Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for.
And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.
It's a negative feedback loop, and the politicians would rather reduce taxes on the rich then reverse that trend
At least that's how it looks to me
> To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless.
It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless."
My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.
Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story.
The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three.
The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes.
I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly.
As soon as you let it do more though, it will invariably tie itself into a knot - all the while confidently ascertaining that it knows what it’s doing.
Anyone trusting it to just "do its own thing" is out if their mind
I think if someone's goal was just the tutorial code, it would have been very impressive to them the AI can summon it.
I'm too poor for local llms, I think there might be a 2 or 4gb graphics card in one of my junk pcs but thats about it lol
Actual novel stuff is so far out on the long tail of iterations that it's a gamble: it might pop up in an early run, or might take 2000 prompts and $20,000 worth of tokens. And it's still not really engineered, it's 10,000 monkeys with typewriters copying random shakespeare snippets off the chalkboard. At some point you'll get all of Hamlet, but most of the time you'll get garbage, and sometimes you'll get Romeo & The Taming of The Tempest.
The other day though I asked for something simple and it one-shotted the problem. To me, that's new.
I know this success was a statistical outlier, however. I grok how to use it and to not trust it. I'm just shocked so many people smart people fail to understand it.
I reckon the reason the VC rhetoric has reached running-hair-dye-Giuliani-speech level absurdity isn’t because they’re trying to convince other people— it’s because they’re trying to convince themselves. I’d think it was funny as hell if my IRA wasn’t on the line.
Yes my pension is probably going down the same sinkhole with your IRA. Good luck. We need it.
Is he facing charges yet for sneaking drugs into his wife's food, or did he only ever discuss that with his buddy Jeff E and never actually follow through with it
Now programming and art are both gambling.
This is an opportunity. You can have a good long career consulting/contracting for these types of companies.
Emergency clean up work is ridiculous money!
This is a straw man. I don't know anybody who sincerely claims this, even online. However if you dare question people claiming to be solving impossible problems with 15 AI agents (they just can't show you what they're building quite yet, but soon, soon you'll see!), then you will be treated as if you said this.
AI is a superior solution to the problem Stack Overflow attempted to solve, and really great at quickly building bespoke, but fragile, tools for some niche problem you solve. However I have yet to see a single instance of it being used to sustainably maintain a production code base in any truly automated fashion. I have however, personally seen my team slowed down because code review is clogged with terribly long, often incorrect, PRs that are largely AI generated.
They are fine, moderately useful here and there in terms of speeding up some of my tasks.
I wouldn't pay much more than 20 bucks for it though.
None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.
Back then, whenever there was a thread discussing the merits of Crypto, there would be people speaking of the certainty that it was the future and fiat currency was on its way out.
It's the same shit with AI. In part it's why I am tranquil about it. The disconnect in between what AI shills say and the reality of using it on a daily basis tell me what I need to know.
I remember when everyone was reading SICP and Clojure and Blockchain were going to burn the universe to the ground. Then crypto. Now this.
Been around much longer than HN and watched this cycle so many times it's boring. I'm still writing C.
It's good toilet time for when Reddit gets too annoying.
That said, a well-reasoned text should probably go on a blog site, not here, or here only as link. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of effort, with only few people even noticing your comment and the discussion soon entirely disappearing into history.
Productivity gains won't show up on economic data and companies trying to automate everything will fail.
But the average office worker will end up with a much more pleasant job and will need to know how to use the models, just like who they needed to learn to use a PC.
There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it.
The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.
Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of these. The entire world of open image/video generation is pretty much ignored by all but a very narrow niche of people, but has so much potential for creating interesting stuff. Even restricting yourself only to an API endpoint, isn't there something more clever we can be doing than re-implementing code that already exists on github badly through vibe coding?
But nobody in the hype-fueled mind rot part of this space remotely cares about anything real being done with gen AI. Vague posting about your billion agent setup and how you've almost entered a new reality is all that matters.
I think we all do???
Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.
AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.
Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.
Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.
A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.
You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad.
The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people).
Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me".
As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".
I'm hoping that the already full of slop centralized platforms now with LLM fueled implosion will overflow and lead to a renaissance of sorts for small and open web, niche communities and decoupling from big tech.
It's already gaining traction among the young, as far as I can see.
