Artificial intelligence is losing hype • Hacker News Board

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#451

Post by anonzzzies » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:16 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #217

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I see so many people hyping Claude Sonnet + Cursor on Twitter/X, yet in real world usage, I find it no better than GitHub Copilot (presumably GPT 4o) + VScode. Cursor offers some super marginal UX improvements over the latter (being that it’s a fork of VScode), since it allows you to switch models. But Claude and GPT have been interchangeable at least for my workflows, so I’m not sure the hype is really deserved. I c…

I have copilot too; it's good for edits, but one shot complete function generating, I don't find it very good at (while sonnet is imho).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#452

Post by anonzzzies » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:20 AM UTC

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I have the same experience; I hope some open source/weights model gets to the same standard as I find a company like Anthropic having too much power to just shut out parts of the world (it did in the beginning when not available in the EU so I had to use proxies etc).

It is of vital importance (imho) to get open models at the same level before another jump comes (if it comes of course, maybe another winter, but at least we'll have something I use every day/all day; so not all hype I think).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#453

Post by roseway4 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:21 AM UTC

Calavar wrote: post #359

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Something worth noting is that the parent comment refers to using Cursor, not ChatGPT/Claude.ai. The latter are general-purpose chat (and, in the case of ChatGPT, agentic) applications.

Cursor is a purpose-built IDE for software development. The Cursor team has put a lot of research and sweat into providing the used LLMs (also from OpenAI/Anthropic) with:

- the right parts of your code

- relevant code/dependency documentation

- and, importantly, the right prompts.

to successfully complete coding tasks. It's an apple and oranges situation.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#454

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:21 AM UTC

Calavar wrote: post #359

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Counterpoint: I have gotten real value out of dumping broken SQL into ChatGPT and have it fix it for me. I could 100% have done that by myself, but it would have meant I have to go and google the right syntax.

AI is great for me, but it is more like a junior developer you are pairing with than a replacement.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#455

Post by bruce511 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:25 AM UTC

mikhmha wrote: post #450

bruce511 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet. I am an experienced programmer, but I find myself (for the first time) doing a deep-dive in SQL and specifical…

Recently I saw the process of filling for 2 insurance claims through 2 different entities. First one used a great ai voice agent that does the process of filtering your query. it understood me perfectly. But then I still had to wait in line for an actual agent. Ok wait for 6 hours. Whatever. Call again - the 2nd time going through the same agent is painful. Its so slow. And all this just to connect me to a human - wh…

Your point is that AI is bad at some things, and in some cases misused. Which is of course abundantly true.

But equally it doesn't prove, or even assert, the opposite. A bicycle may be bad at cross-country road trips, but that doesn't make it a bad choice for some other situations.

Hence my earlier comment - I (and I suspect others) are finding it useful for some tasks. That is not to imply it is good at all tasks.

Is it over-hyped? Of course yes. Welcome to IT where every new thing is over-hyped all the time.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#456

Post by structural » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:25 AM UTC

Calavar wrote: post #359

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

I've been very productive using LLMs, without any expectations of them "writing functional code". Instead, I've mostly used them as if I was working with a human research librarian.

For example, I can ask the LLM things like "What are the most common mistakes when using the Vulkan API to render a triangle with a texture?" and I'll very rapidly learn something about working with an API that I don't have deep understanding of, and I might not find a specific tutorial article about.

As another example, if I'm an experienced OpenGL programmer, I can ask directly "what's the Vulkan equivalent of this OpenGL API call?" and get quite good results back, most of the time.

So I'm asking questions where an 80% answer is still very valuable, and it's much faster than searching for documentation and doing a lot of comparison and headscratching, and it works well enough even when there's no specific article I could find in a variety of searches.

Anything better that the technology gets from here just makes things even easier yet!

