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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#931

Post by 0j »

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…

I don't feel like being dependent on LLM coding tools is much of an issue, you can very easily switch between different vendors. And I hope that open weight models will be "good enough" until we get a monopoly. In any case, even if you are afraid of getting too dependent on AI tools, I think everyone needs to stay up to date on what is happening. Things are changing very quickly right now, so no matter what argument you may have against LLMs, it may just not be valid any more in a few months

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#932

Post by flkiwi »

I tend to agree with the gist of this, namely that the change is here and "AI" presents some huge potential to save me from having to do the tedious stuff. But we do need a bit of a sanity check. I'm in the middle of trying to convince any of the AIs that I have access to to write me some simple Lua. Specifically, I'm trying to write a query that returns a certain subset of pages from the Silverbullet V2 note tool. This isn't particularly difficult, but it's become this hilarious journey to try to get the AI to figure this problem out. Silverbullet is a niche use case, v2 even more so, but a reasonably skilled developer could peruse the API documentation and come up with a pretty good starting point. AI tools? Absolutely insane wrong answers. I finally specifically asked one or two of them not to guess with their answers and they just straight up said "nah, we don't know how to do this."

Point being: there's some real power in these tools, but if the ground is not already well-trodden, they risk creating a huge time sink that could be better served just learning to do the thing yourself.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#933

Post by GenshoTikamura »

globnomulous wrote: post #695

I've only just realized how bad AI is for me, in a manner I didn't at all expect. I don't use it. I don't want to use it. I hate it. As another commenter here nicely put it, I want to do, not tell. I like writing code. I like solving problems. I like doing the work myself. I like struggling and then, the next day, finding that my capabilities have grown. And yet I'm overwhelmingly demoralized and depressed about AI's…

Stay strong. Someday we'll all meet at the opposite riverside, as in Fahrenheit 451.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#934

Post by benced »

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…

You can run LLMs locally pretty easily, especially if you have a Mac (the unified memory architecture of Macs is really good at this). It's a niche thing but caring about Free Software is niche.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#935

Post by dabockster »

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…

You can get 90%+ of the way there with a tiny “coder” LLM running on the Ollama backend with an extension like RooCode and a ton of MCP tools.

In fact, MCP is so ground breaking that I consider it to be the actual meat and potatoes of coding AIs. Large models are too monolithic, and knowledge is forever changing. Better just to use a small 14b model (or even 8b in some cases!) with some MCP search tools, a good knowledge graph for memory, and a decent front end for everything. Let it teach itself based on the current context.

And all of that can run on an off the shelf $1k gaming computer from Costco. It’ll be super slow compared to a cloud system (like HDD vs SSD levels of slowness), but it will run in the first place and you’ll get *something* out of it.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#936

Post by tshaddox »

I don't doubt that LLMs will have a large impact on software and programming. But I do wonder whether it will be a positive impact. I think one of the biggest problems the software industry has is that it's far too rare for the people building software to have deep explanatory knowledge about what they have built. LLMs threaten to make this problem vastly worse than it already is.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#937

Post by dabockster »

Fredkin wrote: post #793

My main concern is not even mentioned in this article and there are hardly any comments here addressing it: Privacy / allowing 3rd parties to read and potentially train on your proprietary source code. I've used LLMs to crank out code for tedious things (like generating C-APIs and calling into poorly documented libraries) but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline. Would love to us…

> but I'm not letting them touch my code until I can run it 100% locally offline

You can do this already with Ollama, RooCode, and a Docker compatible container engine.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#938

Post by rollcat »

belter wrote: post #718
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…

> What fascinates me is how negative these comments are — how many people seem closed off to the possibility that this could be a net positive for software engineers rather than some kind of doomsday. I tried the latest Claude for a very complex wrapper around the AWS Price APIs who are not easy to work with. Down a 2,000 line of code file, I found Claude faking some API returns by creating hard coded values. A patte…

More or less this. Maybe a job opportunity, but many decision makers won't see the real problem until they get hit by that AWS bill. Ironic, if the business won't hire you because they went out of business?

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#939

Post by bdangubic »

tshaddox wrote: post #936

I don't doubt that LLMs will have a large impact on software and programming. But I do wonder whether it will be a positive impact. I think one of the biggest problems the software industry has is that it's far too rare for the people building software to have deep explanatory knowledge about what they have built. LLMs threaten to make this problem vastly worse than it already is.

the reason this is rare is that no one stays on any one project long enough for this to be a reality anywhere. you know anyone working 15-20 years on the same project? I’ve been on many projects where deep explanatory knowledge existed through and through until the project was initial-code-complete and then people left to do other amazing things leaving project with people with limited knowledge of it. I suspect this is the case for vast majority of software

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#940

Post by ljsprague »

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…

Yes, film killed theatre.
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