Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#711

Post by tptacek »

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…

For what it's worth: I'm not dismissive of the idea that these things could be ruinous for the interests of the profession. I don't automatically assume that making applications drastically easier to produce is just going to make way for more opportunities.

I just don't think the interest of the profession control. The travel agents had interests too!

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#712

Post by eleveriven »

cesarb wrote: post #312

This article does not touch on the thing which worries me the most with respect to LLMs: the dependence . Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to opera…

It's also why local models, even if less powerful, are so important. The gap between "state of the art" and "good enough for a lot of workflows" is narrowing fast

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#713

Post by eMPee584 »

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…

> we can affect the trajectory of AI.

More meaningful, we can influence the context the intelligence explosion will play out in.

So how about we use the occasion to switch our global economic operating system from competition to cooperation in time for the singularity?

> Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down

Precious little hope in slowing this rocket down when the boosters are just getting fired up..

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#714

Post by dogcomplex »

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…

"Mech suit" is apt. Gonna use that now.

Having plenty of initial discussion and distilling that into requirements documents aimed for modularized components which can all be easily tackled separately is key.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#715

Post by eleveriven »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #181

I use AI every day, basically as a "pair coder." I used it about 15 minutes ago, to help me diagnose a UI issue I was having. It gave me an answer that I would have figured out, in about 30 minutes, in about 30 seconds. My coding style (large files, with multiple classes, well-documented) works well for AI. I can literally dump the entire file into the prompt, and it can scan it in milliseconds. I also use it to help…

Agree on the verbosity and occasional naivety. But the fact that it gives working starting points is what really moves the needle. It gets me unstuck faster, and I still get to do the creative, architectural stuff

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#716

Post by tptacek »

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…

These are 4 arguments that have literally nothing to do with what I wrote.

* I don't care what "AI" is. There's a section in the post about this. Nobody needs to update their religious beliefs because of LLMs.

* I don't care about the economic futures of Nvidia or the frontier model companies. I'm not recommending you invest in their stock.

* The article opens with "all progress in LLMs could halt and this would still apply".

* The article doesn't care about "AI companies".

I'm a crypto skeptic and I do deny Bitcoin is a long-term thing, for what it's worth. I'm a hard skeptic of cryptofinance.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#717

Post by eleveriven »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #547

The reaction to this article is interesting. I have found AI to be useful in software contexts that most people never exercise or expect based on their intuitions of what an LLM can do. For me, a highly productive but boring use of LLMs for code is that they excel at providing midwit “best practice” solutions to common problems. They are better documentation than the documentation and can do a lot of leg work e.g. Li…

The moat isn't intelligence, it's context

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#718

Post by belter »

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…

> What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday.

I tried the latest Claude for a very complex wrapper around the AWS Price APIs who are not easy to work with. Down a 2,000 line of code file, I found Claude faking some API returns by creating hard coded values. A pattern I have seen professional developers being caught on while under pressure to deliver.

This will be a boon to the human skilled developers, that will be hired at $900 dollars an hour to fix bugs of a subtlety never seen before.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#719

Post by dogcomplex »

gdubs wrote: post #6

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

If anything we now need to unlearn the rigidity - being too formal can make the AI overly focused on certain aspects, and is in general poor UX. You can always tell legacy man-made code because it is extremely inflexible and requires the user to know terminology and usage implicitly lest it break, hard.

For once, as developers we are actually using computers how normal people always wished they worked and were turned away frustratedly. We now need to blend our precise formal approach with these capabilities to make it all actually work the way it always should have.

Post reply on HN