Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: Nothin…
Artificial intelligence is losing hype
521–530 of 814 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#522Earlier 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…
For LOVR (Lua based 3D/VR framework), I found these LLMs pretty much useless, both ChatGPT and Claude. Seems all is trained on old APIs, so it takes quite a bit of effort to make any suggestions work with newest LOVR version.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
- We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? - Simple interpolation of the progress is exactly the problem here. Look at the historical graphs of AI funding and tell me with a straight face that we absolutely must use simple interpolation. - Nope, human-level intelligence is not even close. It remains as nebulous and out of reach a…
> We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? You shouldn’t use science fiction as your reference point. It’s like saying “where is my flying car?” (Helicopters exist)
And btw in the Terminator novelizations it was clearly stated that Skynet was a very good optimization machine but lacked creativity. So it's actually a good benchmark: can we create an intelligent machine that needs no supervision but still has limitations (i.e. it cannot dramatically reformulate its strategy in case it cannot win, which is exactly what happened in the books)?
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#524If 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 busine…
When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI, but what it's really going to look like is a graph of oddball AI agents tuned for different optimizations.
One node might be slow and expensive but able to infer intent from a document, but its input is filtered by a fast and cheap one that eliminates uninteresting content, and it could offload work to a domain-specific one that knows everything about URLs, for example. More like the network of small, specialized computers scattered around your car than a central know-it-all computer.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#525AI (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 saw an LLM demo at one point where it was asked to write FFT and add unit tests for it which really drove this point home for me.
A programmer is a nicer term for a code monkey. You ask them to write FFT and they'll code it. All problems can be solved with mode code. They can edit code, but on the whole it's more just to add more code. LLMs are actually pretty good at this job, in my experience. And this job is important, not all tasks can be engineered thoroughly. But this job has its scaling limits.
A software engineer is not about coding per se, it's about designing software. It's all about designing the right code, not more code. Work smarter, not harder, for scale. You ask them to write FFT and they'll find a way to depend on it from a common implementation so they don't have to maintain an independent implementation. I've personally found LLMs very bad at this type of work, the same way you and others relying to you describe it. (Ok, maybe FFT is overly simple, I'm sure an LLM can import that for you. But you get the idea.) LLMs have statistical confidence, not intellectual confidence. But software engineering generally works with code too complex for pure statistical confidence.
No offense to the LLM fans here, but I strongly suspect most of them are closer to the programmer category of work. An important job, but one more easily automated away by LLMs (or better software engineering long-term). And we can see this by how a lot of programming has been outsourced for decades to cheap labor in third-world countries: it's a simpler type of job. That plus the people biased because their jobs and egos depend on LLMs succeeding.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.
Do you provide code examples? In my experience the more specific you get with your problem the more specific are the provided solutions (probably a "natural" occurence in LLMs). Hallucianted APIs are sometimes a problem for me, but then I just specify which API to use.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need an LLM if you know what you want it to do? Just write the code rather than wrangling with the LLM, it isn't like writing code take much time when you know what it should do.
This is the comment! If so called „prompt engineering“ goes so far that only one solution remains, you don‘t need the LLM.
That way I can generate a simple few hundred lines of code app in minutes. There is no way I could type that fast even if I exactly know what characters to write and it's not always the case. Like, oftentimes I know exactly what to do and I know if it's OK when I see the code, but writing it would require me to look into the docs here and there.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#528AI (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…
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#529If 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 busine…
> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#530Earlier 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…
Sometime I think there's something wrong with me. I've used copilot, I'm paying for ChatGPT and we're also having the Jetbrains AI, and there's just something so off about all of this. Some basic things are fine, but once you get into specialised things, everything gets just terribly wrong and weird. I can't even put it into words, I see people saying how they are 10x more productive (I'd like to see actual numbers a…
So it will be with inexperienced people coding with LLMs.