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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

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

#861

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…

Do you have an example of something that was subpar and needed a 70% rewrite?

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

#862
> I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. 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.

I am sorry, but this is incredibly naïve. Governments don't work that way. It reflects a lack of social awareness. "People getting fired" in 2026 is not the same as it was even 10 years ago. The society has changed, losing a job today is demonstrably more dangerous.

This is akin to saying "Sure, thousands of houses will burn down, but the more houses burn down, the more political pressure there will be". Why do we have to wait for the houses to burn down?

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

#863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest frustration with LLMs for me is people telling me I'm not promoting it in a good way. Just think about any product where they are selling a half baked product, and repeatedly telling the user you are not using it properly.

Have you seen the way some people google/prompt? It can be a murder scene. Not coding related but my wife is certainly better than most and yet I’ve had to reprompt certain questions she’s asked ChatGPT because she gave it inadequate context. People are awful at that. Us coders are probably better off than most but just as with human communication if you’re not explaining things correctly you’re going to get garbage…

People are "awful at that" because when two people communicate, we're using a lot more than words. Each person participating in a conversation is doing a lot of active bridge-building. We're supplying and looking for extra nonverbal context; we're leaning on basic assumptions about the other speaker, their mood, their tone, their meanings; we're looking at not just syntax but the pragmatics of the convo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics). The communication of meaning is a multi-dimensional thing that everyone in the conversation is continually contributing to and pushing on.

In a way, LLMs are heavily exploitative of human linguistic abilities and expectations. We're wired so hard to actively engage and seek meaning in conversational exchanges that we tend to "helpfully" supply that meaning even when it's absent. We are "vulnerable" to LLMs because they supply all the "I'm talking to a person" linguistic cues, but without any form of underlying mind.

Folks like your wife aren't necessarily "bad" at LLM prompting—they're simply responding to the signals they get. The LLM "seems smart." It seems like it "knows" things, so many folks engage with them naturally, as they would with another person, without painstakingly feeding in context and precisely defining all the edges. If anything, it speaks to just how good LLMs are at being LLMs.

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

#864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not post a github gist with prompt and code so that people here can give you their opinion?

Those just don't appear at all on HackerNews Gee I wonder why

Because most people don't work on public projects and can't share the code publicly?

What's more interesting is the lack of examples of non-trivial projects that are provably vibe-coded and that claim to be of high-quality.

I think many of us are looking for: "I vibe-coded [this] with minimal corrections/manual coding on a livestream [here] and I believe it to be high-quality code"

If the code is in fact good quality then the livestream would serve as educational material for using LLMs/agents productively and I guarantee that it would change many minds. Stop telling people how great it all is, show them. I don't want to be a naysayer, I want to be impressed.

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

#865

Thanks for reading / commenting this post. Initially it seemed like I received a bunch of very negative comments, now I read most of the thread, and there are very good points, articulated with sensibility. Thank you. I wanted to provide some more context that is not part of the blog post. Since somebody may believe I don't enjoy / love the act of writing code. 1. I care a lot about programming, I love creating somet…

That's really interesting, but i'm wondering if this is as rational as it looks. > we are going to be kinda of obsolete in what defined us, as a profession: the ability to write code Is it a fact, really? I don't think "writing code" is a defining factor, maybe it's a prerequisite, as being able to write words hardly defines "a novelist". Anyway, prompt writing skills might become obsolete quite soon. So the main que…

> the ability to write code

I call it "the ability to communicate intent [using a programming language]" and suddenly building with AI looks at lot more like the natural extension of what we used to do writing code by ourselves.

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

#866

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…

It's the second.

Like, yes, prompting is a skill and you need to learn it for AI to do something useful but usefulness quickly falls down a cliff once you go past "greenfield implementation" or "basically example code" or "the thing done a lot so AI have a lot of reference to put from" it quickly gets into kinda sorta but not really working state.

It can still be used effectively on smaller parts of the codebase (I used it a lot basically to generate some boilerplate to run the test even if I had to rewrite a bunch of actual tests) but as whole very, very overrated by the AI peddlers.

And it probably stems from the fact that for the clueless ones it looks like amazing productivity boost because they go from "not even knowing framework" to "somewhat working app"

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

#867

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…

> 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…

that would be true if not for LLM making up answers where none exists.

Like, I've seen Claude go thru source code of the program, telling (correctly!) what counters are in code that return value I need (I just wanted to look at some packet metrics), then inventing entirely fake CLI command to extract those metrics

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

#868
post #667

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…

> Non-trivial coding tasks A coding agent just beat every human in the AtCoder Heuristic optimization contest. It also beat the solution that the production team for the contest put together. https://sakana.ai/ahc058/ It's not enterprise-grade software, but it's not a CRUD app with thousands of examples in github, either.

Compilers beat most coders before LLM were even popular

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

#869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting, but i'm wondering if this is as rational as it looks. > we are going to be kinda of obsolete in what defined us, as a profession: the ability to write code Is it a fact, really? I don't think "writing code" is a defining factor, maybe it's a prerequisite, as being able to write words hardly defines "a novelist". Anyway, prompt writing skills might become obsolete quite soon. So the main que…

I don't think our profession was writing code to begin with (and this may be a bit uuhh. rewriting history?); what we do is take an idea, requirements, an end goal and make it reality. Often times that involves writing code, but that's only one aspect of the software developer's job. Analogy time because comment sections love analogies. A carpenter can hammer nails, screw screws, make holes, saw wood to size. If they…

As a specific example of this, the U.S. 18F team had helped the Forest Service a decade ago with implementing a requirement to help people get a permit to cut down a Christmas tree.

Although there was a software component for the backend, the thing that the actual user ended up with was a printed-out form rather than a mobile app or QR code. This was a deliberate design decision (https://greacen.com/media/guides/2019/02/12/open-forest-laun...), not due to a limitation of software.

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

#870

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…

Maybe LLMs are like a next evolution of a rubber ducky: you can talk to it, and it's very helpful, just don't expect that IT will give you the final answer.
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