One group is keen on rushing on destroying society for a quality-of-life improvement that they can't even be bothered to measure.

Someone who swears they have seen ghosts are obviously gonna have a problem with people saying ghosts don't exist. Doesn't mean ghosts exist.

Ok, but if you're saying I've had delusions LLMs being helpful either I need serious psychiatric care or we need to revisit the premise because we're talking about a tool being useful not the existence of supernatural beings.

I think the point is that a subjective experience, without accompanying data, is useless for making any factual claims wrt both ghosts and reported productivity-boosts from LLM usage.

Getting photos of ghosts is one thing, but productivity increases are omething that we should be able to quantify at some level to demonstrate the efficacy of these tools.

That's a silly thing to request from random people in the comments of an HN thread though ha

Nobody is saying LLM's can never be helpful, it's skepticism towards certain claims made around agentic workflows re. programming, such as claims of massively increased productivity or the idea that agents will replace most if not all programmers.

Funnily enough, the one study that was done, indicates people misjudge the utility and impact of LLMs. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Measuring programming productivity is hard. For example, take testing. It is certainly useful. At the same time, you can waste time on it in some situations.

When, what, how to test may be important for productivity.

I don't know whether LLMs are in the same category.

But there is still a hugely important asymmetry: If the tool turns your office into gods of software, they should be able to prove it with godly results by now.

If I tell you AmbrosiaLLM doesn't turn me into a programming god... Well, current results are already consistent with that, so It's not clear what else I could easily provide.

This is a bit of goalpost moving though because the primary experience is skeptics saying AI couldn't be trusted to design a ham sandwich vs enthusiasts who've make five course meals with AI. (or, you know, the programming equivalent)

Absolutely there's a lot of unfounded speculation going around and a lot of aggressive skepticism of it, and both sides there are generally a little too excited about their position.

But that is fundamentally not what I'm talking about.