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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

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

#691

Post by Keirmot »

shevy-java wrote: post #686

Reads like AI slop. This is also quite annoying: quality appears to go downwards constantly. I am not saying that the oldschool blogs were all great in quality, but now I look at an article to see signs of AI generated text and if I see it - or think I see it - I become more critical automatically. Even without that, it seems the quality of writing has gotten worse. I remember that people years ago complained that ha…

I 100% agree with the sentiment. To me, it feels like most bloggers nowadays think only in very superficial abstract idea, and then prompt ChatGPT for a blog post.

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

#692

Post by graovic »

One thing related to programming jobs and AI: my opinion is that AI will create far more jobs than we’ve ever had.

Right now, there’s a limit to how widely software is adopted, largely based on software quality and cost. AI will improve software quality (for example, you can add a ton of automated tests even if you don’t use AI to develop features) and reduce the cost of building software.

That will lead to better software—and software we didn’t build in the past because it was too complex, or so niche that we weren’t sure we could make enough profit to justify the development costs. It will say also change many other industries, but I think generally for the better: more ways to create new things, more variations, and more customization for specific purposes.

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

#693

Post by krainboltgreene »

cookiengineer wrote: post #677
zephyrthenoble wrote: post #673

It was weird to read this. I know antirez is on HN, so it's strange to say this, but here goes... I always looked up to antirez. Redis was really taking off after I graduated and I was impressed by the whole system and the person behind it. I was impressed to see them walk away to do something different after being so successful. I was impressed to read their blog about tackling difficult problems and how they solved…

> To bring it all together, I guess some part of me was disappointed to see a person that I considered a really good programmer, seem to indicate that they didn't care about doing the actual programming? My take on this is that we as a society are now on the verge of transitioning towards programming as an art form. And the methodologies of art vs non art programming are vastly different. Take clothes, for example. M…

> My take on this is that we as a society are now on the verge of transitioning towards programming as an art form.

It already was. This just makes it a subscription service.

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

#695

Post by kristiandupont »

smt88 wrote: post #603
daxfohl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but: There's been a notable jump over the course of the last few months, to where I'd say it's inevitable. For a while I was holding out for them to hit a ceiling where we'd look back and laugh at the idea they'd ever replace human coders. Now, it seems much more like a matter of time. Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "…

There's no chance LLMs will be an engineering team replacement. The hallucination problem is unsolvable and catastrophic in some edge cases. Any company using such a team would be uninsurable and sued into oblivion.

I use LLM's to write the majority of my code. I haven't encountered a hallucination for the better part of a year. It might be theoretically unsolvable but it certainly doesn't seem like a real problem to me.

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

#696

Post by wk_end »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #311
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…

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.

See, I’m with you, but in my day to day work I almost never could almost never get into a flow state while coding, because very little of my work involves creating things or solving real problems; it typically involves just trying to mentally untangle huge rat nests, Jenna-ing bug fixes and the occasional feature in, and then spending a bunch of time testing to make sure I didn’t break anything, no flow involved. I’ve been grudgingly using Cursor heavily for the past few weeks and it’s been helping make all of this significantly more bearable.

LLMs aren’t replacing the joy of coding for me, but they do seem to be helping me deal with the misery of being a professional coder.

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

#697

Post by stack_framer »

I want AI that I can command with the least possible effort, in the simplest terms, and it flawlessly does exactly what I said.

I want AI that responds instantaneously, and in a manner perfectly suited to my particular learning style.

I want AI so elegant in its form and function that I completely take it for granted.

What I'm getting instead is something clunky, slow, and flawed. So excuse me while I remain firmly in the anti-AI crowd.

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

#698

Post by ffwd »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #617
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-trivial coding tasks I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. If you ask it a narrow, specific question, with one answer, you may well get the answer. For the “non-trivial” questions, there always will be multiple answers, and you’ll get from the LLM all of these depending on the precise words you use to prompt it. You won’t get the best answer, and in a complex scenario requiring highly recurs…

>I’ve come back to the idea LLMs are super search engines. Yes! This is exactly what it is. A search engine with a lossy-compressed dataset of most public human knowledge, which can return the results in natural language. This is the realization that will pop the AI bubble if the public could ever bring themselves to ponder it en masse. Is such a thing useful? Hell yes! Is such a thing intellegent? Certainly NO!

Even though I think it's true that it's lossy, I think there is more going on in an LLM neural net. Namely that when it uses tokens to produce output, you essentially split the text into millions or billions of chunks, each with probability of those chunks. So in essence the LLM can do a form of pattern recognition where the patterns are the chunks and it also enables basic operations on those chunks.

That's why I think you can work iteratively on code and change parts of the code while keeping others, because the code gets chunked and "probabilitized'. It can also do semantic processing and understanding where it can apply knowledge about one topic (like 'swimming') to another topic (like a 'swimming spaceship', it then generates text about what a swimming spaceship would be which is not in the dataset). It chunks it into patterns of probability and then combines them based on probability. I do think this is a lossy process though which sucks.

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

#699

Post by hu3 »

Fokamul wrote: post #694

I support AI vibe coding idiots everywhere I go. Please, use more VIBE coding guys. And no, my work as redteam IT sec. is completely unrelated :D

AI will become/is already much better than most devs in detecting security flaws in code.

So my prediction is that any software worth scanning by redteams will become more secure. Not less.

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

#700

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

totallykvothe wrote: post #569

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important deta…

> I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks

It's just the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who think AI is the bee's knees are precisely the dudes who are least qualified to judge its effectiveness.

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