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The first 40 months of the AI era

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Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#61

Post by skydhash »

3abiton wrote: post #31
tkgally wrote: post #18

Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.

It's funny you mention that. The only difference is sometimes you need a functionality without doing the plumbing. At the end of the day if you're getting the output you need, the process doesn't matter. It's an interesting analogy but only works if the inspector is another expert dev.

When I have such moment and I take a step back, there’s usually a strong hint that there’s a meta problem behind those instances. And while you have to chose when to take the time to solve such problem, it’s usually worth it.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#62

Post by senfiaj »

deadbabe wrote: post #59

The stupid thing is that instead of using AI to give ourselves 1 hour work days, we’re just cramming more work into the same amount of time we’ve always worked.

Yeah, I think this is always the case. We get more powerful tools that do the same thing in 5th amount of time, now we are asked to do 5x more. Capitlalism.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#63

Post by skydhash »

andai wrote: post #50
Hekkova wrote: post #39

I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game chan…

Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…

Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#64

Post by hibikir »

aidos wrote: post #7

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

It's a matter of whether you are just writing more regular quality things, or whether you are improving the quality of what you write. There's many things that increase quality, but are time consuming, which Claude Code can do for you.

One thing I recently did was run a pass over some unit test and functional test suites, asking for standardization on initialization, and creating reasonable helper methods to minimize boilerplate. Any dev can do that, if they have a week, and it'll future code changes more pleasant later. For Claude, an hour was a -8000 line PR that kept all the tests, with all the assertions.

It's what people need to figure out out of a a codebase. Our normal quality practices have an embedded max safe speed for changes without losing stability. If you use LLMs to try to change things faster, the quality practices have to improve if one wants to keep the number of issues per week constant. Whether it's improving testing, or sending the LLM to look at logs and find the bugs faster, one needs to increase the quality budget.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#65

Post by luckydata »

theteapot wrote: post #35

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…

then you should be delighted we have LLMs one of the use cases they are best suited to is writing documentation, much better than humans can.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#66

Post by CamperBob2 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #12

> 40 months Not counting from 1971s DARPA? Sorry I'm allegric when LLMs being called AI like nothing existed before it.

You would need to go back to McCullough, Pitts and von Neumann in the 1940s if you wanted to talk about where it really got started.

The 1970s were a long, dark AI winter, thanks to FUD spread by Minsky and Papert. A lot of recent work could have been done back then despite the lack of good hardware, as seen in the other HN story where the guy trained a transformer on a PDP-11. But the whole field was radioactive after their book came out.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#67

Post by lstodd »

OrangePilled wrote: post #20

This is a sound personal assessment. The section about being "glazed" into action resonates. Hidden within this concept I think is something profound about human motivation, innuendo and all. > AI generated prose is at best boring, and at worst genuinely unappealing. I’m continually tempted, because in theory it should work well. The AI has perfect spelling and grammar, has more than enough context to produce article…

> that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own.

    Whatever happens, we have got
    The Maxim gun, and they have not.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#68

Post by furyofantares »

H8crilA wrote: post #9

Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?

My comment history is months of me pointing it out about articles here. You're just not noticing it, it's everywhere and is extremely obvious to me.

It's possible I should envy you, I'm not sure.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#69

Post by gobdovan »

Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks.

Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the request, it feels more personal. It is also very interesting that most LLMs respond like a normal person when you talk to them directly, but suddenly adopt the more annoying blogger speech patterns when you tell them 'create content'.

Re: The first 40 months of the AI era

#70

Post by jasonfarnon »

Aurornis wrote: post #28
H8crilA wrote: post #9

Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?

You will start to recognize it over time. The major AI models each have their own voice and patterns that they overuse. The more you see those patterns the more you start recognizing them. By now I can recognize quickly if a blog post or README.md was generated by Claude or ChatGPT because the signs are so obvious. Even Hacker News comments that are AI written are easy to spot if they weren't edited. I know I'm not a…

I don't see how to interpret your claims. How do you yourself know that you're right when you "recognize" Claude or ChatGPT? How do you know how much of the text you don't recognize as any LLM is actually LLM-generated? My recollection is whenever I've seen data on this--the educators who think they can spot students cheating--the conclusion is people are really bad at identifying LLM-generated content.
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