My AI skeptic friends are all nuts • Hacker News Board

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#561

Post by grumple » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 3:57 AM UTC

Where are the results? I keep hearing about how great these coding agents are. What have you built beyond the complexity of a disposable toy app? Where are the swarms of new apps built by these agents that are solving new problems and taking over markets? I’m just not seeing results. I guess I need to spend some time using cursor as an agent to see it for myself.

I am a believer that these tools will be (if they aren’t already) extremely useful. Game changing in many ways, and I worry about the future of knowledge fields. Definitely not a skeptic in the trajectory. I do wonder if that makes those of us who are on the cutting edge more valuable as AI can quickly reproduce things that are well understood.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#562

Post by csomar » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 3:57 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #506

I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound. If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never…

No. And I don't think they are doing anything magical. Performance drop sharply after 50k tokens. Your LLM does best when you have a short 2-5K context.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#563

Post by ttiurani » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 3:57 AM UTC

"You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR."

As a software engineer, I need to call out this rhetoric. We are not all morally bankrupt. Many of the people with the most ethical backbone I know are also software engineers.

I don't use "AI" for the same reason I don't use amphetamine. I'm sure I could get stuff more stuff done faster if I used it, but I don't, because the manufacturing and the distribution of it is completely unethical.

The blatant stealing of intellectual property is only the tip of the shitberg. As bad are the giant ecological footprint[1], the colonialism of the grossly underpaid RLHF, and the conceding of even more of our digital lives to trillion dollar corporations.

We can and must ethically evaluate our work, and that includes our tools. Nobody's perfect, but doing one immoral thing does not mean you get a free pass to skip morality altogether.

1. https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/environmental-impact...

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#564

Post by weddpros » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 3:58 AM UTC

Verdex wrote: post #428

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.

AI Coding is becoming an edge, and sharing your edge isn't the wisest thing to do, even more so when doubt is so prevalent!

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#565

Post by intrasight » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 3:59 AM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #557

The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.

My philosophy is to let the LLM either write the logic or write the tests - but not both. If you write the tests and it writes the logic and it passes all of your tests, then the LLM did its job. If there are bugs, there were bugs in your tests.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#566

Post by closeparen » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 4:01 AM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #467

To quote an excellent article from last week: > The AI has suggested a solution, but the added code is arguably useless or wrong. There is a huge decision space to consider, but the AI tool has picked one set of decisions, without any rationale for this decision. > [...] > Programming is about lots of decisions, large and small. Architecture decisions. Data validation decisions. Button color decisions. > Some decisio…

The thing that makes an agent special is making some kind of effort to gather the relevant context before generating. The quality of the edits from the "agent" panel in Cursor/Copilot/etc is quite a bit higher than the type-ahead suggestions or the inline prompt stuff.

Bizarrely though, it seems to be limited to grep for the moment, doesn't work with LSP yet.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#567

Post by mindwok » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 4:01 AM UTC

I am pretty exhausted with reading the cynical takes on AI lately. Like, I get it, but ugh.

Yes, the tech isn't perfect yet. Yes, it means existing industries will be displaced. Yes, it threatens to undermine the identities we have built as useful artists, programmers, data analysts, whatever. It is a scary, uncertain future, and on some days I am overcome with dread about what it means for me.

But ffs, we will figure it out. This technology, if it continues to improve at the pace it has, will open the door to us solving previously intractable problems - problems like curing cancer, endless energy and nuclear fusion, making us 100x more productive at building great housing and infrastructure. Let's get on board and make this thing a success, not fight it every step of the way because we want to preserve some basically arbitrary state of society.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#568

Post by fourthark » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 4:03 AM UTC

LLM, please find all occurrences of "shut the fuck up" and suggest actual arguments for the author to use.

Otherwise, well written and persuasive.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#569

Post by mindwok » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 4:03 AM UTC

habosa wrote: post #558

I’m an AI skeptic. I’m probably wrong. This article makes me feel kinda wrong. But I desperately want to be right. Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of pe…

I share your concern, but being skeptical doesn't help us here. If anything it makes people take it less seriously.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#570

Post by mindwok » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 4:05 AM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #557

The argument that I've heard against LLMs for code is that they create bugs that, by design, are very difficult to spot. The LLM has one job, to make code that looks plausible. That's it. There's no logic gone into writing that bit of code. So the bugs often won't be like those a programmer makes. Instead, they can introduce a whole new class of bug that's way harder to debug.

This is a misunderstanding. Modern LLMs are trained with RL to actually write good programs. They aren't just spewing tokens out.