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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

fly.io

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#921

Post by dang »

GenshoTikamura wrote: post #734

[flagged]

Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines, as you did here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167429? If you keep posting like that we're going to have to ban you again. I don't want to do that, but we can't have commenters abusing HN like this.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these, for example:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#922

Post by jes5199 »

fsloth wrote: post #697
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 totally agree. The ”hard to control mech suit” is an excellent analogy. When it works it’s brilliant. There is a threshold point as part of the learning curve where you realize you are in a pile of spaghetti code and think it actually saves no time to use LLM assistant. But then you learn to avoid the bad parts - thus they don’t take your time anymore - and the good parts start paying back in heaps of the time spen…

also, the agents are actually pretty good at cleaning up spaghetti if you do it one module at a time, use unit tests. And some of the models are smart enough to suggest good organization schemes!

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#923

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#924

Post by simonw »

davidgerard wrote: post #916

fly.io is of course closed source, right? so we can't look at the code and see the demonstrable engineering excellence trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,

Their client application (written in Go) is open source: https://github.com/superfly/flyctl

They have a few other notable open source components, I think these two are particularly interesting:

- https://github.com/superfly/corrosion

- https://github.com/superfly/litefs

(Disclosure: they sponsor some of my work.)

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#925

Post by recursive »

mgraczyk wrote: post #153

We are beyond the point of trying to convince naysayers. I will simply not hire anybody who is not good at using LLMs, and I don't think I would ever work with anybody who thinks they aren't very useful. It's like working with somebody who things compilers are useless. Obviously wrong, not worth spending time trying to convince. To anyone who reads this article and disagrees with the central point: You are missing th…

> You should reevaluate because you will be unemployable in a few years.

When this happens, then I'll figure out how to get good at prompting.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#926

Post by gitaarik »

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…

Every new major technology always endangeres the status quo.

https://chatgpt.com/share/683f3932-fce0-8012-a108-4b70c3e5fd...

Things change and it's scary, but it usually works out. Or at least we just get used to it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#927

Post by MattGrommes »

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 agree, this article is basically what I've been thinking as I play with these things over time. They've gotten a ton better but the hot takes are still from 6-12 months ago.

One thing I wish he would have talked about though is maintenance. My only real qualm with my LLM agent buddy is the tendency to just keep adding code if the first pass didn't work. Eventually, it works, sometimes with my manual help. But the resulting code is harder to read and reason about, which makes maintenance and adding features or behavior changes harder. Until you're ready to just hand off the code to the LLM and not do your own changes to it, it's definitely something to keep in mind at minimum.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#928

Post by timcobb »

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 film kill theatre?

Relatively speaking, I would say that film and TV did kill theater

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#929

Post by okdood64 »

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…

How a feature works, and how a feature is coded (how "nice" & canonical the code is) are two very different things.

He's dunking on the design of it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#930

Post by zahlman »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…

> This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’.

I am in my 40s; have never owned a smartphone and still can't imagine wanting one; am constantly surrounded by others who have them and thus am completely aware of their functionality; AMA.

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