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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

#841

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> 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.

For the latter two, that's a minimum-wage job when LLMs produce your software, if that.

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

#842

Post by theshrike79 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #72
antirez wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that who says that you need to be accustomed to the current "tools" related to AI agents, is suffering from a horizon effect issue: these stuff will change continuously for some time, and the more they evolve, the less you need to fiddle with the details. However, the skill you need to have, is communication skills. You need to be able to express yourself and what matters for your project fast and well. Many…

> Many programmers are not great at communication. This is true, but still shocking. Professional (working with others at least) developers basically live or die by their ability to communicate. If you're bad at communication, your entire team (and yourself) suffer, yet it seems like the "lone ranger" type of programmer is still somewhat praised and idealized. When trying to help some programmer friends with how they…

People anthropomorphise LLMs, not understanding that they don't have "implied context" about things. They just go by the statistical average unless directed otherwise.

Having worked with offshore consultant teams where there are language and cultural barriers - and needing clear specs myself. I somehow just naturally "got" how much context to give the Agent.

People who have been working solo or with like-minded people all their career might have a harder time.

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

#843

Post by austin-cheney »

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…

Like with anything else the people best positioned to enjoy output are the people least well positioned to criticize it. This is true of AI just as eating at restaurants or enjoying movie dramas.

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

#844

Post by dspillett »

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…

> 1) I'm not good at prompting,

I assume this is part of the problem (though I've avoided using LLMs mostly so can't comment with any true confidence here) but to a large extent this is blaming you for a suboptimal interface when the interface is the problem.

That some people seem to get much better results than others, and that the distinction does not map well to differences in ability elsewhere, suggests to me that the issue is people thinking slightly differently and the training data for the models somehow being biased to those who operate in certain ways.

> 2) Other people are just less picky than I am

That is almost certainly a much larger part of the problem. “Fuck it, it'll do, someone else can tidy it later if they are bothered enough” attitudes were rampant long before people started outsourcing work to LLMs.

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

#845

Post by theshrike79 »

oncallthrow wrote: post #48
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

My take: learning how to do LLM-assisted coding at a basic level gets you 80% of the returns, and takes about 30 minutes. It's a complete no-brainer. Learning all of the advanced multi-agent worklows etc. etc... Maybe that gets you an extra 20%, but it costs a lot more time, and is more likely to change over time anyway. So maybe not very good ROI.

1. Basic vanilla LLM Agentic coding

2. Build tools for the LLM, ones that are easy to use and don't spam stuff. Like give it tools to run tests that only return "Tests OK" if nothing failed, same with builds.

3. Look into /commands and Skills, both seem to be here to stay

Maybe a weekend of messing about and you'll be pretty well off compared to the vast masses who still copy/paste code out of ChatGPT to their editor.

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

#846

Post by keybored »

I wish influencer programmers[1] cared a quarter as much about social revolution as they cared about tech revolutions. Will it disrupt all people in tech? Will the benefits go to the top? Then what about an appropriate social response? No. In response to that we have “I hope” and “I wrote a novel .... about Basic Income”[2].

Programmers are simply accepting whatever the owner class does to them [3] and calling it Technological Determinism, even if just indirectly.

> But, I would not respect myself and my intelligence if my idea of software and society would impair my vision: facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever.

Token gestures:

> What is the social soltion, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless.

Innovation can't be taken back (see: technological determinism; tech people are powerless to affect anything) so we should... vote for good governments. That are willing to support those who remain jobless.[0]

Keyword “willing”. Take away people's political leverage to strike. Now they may have no wealth. What are they to do? What is their political influence? The non-answer is to hope that the government will be WILLING to support their existence.

> And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection.

The more people get fired the less people with political leverage. The realpolitic trend would be the opposite of what is written here.

> But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition,

Every progress made in science can be artificially restricted. See foodstuff. We could apparently distribute enough to feed the world but that doesn't make as much money as throwing a lot of it away.

Progress for any given individual can be non existent unless it is evenly distributed.

> which is not always happy.

