Also AI has been basically useless every time I tried it except converting some struct definitions across languages or similar tasks, it seems very unlikely that it would boost productivity by more than 10% let alone 400%.
FWIW, my own experiences with AI have ranged from mediocre to downright abysmal. And, no, I don't know which models the tools were using. I'm rather annoyed that it seems to be impossible to express a negative opinion about the value of AI without having to have a thoroughly documented experiment that inevitably invites the response that obviously some parameter was chosen incorrectly, while the people claiming how good it is get to be all offended when someone asks them to maybe show their work a little bit.
It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc. Of course its more difficult to provide specifics than just say it was good or bad, but there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.
That's an interesting comparison. That kind of statement can be reasonably inferred to be made by someone just learning to drive who doesn't like the experience of driving. And if I were a motorhead trying to convert that person to like driving, my first questions wouldn't be those questions, trying to interrogate them on their exact scenario to invalidate their results, but instead to question what aspect of driving they don't like to see if I could work out a fix for them that would meaningfully change their experience (and not being a motorhead, the only thing I can think of is maybe automatic versus manual transmission).
> there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.
Also, do remember that this holds true when you s/bad/good/g.
But if all we have to go on is "I used it and it sucked" or "I used it and it was great", like, okay, good for you?
"Damn, these relational databases really suck, I don't know why anyone would use them, some of the data by my users had emojis in them and it totally it! Furthermore, I have some bits of data that have about 100-200 columns and the database doesn't work well at all, that's horrible!"
In some cases knowing more details could help, for example in the database example a person historically using MySQL 5.5 could have had a pretty bad experience, in which case telling them to use something more recent or PostgreSQL would have been pretty good.
In other cases, they're literally just holding it wrong, for example trying to use a RDBMS for something where a column store would be a bit better.
Replace the DB example with AI, same principles are at play. It is equally annoying to hear people blaming all of the tools when some are clearly better/worse than others, as well as making broad statements that cannot really be proven or disproven with the given information, as it is people always asking for more details. I honestly believe that all of these AI discussions should be had with as much data present as possible - both the bad and good experiences.
> If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics.
My personal experience:
* most self-hosted models kind of suck, use cloud ones unless you can get really beefy hardware (e.g. waste a lot of money on them)
* most free models also aren't very good, nor have that much context space
* some paid models also suck, the likes of Mistral (like what they're doing, just not very good at it), or most mini/flash models
* around Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4 they start getting somewhat decent, GPT 5 feels a bit slow and like it "thinks" too much
* regardless of what you do, you still have to babysit them a lot of the time, they might take some of the cognitive load off, but won't make you 10x faster usually, the gains might definitely be there from reduced development friction (esp. when starting new work items)
* regardless of what you do, they will still screw up quite a bit, much like a lot of human devs do out there - having a loop of tests will be pretty much mandatory, e.g. scripts that run the test suite and also the compilation
* agentic tools like RooCode feel like they make them less useless, as do good descriptions of what you want to do - references to existing files and patterns etc., normally throwing some developer documentation and ADRs at them should be enough but most places straight up don't have any of that, so feeding in a bunch of code is a must
* expect usage of around 100-200 USD per month for API calls if the rate limits of regular subscriptions are too limiting
And if they don't, then you'd understand the anger surely. You can't say "well obviously everybody should benefit" and then also scold the people who are mad that everybody isn't benefiting.
Look I hope the workers get their fair share. I don't think I'm their enemy. But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business. I am a hacker, I am always trying to concoct creative solutions to problems through code. I happen to still think this is a great way for an American to make it in life, because I did, and mainly want to help like-minded folk, or learn from them.
I wish more of the original Hacker News spirit was still around, instead of this Reddity r/antiwork stuff that seems to be creeping in. I get it the US government and economy are controlled by nepo babies and monopolies I'm not happy about it either, but we don't really need Hacker News to become a Marxism forum.
I wondered whether you had a track record of promoting "creative solutions to problems through code" and saw your last submission was an attempt to drum up outrage about google trials, suggesting someone "should be investigated for conflicts of interest, and perhaps disbarred". Yes, purely items of technical interest for hackers, very un-politicized.
Whereas it IS a forum for discussing the biggest tech court case of the century.
The site was not established to give equal time to all political ideologies in all threads, which is what you seem to be implying.
This is all in the Hacker News guidelines. Let me paste the relevant part for you since you don't seem to know about it:
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
And stop telling people to "look". You look. Because listen, I know that phrases like this one are well-loved by a certain type of person. Shows who's the adult in the room, and also frightens subordinates into silence, right? But understand me now when I say that it's much too transparent when used too often. Realize that there are other adults in the room, and when you toss out too many imperatives too fast then it's easy to see how much you want to control people as well as the topics under discussion.
Good that people finally open their eyes.
> But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business
And that's a false-consciousness at its finest. You are closer to these workers than to those that really own capital.
However, I did something which virtually none of them did. I wanted to get out. So I identified a skillset that the world desperately wanted, and I spent thousands of hours learning how to build and sell with that skillset. Frequently I was criticized or ridiculed or simply ignored, but it worked and I made money. Then I used that money to amass assets.
This doesn't mean I think Elon Musk is my friend or a good guy or something or even that I think the system is just, I don't. But I correctly identified the ladder out of the working class trap. I have Marxist friends who didn't. They're still poor. They still won't listen. Their lives still suck.
The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people. They seem to think that will work but I saw in my own life that concentration of wealth and power always fails the little guy. My philosophy is that it's better to bust all the big guys down (don't mistake this for an endorsement of unregulated capitalism, it isn't) and give everybody the ability to amass their own wealth by creating businesses. I think this idea is way more hackerish than Marxism, because it's all about people building and creating without needing someone else's permission.
If you are a worker, you should want to become an owner. You should not want to appeal to a higher authority for a distribution, because the hand that feeds you will always control you. You will not be free. You should strive to own and control your own slice of the pie because that is the only thing which will make you free. The more workers we can convert into owners, the better, and I'm not talking some fantastical idea of collective ownership here (at least in today's system, it basically doesn't exist).
The state owning things on your behalf is not very true to the spirit of it at all, I would say.
It wouldn't be false consciousness if you would be from wealthy family.
Yes, working people should climb the ladder, but without government intervention and putting collars on wealthy necks there won't be any ladder for them. There would be no small business owners like you. This is why I think you are very wrong when stating you are not one of them. In a sense that is true, but in other you have more common interest with those without any capital that with those really wealthy. But those really wealthy definitely want you to think otherwise.
And I have an impression your view of Marxism is forged on Reddit posts and not Marxists literature.
> The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people.