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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#901

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

I’m an amateur coder and I used to rely on Cursor a lot to code when I was actively working on hobby apps about 6 months ago

I picked coding again a couple of days back and I’m blown away by how much things have changed

It was all manual work until a few months back. Suddenly, its all agents

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#902

Post by nkotov »

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…

The truth is that majority of people do not care about this. It's why AWS exists. It's why Fly.io exists.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#903

Post by wvenable »

grafmax wrote: post #513

> Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not East Coast dockworkers; we won’t stop progress on our own. If you really believe in the power of LLMs then it’s time to wake up. The writing is on the wall. Automation the workforce further into precarious jobs. The idea that tech workers can’t stop so-called “progress” is at best a dumb self-fulfilling…

If work can meaningfully be done by a machine, why should we be fighting against that? For jobs? If life is all about doing pointless work a machine can do, we've got problems as a species.

The problem is capitalism not LLMs. Fighting against this progress just leaves us stagnant as a species.

Perhaps AI will lead to the revolution where automation frees the average person from having to toil in a factory or a cubical farm instead of trying to achieve infinite growth in a closed system.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#904

Post by incomingpain »

gspencley wrote: post #900

The reason that I personally don't use LLMs was not addressed by the article: I haven't found a way to use it that makes me develop faster. The articles talks about "tedious code." If you need to generate a large static value table or something, then OK an LLM might give you a really fast result and cut through the tedium. Most of us were already writing short scripts to do that. I'm open to the possibility that an L…

>I haven't found a way to use it that makes me develop faster.

I have pycharm pro with the ai. I can right click a function and there's 12 things AI can just do for you.

"find problems" where the linter has no concerns and it finds problems that dont show up from linter are shockingly good. This is like "Hey, you need to make sure this function is only running once at a time or it can easily overwhelm the cpu."

"write documentation" and it just fills in the documentation. I havent a clue what it writes and I wont be doing it.

"generate unit tests" is interesting? I have literally never written a unit test before and the code it produces is lengthy. Unit tests are a waste of time; but others disagree and so AI can produce it.

"explain code" look I wrote the code years ago half drunk, half high. No comments. It explains it all in depth and perfectly. Comments sometimes go stale after bug fixes and then make things confusing. Comments arent important when you have this beautifulness.

Lets go back to that cpu DOS attack example. I then can prompt what is claude 3.5 sonnet to give me to solution to fix it. It gives me this beautiful cache option. I could just hit apply and it'd be done. But then i said it's too complicated give me something simpler. It then gives me a solution that is simpler.

>nd in those cases, it's obvious what the repetitive task needs to be. I often find myself writing the code by hand to be quicker than coming up with a prompt to get it to write the code that I then need to review for correctness.

Its all about the boring busy work crap that doesnt need to be done that now gets done.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#906

Post by mkfs »

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…

> It will power scams on an unimaginable scale

It will also make proving your identity harder and more time-consuming.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#907

Post by munificent »

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? Did film kill theatre?

To a first approximation, the answer to both of these is "yes".

There is still a lot of graphic design work out there (though generative AI will be sucking the marrow out of it soon), but far less than there used to be before the desktop publishing revolution. And the kind of work changed. If "graphic design" to you meant sitting at a drafting table with pencil and paper, those jobs largely evaporated. If that was a kind of work that was rewarding and meaningful to you, that option was removed for you.

Theatre even more so. Yes, there are still some theatres. But the number of people who get to work in theatrical acting, set design, costuming, etc. is a tiny tiny fraction of what it used to be. And those people are barely scraping together a living, and usually working side jobs just to pay their bills.

> it feels a bit like mourning the loss of punch cards when terminals showed up.

I think people deserve the right to mourn the loss of experiences that are meaningful and enjoyable to them, even if those experiences turn out to no longer be maximally economically efficient according to the Great Capitalistic Moral Code.

Does it mean that we should preserve antiquated jobs and suffer the societal effects of inefficiency without bound? Probably not.

But we should remember that the ultimate goal of the economic system is to enable people to live with meaning and dignity. Efficiency is a means to that end.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#908

Post by keeda »

lolinder wrote: post #350

> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property. This kind of guilt-by-association play migh…

> None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates?

I don't think that is an accurate representation of the tech community. On the other hand, I do think TFA is making a reasonable statistical representation of the tech community (rather than a "guilt-by-association" play) which could be rephrased as:

The overriding ethos in HN and tech communities has clearly been on the "information wants to be free" side. See: the widespread support of open source and, as your comment itself mentions, copyleft. Copyleft, in particular, is famously based on a subversion of intellectual property (cf "judo throw") to achieve an "information wants to be free" philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, this has also manifested countless times as condoning media piracy. Even today a very common sentiment is, "oh there are too many streaming services, where's my pirate hat yarrrr!"

Conversely, comments opposing media piracy are a vanishingly tiny, often downvoted, minority. As such, statistically speaking, TFA's evaluation of our communities seems to be spot on.

And, now the same communities are in an uproar when their information "wants to be free". The irony is definitely rich.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#909

Post by billy99k »

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…

I use LLMs daily. From helping me write technical reports (not 100%, mostly making things sound better after I have a first draft) to mapping APIs (documentation, etc).

I can only imagine what this technology will be like in 10 years. But I do know that it's not going anywhere and it's best to get familiar with it now.

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