At least the article looks completely organic in terms off writing

Genre: I Have Anecdotes About AI And If You Don't See What I'm Seeing You Are Misguided.[4 ]

[1] Not a vocation. Simply the obvervation that the famous and respected programmers will have more weight outside their niche simply because of who they are.

[2] Basic Income hails from the right libertarian tradition. Leave the rich alone, give the commoner enough crumbs to survive. Later it was romanticized as a way for former programmers to go to their evergreen pastures of endless sideprjects.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526137

[4] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

[0] Let's vote and hope that Italy doesn't get a fascist prime minister next time.

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

#847

Post by water-drummer »

simonw wrote: post #160
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

This is a pretty common position: "I don't worry about getting left behind - it will only take a few weeks to catch up again". I don't think that's true. I'm really good at getting great results out of coding agents and LLMs. I've also been using LLMs for code on an almost daily basis since ChatGPT's release on November 30th 2022. That's more than three years ago now. Meanwhile I see a constant flow of complaints fro…

> Using this stuff well is a deep topic. These things can be applied in so many different ways, and to so many different projects. The best asset you can develop is an intuition for what works and what doesn't, and getting that intuition requires months if not years of personal experimentation.

You feel that way because it took you years or months to reach that point. But after reaching that point, do you really think that it's equally—if not more—difficult to put what you learned into words compared to, let's say, programming or engineering?

See, the thing about these tools is that they're designed to be operated via natural language, which is something most people (with a certain level of education) are quite comparable to each other at; consequently, the skill ceiling is considerably lower compared to something like programming. I am not saying there's no variance in people's ability to articulate, but that the variance is considerably less than what we get when comparing people's ability to write code or solve engineering problems.

So, whatever you learned by trial and error was just different ways or methods to get around the imperfections of the existing LLMs—not ways to use them skillfully according to their design goals. Their design goal is to achieve whatever task is given to them, as long as the intent is clear. These workarounds and tricks that you learned aren't something you build an intuition for. What you build an intuition for is finding new workarounds, but once you've found them, they're quite concrete and easy to describe to someone else who can simply use them to achieve the same results as you.

Tools that are designed to be operable via natural language aren't designed to be more thorough—it's actually the opposite. If you want more control, you have programming languages and search engines; thoroughness is where you get that high skill ceiling. The skill ceiling for using these tools is going to get narrower and narrower. The workarounds that you figure out may take skill to discover, but they don't take much skill to replicate.

If you share your "tips and tricks" with someone, then yeah, it will take them a week to start getting the same results as you because the skill ceiling is low and the workarounds are concrete/require less thinking.

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

#848

Post by theshrike79 »

Ekaros wrote: post #23
systemf_omega wrote: post #8

What I don't understand about this whole "get on board the AI train or get left behind" narrative, what advantage does an early adopter have for AI tools? The way I see it, I can just start using AI once they get good enough for my type of work. Until then I'm continuing to learn instead of letting my brain atrophy.

By their promises it should get so good that basically you do not need to learn it. So it is reasonable to wait until that point.

Do you always believe what the marketing people tell you?

If so, I've got a JPEG of a monkey to sell you =)

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

#849

Post by eloisant »

xmodem wrote: post #837
eloisant wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely use AI for non-trivial tasks. It's not just about better prompting, but using better tools. Tools that will turn a bad prompt into a good prompt. For example there is the plan mode for Cursor. Or just ask the AI: "make a plan to do this task", then you review the plan before asking it to implement. Configure the AI to ask you clarification questions instead of assuming things. It's still evolving p…

I have not been as aggressive as GP in trying new AI tools. But the last few months I have been trying more and more and I'm just not seeing it. One project I tried out recently I took a test-driven approach. I built out the test suite while asking the AI to do the actual implementation. This was one of my more successful attempts, and may have saved me 20-30% time overall - but I still had to throw out 80% of what i…

If you haven't yet, check Claude Code's plan mode:

https://claudelog.com/mechanics/plan-mode/

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

#850

Post by hexbin010 »

simonw wrote: post #690
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…

If you think antirez wrote that with AI then your AI detection insincts are way off . It reads like someone with (good) English as a second language. LLMs don't write like that.

It wouldn't be a bad thing though would it? Because AI is in fact amazing.
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