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#457

Post by emseetech » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:25 AM UTC

sandspar wrote: post #378

yoyohello13 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the middle. I use paid models. It’s great for scripts, reminding me of commands, and surprisingly good at debugging error messages. But if I’m working in our main code base I’m basically never able to just use the code it spits out. It can get me in the ballpark of what I want, but it often does weird convoluted shit on the first pass. I can keep prompting to refine the code down to something closer to what I…

I'm concerned about the "turning the brain off" effect too. When we put backup cameras on cars it means that everyone can parallel park perfectly. Now take away the backup cameras and see what happens to our parallel parking.

I'm also concerned, because a lot of people are using these models for the early stage drudge-work and I hate to sound like Calvin's dad here, but I feel like those early stages are good for a developer to build a mental model of their larger goals and targets. Sure it's easy and a lot of boilerplate, but our brains are working while we're doing it, and for me, it feels like a necessary part of the process. I'm not convinced automating it away isn't going to result in a more difficult time understanding of your product and code base later on.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#458

Post by weq » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:26 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #446

Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

I was skeptical like you, but recently decided to try it out. I wasn't expecting much, and as such I was slightly surprised. For example, just now my NAS stopped working because the boot device went offline. So I got to thinking about writing a simple syslog server. I've never looked at the syslog protocol before, and I've never done any low-level TCP/UDP work in C# yet. So I asked ChatGPT to generate some code[1], a…

This is how i currently utilise and view The AI tools. I replaced the googling in my flow with it. It might have taken me 20minutes before to get the boilerplate together, now its a minute. Depending on the type of code legacy overheads you have, results may vary. If you can break your problem down into small descrete bits.

The way the OP here was talking about sonnet being above way above chatgtp in this case, it could be true. Google probably has the largest Go codebases on search to train the AI on higher quiality inputs. Go is a simpler language with less variation over time compared to something like .net also adding to its corner.

ive always been the type of person to use the right language for the each use case. For the last 10+ years ive primarly been building cross platform apps that target every common OS. So these "ai" tools like phind.com give me a universal API interface and generate code which is equiv to a SO answer. They are the ability of an outsourced junior dev who you would never let push code to prod, that doesnt have the language barrier but retains the fake dergee overheads ;)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#459

Post by ainonsense44 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:27 AM UTC

iluvcommunism wrote: post #353

wokwokwok wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you spend 10 minutes writing a free text description of the test you want; tell it exactly how you want it to write the test, and then 4-5 minutes trying to understand if it did the right thing or not, restart because it did something crazy then a few minutes manually fixing the diff it generated? MMmm. I mean, don't get me wrong; this is impressive stuff; but it needs to be an order of magnitude less 'screwing ar…

I used it for some troubleshooting in my job. Linux Sys Admin. I like how I can just ask it a question and explain the situation and it goes thru everything with me, like a Person.

> Certainly, yes. To initialize the IPv6 subsystem, enter 'init 6' in an elevated system terminal.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#460

Post by kmarc » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 5:29 AM UTC

My employer PoC'd, collaborated with and eventually bought Codeium's solution.

I couldn't care less about (any, so also neither about) the LLM hype. Especially didn't bother going to a new web site (ChatGPT), or installing new IDEs etc.

I checked Codeium's mycompany-customized landing page: a one-liner vim plug-in installation and copy pasting an auth token.

I started typing in the very same editor, very same environment, very same everything, and the thing just works, most of the time guesses well what I would want to write, so then I just press tab to accept and voila.

I wasn't expecting such a seamless experience.

I still haven't integrated its "chat" functionality into my workflow (maybe I won't at all). I'm not hyped about it, it just feels like a companion to already working (and correct) code completion.

I read a lot about other people's usages (I'm a devXP engineer), and I feel like that for whatever reason there is more love / hype / faith on their chosen AI companion than how much they actually could improve if took a humble way of understanding code, reading (and writing) docs, reasoning about the engineering solution.

As everything, now AI is losing hype, but somehow (in my bubble) seems like engineers are still high on it. But I also see that this will distill further the set of people who I look up to and want to collaborate with, because e of that mentioned humbleness, as opposed to just accepting text predicted solutions mindlessly.