"I shipped code 15% faster with AI this month" doesn't have the pull of a 47 agent setup on a mac mini
Any guesses on how long this lasts?
6-12 months before non-technical leaders take notice and realize they can't actually fire half their team
“Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
I understand why people don't act polite to LLMs, but honestly I think not thanking them will make people act more dickish to other humans.
Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person.
I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...
I don't think it's that weird
They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.
Many users don't want to acknowledge this about the company making their fav ai
There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.
The rate of progress in the last 3 years has been over my expectations. The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane. No idea how people can say "no improvement".
I wonder is there are parallel realities. What I remember from the last year is a resounding yawn at the latest models landing, and even people being actively annoyed in e.g. ChatGPT 4.1 vs 4 for being nerfed. Same for 5, big fanfare, and not that excited reception. And same for Claude. And nothing special in the last 2 months either. Nobody considers Claude 4.6 some big improvement over 4.5.
Sorry for closing this comment early, I need to leave my car at the house and walk to the car wash.
There was some improvement in terms of the ability of some models to understand and generate code. It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.
I still think that any claims that it can operate at a human level are complete bullshit.
It can speed things up well in some contexts though.
It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. There's no way that your comment can be taken seriously. It's 99.9% a troll comment, or simply delusional. 3 years ago the model (gpt3.5, the only one out there basically) was not able to output correct code at all. It looked like python if you squinted, but it made no sense. To compare that to what we have today and say "a bit more useful" is not a serious comment. Cannot be a serious comment.
It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice.
And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.
My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work.
That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me.
It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you hate it.
But you're sort of doing the same thing I did - "second coming of Christ"?!
I have no intention of changing your mind. I don't think of the people I reply to highly enough to believe they can change their minds.
I reply to these comments for other people to read. Think of it as me adding ky point of view for neutral readers.
Either way, I could use AI for some coding tasks back in GPT 3.5 days. It was unreliable, but not completely useless (far from it in fact)
Nowadays it is a little more reliable, and it can do more complex coding tasks with less detailed prompts. AI now can handle a larger context, and the "thinking" steps it adds to itself while generating output were a nice trick to improve its capabilities.
While it makes me more productive on certain tasks, it is the sort of the improvements I expected in 3 years of it being a massive money black hole. Anything less would actually be embarrassing all things considered.
Perhaps if your job is just writing code day in an out you would find it more useful than I do? As a software engineer I do quite a bit more than that, even if coding is the bit of work I used to enjoy the most.
What developments have been "staggering"? Claude 4.6 vs 4.5? ChatGPT 5.2 vs 5? The Gemini update?
Only the hype has been staggering, and bs non-stories like the "AI agents conspire and invent their own religion".
Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later
The case where it's not obvious is when the effect is <1.5x. I think that's clearly where we're at
100%. i have a basically unlimited Claude balance at work. I do not think of cost except for fun. CEO thinks every engineer has to use AI because nobody is gonna just be using text editors alone in the future.
That such a collapse of consumption economy, even just counting white collar jobs cut by "mere" 30%, would also mean a collapse of the stock market, society, infrastructure, and even basic safety, doesn't enter the mind.
similar to the ATM example in the article (and my experience with ai coding tools), the automation will start out by handling the easiest parts of our jobs.
eventually, all the easy parts will be automated and the overall headcount will be reduced, but the actual content of the remaining job will be a super-distilled version of 'all the hard parts'.
the jobs that remain will be harder to do and it will be harder to find people capable or willing to do them. it may turn out that if you tell somebody "solve hard problems 40hrs a week"... they can't do it. we NEED the easy parts of the job to slow down and let the mind wander.
LLMs will help such teams move and break things even faster than before. I’m not against the use of LLMs in software development, but I’m against their blind use. However, when there is pressure to ship as fast as possible, many will be tempted to take shortcuts and not thoroughly analyze the output of their LLMs.
But what I really hate about AI and how most people talk about it is that if one day it does what the advertisements say, all white collar jobs collapse.
Then everything collapses. The carpenter will also be out of work if more than half of his client base cannot afford his work anymore.
If everyone is out of a job, then what is the point of the economy? Who is doing what work for whom? If nobody can afford anything, then why are we even doing this?
