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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#881

Post by strogonoff »

If yesterday we were sued for singing the happy birthday song in public, and today we see corporations with market caps the size of countries pretending that IP ownership is not much of a thing, the alarm bells should be deafening. Control over intellectual property has given us fantastic things—Linux, Blender, etc.—and you can’t have GPL without an ability to defend copyleft. IP laws provide that ability.

One does not need to be a skeptic about machine learning and its potential as technology to refuse to engage with its practical applications when they are clearly ethically corrupt. The ends do not justify the means. Just like refusing to buy products of forced labour or disproportionate environmental impact, or to invest in war and bloodshed, everyone makes this decision for themselves.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#882

Post by keeda »

wpietri wrote: post #837
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…

One of the things I think is going on here is a sort of stone soup effect. [1] Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months. As you and I presume he agree, the use of off-the-shelf LLMs in code was kinda garbage. And I expect the skepticism he's knocking here ("stochastic parrots") was in fact accurate then. But it did get a lot of people (and money) to rush in and start trying to make s…

> Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months.

This was actually the only point in the essay with which I disagree, and it weakens the overall argument. Even 2 years ago, before agents or reasoning models, these LLMs were extremely powerful. The catch was, you needed to figure out what worked for you.

I wrote this comment elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164846 -- Upshot: It took me months to figure out what worked for me, but AI enabled me to produce innovative (probably cutting edge) work in domains I had little prior background in. Yes, the hype should trigger your suspicions, but if respectable people with no stake in selling AI like @tptacek or @kentonv in the other AI thread are saying similar things, you should probably take a closer look.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#883

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#884

Post by echelon »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #767
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…

The better I am at solving a problem, the less I use AI assistants. I use them if I try a new language or framework. Busy code I need to generate is difficult to do with AI too. Because then you need to formalize the necessary context for an AI assistant, which is exhausting with an unsure result. So perhaps it is just simpler to write it yourself quickly. I understand comments being negative, because there is so muc…

> The better I am at solving a problem, the less I use AI assistants.

Yes, but you're expensive.

And these models are getting better at solving a lot of business-relevant problems.

Soon all business-relevant problems will be bent to the shape of the LLM because it's cost-effective.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#885

Post by 59nadir »

jatins wrote: post #481

Everything about that is true but, and that's a big BUT, the code I write with LLM I can only iterate on it with an LLM. My mind doesn't develop a mental model of that code, I don't know where the relevant parts are, I can't quickly navigate through it and I have to reach the LLM for every small change. Which is why I like Copilot style editing more than agents as a working model but agents are just so much more powe…

This is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, as well as what kind of onboarding actually makes sense for work on a system. It's also why I can never get on board with the passive "review code an LLM spits out" type of development; it just does not build theory as reliably, effectively and efficiently.

It's a good, very digestible paper, in my opinion; well worth the read.

[0] - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#886

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> Then something shifted. I started experimenting. I stopped giving it orders and began using it more like a virtual rubber duck. That made a huge difference.

This is how I use it mostly. I also use it for boilerplate, like "What would a database model look like that handles the following" you never want it to do everything, though there are tools that can and will and they're impressive, but then when you have a true production issue, your inability to quickly respond will be a barrier.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#887

Post by hakanderyal »

Spot on. Current gen LLMs also has the ability to mimic your code style. I always point it to existing code, and the result is the same as what I would have written.

Yesterday I “wrote” 18k lines of code with Claude & Cursor. Mostly UI, some backend. This would have taken me a week without LLMs.

I’m sold.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#888

Post by AnimalMuppet »

rotis wrote: post #790

The author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece: https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/ Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together. For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in…

Hmm. The author is a cryptography expert. So, honest question: Would he trust crypto code written by an AI?

(I suspect I know the answer, but I am not certain of it.)

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#889

Post by rzodkiew »

bergen wrote: post #654

One point is missing for me - you get lazy. People are less and less equiped to think about complex problems the more they RELY on this for coding. Also this article is just about coding.

Not sure why more people aren't mentioning this. But that's the exact reason I've stopped using any LLM stuff. Your thinking just gets lazier and lazier the more you use it. You stop thinking the problems deeply and thoroughly when the "answer" is just around the corner. Then one day you snap out of that mirage, and see what a boatload of junk you've just created with this stuff.

I also dread what's going to happen to the younger generations which have this to replace their real education, but that's a bit offtopic here.

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