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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

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Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#481

Post by threethirtytwo »

lins1909 wrote: post #392
threethirtytwo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is not about whether programming is fun, elegant, creative, or personally fulfilling. It is about business value. Programming exists, at scale, because it produces economic value. That value translates into revenue, leverage, competitive advantage, and ultimately money. For decades, a large portion of that value could only be produced by human labor. Now, increasingly, it cannot be assumed that this will…

Why do you say this subjective thing so confidently? Does believing what you just wrote make you feel better? Have you considered that there are people who actually just enjoy programming by themselves?

Isn't this common on HN? People with subjective opinions voice their subjective opinions confidently. People who disagree calmly state they disagree and also state why.

The question is more about why my post triggered you... why would my simple opinion trigger you? Does disagreement trigger you? If I said something that is obviously untrue that you disagreed with, for example: "The world is flat." Would this trigger you? I don't think it would. So why was my post different?

Maybe this is more of a question you should ask yourself.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#482

Post by bitwize »

gradus_ad wrote: post #465

It seems that as the tools available to developers have become more abstracted allowing them to do more with less, their ability to command higher salaries and prestige has only grown and grown. LLM's are just a continuation of this trend. The naive view considers only the small scale ease of completing a task in isolation and expects compensation to be proportional to it. But that's not how things work. Yes abstract…

OK, so what do I hear about LLMs? Oh, it's just like having an intern. A fresh graduate. Now you're not building the thing yourself, you're giving directives and delegating the actual building of the thing. What does this sound like?

The managerial class believes that all the value in a business comes from managerial work. LLMs are being hyped by the managerial class because they are turning software development into managerial work and eliminating "programmer" as a professional category. The key insight Milt Bryce had with PRIDE is that software is a product that can be manufactured just like any other product. The ideal software production workflow is that of a factory, and the ideal factory is staffed by no more than a man and a dog—in other words, fully automated.

So the rules of business in your father's or grandfather's time prevail once again. It's up or out. Learn people skills, learn the business, and take on more responsibilities putting those skills to use and fewer responsibilities involving code. Or find yourself increasingly irrelevant.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#483

Post by jimmaswell »

jfengel wrote: post #480
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right of course. For me there’s no flow state possible with LLM “coding”. That makes it feel miserable instead of joyous. Sitting around waiting while it spits out tokens that I then have to carefully look over and tweak feels like very hard work. Compared to entering flow and churning out those tokens myself, which feels effortless once I get going. Probably other people feel differently.

I could imagine a world where LLM coding was fun. It would sound like "imagine a game, like Galaxians but using tractor trailers, and as a first person shooter." And it pumps out a draft and you say, "No, let's try it again with an army of bagpipers." In other words, getting to be the "ideas guy", but without sounding like a dipstick who can't do anything. I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet. Instead we'…

For me the excitement is palpable when I've asked it to write a feature, then I go test it and it entirely works as expected. It's so cool.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#484

Post by epolanski »

colordrops wrote: post #403
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

> But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on. I think there is a section of programmer who actually do…

The split I'm seeing with those around me is: 1. Those who see their codebase as a sculpture, a work of art, a source of pride 2. Those who focus on outcomes. They are not contradictory goals, but I'm finding that if your emphasis is 1, you general dislike LLMs, and if your emphasis is 2, you love them, or at least tolerate them.

Why would you dislike LLMs for 1?

I have my personal projects where every single line if authored by hand.

Still, I will ask LLMs for feedback or look for ideas when I have the feeling something could be rearchitected/improved but I don't see how.

More often than not, they fluke, but occasionally they will still provide valid feedback which otherwise I'd missed.

LLMs aren't just for the "lets dump large amounts of lower-level work" use case.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#485

Post by noosphr »

simonw wrote: post #160
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

I've been building Ai apps since gpt 3 so 5 years now.

The pro AI people don't understand what quadratic attention means and the anti-ai people don't understand how much information can be contained in a tb of weights.

At the end of the day both will be hugely disappointed.

>The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation.

Intuition does not translate between models. Whatever you think dense llms were good at deepseek completely upended it in an afternoon. The difference between major revisions of model families is substantial enough that intuition is a drawback not an asset.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#486

Post by simonw »

bitwize wrote: post #482
gradus_ad wrote: post #465

It seems that as the tools available to developers have become more abstracted allowing them to do more with less, their ability to command higher salaries and prestige has only grown and grown. LLM's are just a continuation of this trend. The naive view considers only the small scale ease of completing a task in isolation and expects compensation to be proportional to it. But that's not how things work. Yes abstract…

OK, so what do I hear about LLMs? Oh, it's just like having an intern. A fresh graduate. Now you're not building the thing yourself, you're giving directives and delegating the actual building of the thing. What does this sound like? The managerial class believes that all the value in a business comes from managerial work. LLMs are being hyped by the managerial class because they are turning software development into…

The great thing about working with LLMs is that you don't need people skills, even though managing them is a loose imitation of that.

You don't have to consider the feelings of your coding agent, or their specific taste, or what challenges would best help them advance in their skills or career.

You tell them to do something, and if they do it wrong you tell them what to fix, and you can keep on hammering away at them until you get the right result.

If they go too far off the tracks you reboot them with a clean slate and set them on the task again in a different direction.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#487

Post by yicmoggIrl »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #387

The reason I am "anti-AI" is not because I think LLMs being bad at what they do, nor because I'm afraid they'll take my job. I use CC to accelerate my own work (it's improved by leaps and bounds though I still find I have to keep it on a short leash because it doesn't always think things through enough). It's also a great research tool (search on steroids). It's excellent at summarizing long documents, editing and pr…

This. The only thing AI will do, at the societal level, if it truly succeeds, is insanely amplify the power imbalance we already suffer under. Thinking that the benefits of AI will be "democratic" is staggeringly naïve.

It's obvious that AI, if it succeeds, will be primarily used to make people, even as physical beings, redundant.

From TFA:

> the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection

This is daydreaming. Just look at the US. "Political pressure" is not a thing.

There will be war.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#488

Post by epolanski »

systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

What would be the type of work you're doing where you wouldn't benefit from one or multiple of the following:

- find information about APIs without needing to open a browser

- writing a plan for your business-logic changes or having it reviewed

- getting a review of your code to find edge cases, potential security issues, potential improvements

- finding information and connecting the dots of where, what and why it works in some way in your code base?

Even without letting AI author a single line of code (where it can still be super useful) there are still major uses for AI.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#489

Post by darkhorse222 »

Diti wrote: post #462
jstummbillig wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no hard part. The anti-AI position has simply become trite. The idea is that agentic coding does not work. Today, it does work.

It only works for languages and frameworks that are already in the training data (duh). It still is mostly useless when you need to create something from scratch in an unstable language. That, and you can’t also get the amazing results if you’re poor or have bad internet.

Good thing almost all of programming falls into the former. Most of the economy runs on well defined languages. Billions and billions of dollars.

Re: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

#490

Post by yicmoggIrl »

on_the_train wrote: post #245

Another one of these sickening pieces. Framing opposition to an expensive tech that doesn't work as "anti". I tried letting the absolutely newest models write c++ today again. Gpt 5.1 and opus 4.5. single function with two or less input parameters, a nice return value, doing simple geometry with the glm library. Yes the code worked. But I took as long fixing the weird parts as it would have taken me myself. And I sti…

> reviewing is so much harder than writing

This is what reams of the AI proponents fail to understand. "Amazing, I don't have to write code, 'only' review AI slop" is sitting backwards on the horse. Who the heck wants to do that?

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