so that most prompts will end up with bollocks, masquerading as code.

When a LLM has been tamed to the point that I can define and request a PowerCLI programme, I can be fairly sure that AI is a solved thing.

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