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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#701

Post by M4v3R »

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.

I literally do this about twice a week on Twitch. I’m working on some hobby projects, and one constraint I’ve put on myself is to use LLMs for pretty much everything, regardless of whether it saves me time or not. The reason is twofold: I want to learn how to use them efficiently, and I want to constantly test the waters to see where the limits of their capabilities are. On my stream, you can see LLMs fail spectacularly one time and do hours of work in minutes another time.

I’m not alone in this - there are tons of other examples of people showing how they use LLMs online; you just need to search for them.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#702

Post by eleveriven »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #691

I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…

Totally agree with "vibe debt". Letting an LLM off-leash without checks is a fast track to spaghetti. But with tests, clear prompts, and some light editing, I’ve shipped a lot of real stuff faster than I could have otherwise.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#703

Post by throw310822 »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #691

I think this article is pretty spot on — it articulates something I’ve come to appreciate about LLM-assisted coding over the past few months. I started out very sceptical. When Claude Code landed, I got completely seduced — borderline addicted, slot machine-style — by what initially felt like a superpower. Then I actually read the code. It was shockingly bad. I swung back hard to my earlier scepticism, probably even…

> Did Photoshop kill graphic artists?

No, but AI did.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#704

Post by concats »

pier25 wrote: post #627

I'm mostly skeptical about AI capabilities but I also think it will never be a profitable business. Let's not forget AI companies need to recoup a trillion dollars (so far) just to break even [1]. VCs are already doubting if the billions invested into data centers are going to generate a profit [1 and 2]. AI companies will need to generate profits at some point. Would people still be optimistic about Claude etc if th…

What about the free open weights models then? And the open source tooling to go with them?

Sure, they are perhaps 6 months behind the closed-source models, and the hardware to run the biggest and best models isn't really consumer-grade yet (How many years could it be before regular people have GPUs with 200+ gigabytes vram? That's merely one order of magnitude away).

But they're already out there. They will only ever get better. And they will never disappear due to the company going out of business or investors raising prices.

I personally only care about the closed sourced proprietary models in so far as they let me get a glimpse of what I'll soon have access to freely and privately on my own machine. Even if all of them went out of business today, LLMs would still have a permanent effect on our future and how I'd be working.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#705

Post by eleveriven »

moomin wrote: post #692

Who are these friends? Are they in the room with us right now? Look, maybe my experience is atypical but I’m an AI skeptic and I know plenty of others. I’ve never heard people claim that LLMs are a fad or going to go away. I’ve seen lots of people: * think that conflating LLMs and “AI” produces a lot of poorly reasoned arguments * doubt the economic narratives being built around LLM technology * think the current rat…

Like you said, nobody reasonable is denying that something real is happening - the question is more about how useful, how soon, and for whom

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#706

Post by tptacek »

blibble wrote: post #220

> We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. we could choose to be of course if you're a temporarily embarrassed billionaire like ptacek, you certainly don't want the workers doing this

Kind of saying the quiet part loud here.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#707

Post by fifticon »

By the reply count it appears this post was excellent at trolling HN's core audience :-). The author may be right, but his preface "look I'm one of you" was in a very different tone to the rest of his "now shut up and get to work" rant.

I do use the AI tools to some extent, if for no other reason than that they are currently the path of least resistance, and google+friends have lately played themselves out of the game.

He is probably right we should get acquainted with using agents before dismissing it :-).

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#709

Post by ivolimmen »

Call me old but I am not using AI for coding. It's not what I expect or want an AI to do for me. I would love for it to do stuff I don't like to do. It's like the meme that was floating around: that a woman says it would have loved the AI to do the dishes so she can to art; not the other way around. Yes I am also a skeptic but that is not weird as I have seen to many movies about AI taking over the world. I hope I never have to say: "I told you so". I really do see positive points to AI but just not in coding. I would not even trust them to write tests. Might make them write documentation at some point.

I would like to point out: LLM's look really intelligent until you converse with them in a less popular language, it will make weird mistakes and interpret your questions all wrong. I am Dutch and they really suck at that.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#710

Post by baduiux »

atakan_gurkan wrote: post #699

"If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing. No wonder you’re talking past each other." This is in fact what I am doing (though I am not trying to convince anyone not to use LLMs). How can I get into this other mode? Any pointers? Do I need to pay up for a service? I do not want to carry out vibe coding, I…

Just have a look at Cursor.ai or zed.dev. Cursor is based on VS Code and integrates different models right into your codebase. It has access to your codebase, knows your code (after indexing) and is able to directly apply changes to your code or run commands on your integrated terminal. You can directly accept/decline changes. You can reference existing code / files. You can link documentation, you can write a default prompt and default settings (previously .cursorrules).

It's faster than opening chatgpt in browser, writing your promt, waiting for the reply, scanning and scrolling through the reply, copying it, inserting it manually, going back to say something doesn't work.

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