Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#461

Post by somenameforme »

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…

Lots of companies are directly involved with LLMs, or working to leverage it for startups or their existing projects. And I think a fair chunk of all the employees working at these places probably post on HN (a crazy high percent of the recent batches of YC applicants were using LLM stuff, for instance). That's going to lead to a sizable number of perspectives and opinions that are not especially free of bias, simply because you want to believe that what you're working on is ultimately viable.

And I think it'd be extremely easy to convince oneself of this. Look at where 'AI' was 5 years ago, look at where it is today and then try to imagine where it will be in another 5 years. Of course you have to completely blind yourself to the fact that the acceleration has clearly sharply stalled out, but humans are really good at cognitive dissonance, especially when your perception of your future depends on it.

And there's also the point that even though I'm extremely critical of LLMs in general, they have absolutely 'transformed' my workflow in that natural language search of documentation is really useful. Being able to describe a desired API, but in an overly broad way that a search engine can't really pick up on, but that an LLM [often] can, is just quite handy. On the other hand, this is more a condemnation of search engine tech being frozen 20 years in the past than it is about an imminent LLM revolution.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#462

Post by structural »

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…

AI lets the agency better be able to afford to hire and keep the excellent humans around to solve complex problems. It's better than a human that also can't fix your issue themselves and has to ask you to transfer to the other person. Ideally, the AI agent would have let you book a callback time with the specific right human who's best able to fix your issue. Some companies are able to do this, and you, the customer, never realize that of the 100 specialists in the building, you got connected to the one person who understands your issue and has the tools to fix it.

Customer service is hard because it has to filter out 90% noise, 9% fairly straightforward tasks, and the <1% of complex issues that need to be sent to the right human.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#463

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

Very interesting. A couple of notes here on the C# version.

Its using the old format where the Program.cs file has an actual class, whereas as of .NET 6 thats not required.

You said barebones, but for any real server you would want to use the generic host https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/gen... which gets you a lot of the boilerplate and enables you program to be wrapped in a windows or systemd service.

Finally, parsing can be simplified since ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8, you can just parse the entire string as UTF-8. IMHO I am disappointed that the AI didn't point that out.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#464

Post by chrisandchris »

anonzzzies wrote: post #449
chrisandchris wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. A friend, whose SQL knowledge is minimal, used an LLM to query data from a database over a couple of tables. Yes, after a lot of trial and error he (most probably) got the correct data, however the only one being able to read the query is the LLM itself. It's full of coalesce, subselects that repeat the same joins again and again. LLM will do a lot for you, but I really hate this "this will [already did] s…

> because it's quality is those of a junior dev, at max. Echo chamber/bias I guess. I know many, many seniors with big pay checks working for big companies who are vastly worse than sonnet at the moment. Juniors stand literally no chance unless very talented.

I understand a junior dev as someone who's missing (or does not have at a greater level) of maintainability, readability, longevity of a solution.

I don't know what companies pay for and I don't care, because if we go by that, every definition of every word is arguable (because there's everywhere someone out of the range of the definition)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#465

Post by mikhmha »

structural wrote: post #462
mikhmha wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI lets the agency better be able to afford to hire and keep the excellent humans around to solve complex problems. It's better than a human that also can't fix your issue themselves and has to ask you to transfer to the other person. Ideally, the AI agent would have let you book a callback time with the specific right human who's best able to fix your issue. Some companies are able to do this, and you, the customer,…

DONT get me wrong. What you're saying I actually support. If this allows that company to have quality staff I'm all for it. The less time we both spend on each other the better. So just offer async processing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#466

Post by badgersnake »

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…

There’s a lot of people on here with a financial interest in AI doing well. So they hype it continuously.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#467

Post by kristiandupont »

somenameforme wrote: post #461
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…

Lots of companies are directly involved with LLMs, or working to leverage it for startups or their existing projects. And I think a fair chunk of all the employees working at these places probably post on HN (a crazy high percent of the recent batches of YC applicants were using LLM stuff, for instance). That's going to lead to a sizable number of perspectives and opinions that are not especially free of bias, simply…

>acceleration has clearly sharply stalled out

I would rather say that the innovation happens in spikes. I see no slowing down whatsoever.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#468

Post by antupis »

kmarc wrote: post #460

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 environ…

> 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.

It is dotcom bust again. Mainstream is losing interest but at the same time I see our internal chatbots / ai agents doing hockey stick growth and I am using several hours code pilot daily.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#469

Post by aussieguy1234 »

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder.

Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before.

Create SQL queries for all kinds of business metrics including Monthly/Daily Active users, breakdown of users by country, abusive user detection and more.

Automated unit test creation. Not just the happy path either.

Automated data repository creation, based on a one shot example and MySQL text output describing the tables involved. From this, I have super fast data repositories that use raw SQL to get/write data.

Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs.

Database and query optimization.

Code Review. This has caught edge case bugs that normal testing did not detect.

I'm going to try out aider + claude sonnet 3.5 on my codebases. I have heard good things about it and some rave reviews on X/twitter. I watched a video where an engineer had a bug, described it to some tool (which wasn't specified, but I suspect aider), then Claude created a test to reproduce the bug and then fixed the code. The test passed, they then did a manual test and the bug was gone.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#470

Post by fuzztester »

kristiandupont wrote: post #440
fuzztester wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. These are the four simple lines that I wrote above: >Solid questions and comments, layer8. > I notice that the person you replied to has not replied to you yet. >It may be that they will, of course. >But your points are good. (Italics mine, and they were not in my original comment.) You, above: >when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow, I did check the time intervals betwe…

You were being passive aggressive and adding nothing to the discussion. The fact that you weren't wrong doesn't make any difference.

>You were being passive aggressive and adding nothing to the discussion.

What arrant nonsense!

Don't accuse people falsely or without substantiating your accusation.

My comment being referred to above, consisted of four simple short lines.

I am not going to bother to paste them here again for a third time.

Those HN readers who wish to do so, can go the few needed levels up this thread and check for themselves:

Nothing I said in those four lines can be interpreted as being passive-aggressive.

I say that you do not know what the heck you are talking about, if you claim that I was passive-aggressive in that comment.

Post reply on HN