And, at some point, needs have to be met. If you were to drop 1000 random people on a remote island, you wouldn't expect nothing to happen just because there aren't any employers with jobs to hire people to do. People would spontaneously organize for survival and a local economy would form.
I find depictions of post-apocalyptic societies in sci-fi to be difficult to accept, too. Like Elysium: how could the entire Earth be an underclass, yet the space station needs them to work to be able to survive? That would be the easiest siege warfare of all time; do literally nothing and the space station eventually starves to death. Like Fallout: how could places stay completely run down for centuries? You mean to tell me that nobody would at least start a scrap yard and start cleaning up the old baby buggies and scrap metal from burnt out hulks of cars?
And then grown-ass adults tell stories about what could happen as if they are experts in Economy. Nobody knows how Economy work. Hell, half the Nobel prizes in economics in the last decade have basically been about proving the stupid, fairytale version of economics that existed for the last 100 years was a complete farce.
Yeah, I can definitely see a market collapse leading to a lot of mortgages getting foreclosed. But a complete shutdown? It seems preposterous. How? Why would everyone go along with it?
This kind of question is called "political economy". It used to be basically synonymous with "economics", but after one 19th century economist wrote a very detailed and convincing study that provided solid answers that were not politically acceptable, economists turned away from political economy, and declared this kind of question out of scope, and focused on working out all the mathematical details of a political economy in which all those questions had, as you say, fairytale answers.
Welcome to capitalism.
But it's tacitly understood we need to develop this as soon as we can, as fast as we can, before those other guys do. It's a literal arms race.
Probably only a matter of time until there’s a Snowden-esque leak saying AI is responsible for drone assassinations against targets selected by AI itself.
Still wouldn't mean much. Wars are won on capacity, logistics (the practical side, not ability to calculate them), land/etc advantages, and when it comes to boots on the ground, courage, knowledge of the place, local population support, etc. Not "analyzing info sources" at scale which is mostly a racket that pretends to be important.
"If there's a chance psychic powers are real..."
Against other countries? The biggest endgame is own population control. That has always been the biggest problem/desire of elites, not war with other countries.
Shumer is of a similar stock but less capable, so he gets caught in his lies.
I’m still shocked people work with Altman knowing his history, but given the Epstein files etc it’s not surprise. Our elite class is entirely rotten.
Best advice is trust what you see in front of your face (as much as you can) and be very skeptical of anything else. Everyone involved has agendas and no morals.
If marketing it was the sole objective there are many other stories they could have told, but didn't.
"Yes, I would love to pause AI development, but unless we get China to do the same, we're f***, and there's no advantage unilaterally disarming" (not exact, but basically this)
You can assume bad faith on the parts of all actors, but a lot of people in AI feel similarly.
and by pretending that he has no option but to "go against his own will" and continue it, he gets to make it sound nuclear-bomb-level important.
This is hyping 101.
Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think.
- Alex Karp genuinely believes China is a threat
- I think China is an economic threat, especially for tech
- An AI arms race is itself threatening; it is not like the nuclear deterrent
- Geopolitical tensions are very convenient for Alex Karp
- America has a history of exaggerating geopolitical threats
- Tech is very credulous with politics
"Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think".
I mean, dude, a corporate head having a conflict of interest in saying insincere shit to promote the stuff his company makes is not some conspiracy thinking about everybody playing "8 dimensional chess".
It's the very basic baseline case.
Whether or not you believe it, a lot of people view advanced AI the same way.
Barely.
Even in the nuclear weapons CEO case, if they actually believed that, they'd be in another line of business, not making millions of nuclear weapons.
Like I said you can believe whatever you want about good-faith motives, but he didn't have to say he wanted to pause AI, he could have been bright-and-cheery bullish, there was no real advantage to laying his cards out on his qualms.
If the USA pauses AI development, do you think China will?
This is the source of migration allowance but I bet you stand there with a "Refugees welcome" sign.
Or claim to.
> I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it. But they’re instead saying that it is going to leave me a poor, jobless wretch, a member of the “permanent underclass,” as the meme on Twitter goes.
They are marketing it. The target customer isn't the user paying $20 for ChatGPT Pro, though; the customers are investors and CEOs, and their marketing is "AI is so powerful and destructive that if you don't invest in AI, you will be left behind." FOMO at its finest.