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

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911

Post by DamnInteresting »

Rooster61 wrote: post #904

The question that I haven't seen answered yet is whether or not we will reach a sort of "peak vibe coding" phase. What I mean by that is, right now, LLM's are somewhat decent at writing workable code. That code, however, needs babysitting to keep from going off the rails. And that code is sourced from training, which has been gleaned from the billions of lines of code written by hackers everywhere and pushed to sourc…

This has been my suspicion since LLMs began eating the Internet. Whether it's code or writing, now that LLMs are consuming their own output, the Habsburg Jaw[1] is going to quickly become evident. It is very difficult--sometimes impossible--to know whether a given chunk of input is wholly or partially generated by an LLM. Nevertheless, filtering input may become a critical task. That expense will be passed to the consumer, and LLM prices will necessarily rise as their quality diminishes. It could become a death spiral.

If so, I, for one, will be relieved. I'm tired of LLMs trying to take over the enjoyable parts of writing and coding, and leaving the menial tasks to us humans.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...

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

#912

Post by pxc »

20k wrote: post #788
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wish LLMs were good at search. I've tried to evaluate them many times for their quality at answering research questions for astrophysics (specifically numerical relativity). If they were good at answering questions, I'd use them in a heartbeat Without exception, every technical question I've ever asked an LLM that I know the answer to, has been substantially wrong in some fashion. This makes it just.. absolutely us…

> Without exception, every technical question I've ever asked an LLM that I know the answer to, has been substantially wrong in some fashion.

The other problem that I tend to hit is a tradeoff between wrongness and slowness. The fastest variants of the SOTA models are so frequently and so severely wrong that I don't find them useful for search. But the bigger, slower ones that spend more time "thinking" take so long to yield their (admittedly better) results that it's often faster for me to just do some web searching myself.

They tend to be more useful the first time I'm approaching a subject, or before I've familiarized myself with the documentation of some API or language or whatever. After I've taken some time to orient myself (even by just following the links they've given me a few times), it becomes faster for me to just search by myself.

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

#913

Post by smt88 »

staticshock wrote: post #742
smt88 wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In software, we, the developers, have increasingly been a bottleneck. The world needs WAY more software than we can economically provide, and at long last a technology has arrived that will help route around us for the benefit of humanity. Everything you wrote here is directly contradicted by casual observation of reality. Developers aren't a bottleneck. If they were, we wouldn't be in a historic period of layoffs.…

Yes, the layoffs are a market correction initiated by non-AI factors, such as the end of the ZIRP era. The world is chock-full of important, society-scale problems that have been out of reach because the economics have made them costly to work on and therefore risky to invest in. Lowering the cost of software development de-risks investment and increases the total pool of profitable (or potentially profitable) projec…

> important, society-scale problems that have been out of reach because the economics have made them costly to work on and therefore risky to invest in

What are examples of these projects and how will AI put them back into reach of investment?

I haven't seen anything in this category so far.

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

#914

Post by strange_quark »

CatsOnHats wrote: post #756

The company i work for is spending the equivalent of the yearly salary of a dozen engineers, worth of tokens per month. It recently surpassed our monthly cloud spend bill. We have people who are running the same tasl 10 times in parallel and having one LLm write a prompt for another LLm to execute then sitting on their phone for an hour while they let the AI's battle it out. For tasks that should take 3 minutes. Then…

> Frankly it blows my mind that so many developers have so little actual understanding of cost associated with AI.

I’ve seen all the same bullshit as you. We have a claude slash command to add one of 4 labels to a PR. We have people using AI to move their JIRA tickets across the swim lanes. People kick off codex tasks to rename a variable.

But I’ve literally heard execs at my place of work cheering this behavior on say the actual concern is why isn’t everyone doing this and if you aren’t spending enough, then maybe you aren’t being a forward thinker.

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

#915

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

That's the curse of the expert. You see many of the shortcomings, that someone less experienced might not even think about, when they go to social media and blurt out that AI is now able to fully replace them.

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

#916

Post by ninininino »

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…

How much buggy / incorrect Java written by first year computer science University students is there on Stack Overflow (in SO post bodies)? Decades of it.

Ask the same question of Golang, or Rust, or Typescript.

I have a theory that the large dichotomy in how people experience AI coding has to do with the quality of the training corpus for each language online.

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

#917

Post by teunispeters »

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…

Wow only 70%. I so far have had to drop and rewrite from scratch every time. Mind, I work in C/embedded spaces, and current LLMs are just horrible at any code in that space.

My vote is with (2).

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

#918

Post by parliament32 »

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…

Not even coding tasks. Just getting an LLM to help me put together a PromQL query to do something somewhat non-standard takes dozens of tries and copy/pasting back error messages.. and these aren't complex errors, trivial things like missing closing brackets and the like.

I know the usual clap back is "you're just missing this magical workflow" or "you need to prompt better" but.. do I really need to prompt "make sure your syntax is correct"? Shouldn't that be, ya know, a given for a prompt that starts with "Help me put together a PromQL query that..."?

Post reply on HN