[HN Gopher] AI Angst
___________________________________________________________________
AI Angst
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-06-09 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tbray.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
| strict9 wrote:
| Angst is the best way to put it.
|
| I use AI every day, I feel like it makes me more productive, and
| generally supportive of it.
|
| But the angst is something else. When nearly every tech related
| startup seems to be about making FTEs redundant via AI it leaves
| me with a bad feeling for the future. Same with the impact on
| students and learning.
|
| Not sure where we go from here. But this feels spot on:
|
| _> I think that the best we can hope for is the eventual
| financial meltdown leaving a few useful islands of things that
| are actually useful at prices that make sense._
| bob1029 wrote:
| I agree that some kind of meltdown/crash would be the best
| possible thing to happen. There are too many players not adding
| any value to the ecosystem at this point. MCP is a great
| example of this - Complexity merchants inventing new markets to
| operate in. We need something severe to scare off the bullshit
| artists for a while.
|
| How many civil engineering projects could we have completed
| ahead of schedule and under budget if we applied the same
| amount of wild-eyed VC and genius tier attention to the
| problems at hand?
| pzo wrote:
| MCP is now only used by really power users and mostly only in
| software dev settings but I see them used by users in the
| future. There is no decent mcp client for non tech savvy
| users yet. But I think if browsers will have build in better
| implementation of them they will be used. Think what
| perplexity comet or browser company dia trying to do. It's
| still very early for MCP.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| All the angst is 100% manufactured by policy, LLMs wouldn't be
| hated if it didn't dovetail with the end of ZIRP, Section 174
| specifically targeting engineer roles to be tax losers so
| others could be other tax winners, Macro Economic Uncertainty
| (which compounds the problems of 174.)
|
| If ours roles hadn't been specifically targeted by government
| policy for reduction as a way to buoy government revenues and
| prop up the budgetary bottom line, in the face of decreasing
| taxes for favored parties.
|
| This is simply policy induced multifactorial collapse.
|
| And LLMs get to take the blame from engineers because that is
| the excuse being used. Pretty much every old school hacker who
| has played around with them recognizes that LLMs are impressive
| and sci-fi, it's like my childhood dream come true for
| interface design.
|
| I cannot begin to say how fucking stupid the people in charge
| of these policies are, I'm an old head, I know exactly the type
| of 80s executives that actively likes to see the nerds suffer
| because we're all irritating poindexters to them.
|
| The pattern of actively attacking the freedoms and sabotaging
| incomes of knowledge workers is not remotely a rare pattern,
| and it's often done this stupidly and at the expense of an
| countries economic footing and ability to innovate.
| perplex wrote:
| > I really don't think there's a coherent pro-genAI case to be
| made in the education context
|
| My own personal experience is that Gen AI is an amazing tool to
| support learning, when used properly.
|
| Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work
| with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive
| change for both teachers and students.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Computer and internet has been around for 20 years and yet the
| evaluation systems of our education has largely remained the
| same.
|
| I don't hold my breath on this.
| icedchai wrote:
| Where are you located? The Internet boom in the US happened
| in the mid-90's. My first part-time ISP job was in 1994.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| dial-up penetration in the mid-90's was still very thin,
| and high-speed access limited to universities and the
| biggest companies. Here's the numbers ChatGPT found for me:
|
| * 1990s: Internet access was rare. By 1995, only 14% of
| Americans were online.
|
| * 2000: Approximately 43% of U.S. households had internet
| access .
|
| * 2005: The number increased to 68% .
|
| * 2010: Around 72% of households were connected .
|
| * 2015: The figure rose to 75% .
|
| * 2020: Approximately 93% of U.S. adults used the internet,
| indicating widespread household access .
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes, it was thin, but 1995 - 96 was when "Internet" went
| mainstream. Depending on your area, you could have
| several dialup ISP options. Major metros like Boston had
| dozens. I remember hearing ISP ads on the radio!
|
| 1995 was when Windows 95 launched, and with its built in
| dialup networking support, allowed a "normal" person to
| easily get online. 1995 was the Netscape IPO, which
| kicked off the dot-com bubble. 1995 was when Amazon first
| launched their site.
| murrayb wrote:
| I think he is talking education as in school/college/university
| rather than learning?
|
| I too am finding AI incredibly useful for learning, I use it
| for high level overviews and to help guide me to resources
| (online formats and books) deeper dives. Claude has so far
| proven to be an excellent learning partner, no doubt other
| models are similarly good.
| strict9 wrote:
| That is my take. Continuing education via prompt is great, I
| try to do it every day. Despite years of use I still get that
| magic feeling when asking about some obscure topic I want to
| know more about.
|
| But that doesn't mean I think my kids should primarily get
| K-12 and college education this way.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The issue with education in particular is a much deeper issue
| which gen AI has ripped bandages off and exposed the wound to
| the world, while also greatly accelerating its decay, but it
| was not responsible for creating it.
|
| What is the purpose of education? Is it to learn, or to gain
| credentials that you have learned? Too much of education has
| become the latter, to the point we have sacrificed the former.
| Eventually this brings down both, as a degree gains a
| reputation of no longer signifying the former ever happened.
|
| Or existing systems that check for learning before granting the
| degree that showed an individual learned were largely not ready
| for the impact of genAI and teachers and professors have
| adapted poorly. Sometimes due to lack of understanding the
| technology, often due to their hands being tied.
|
| GenAI used to cheat is a great detriment to education, but a
| student using genAI to learn can benefit greatly, as long as
| they have matured enough in their education process to have
| critical thinking to handle mishaps by the AI and to properly
| differentiate when they are learning and when they are having
| the AI do the work for them (I don't say cheat here because
| some students will accidentally cross the line and 'cheat'
| often carries a hint of mens rea). To the mature enough student
| interested in learning more, genAI is a worthwhile tool.
|
| How do we handle those who use it to cheat? How do we handle
| students who are too immature in their education journey to use
| the tool effectively? Are we ready to have a discussion about
| those learning who only care for the degree and the education
| to earn the degree is just seen as a means to an end? How to
| teachers (and increasingly professors) fight back against the
| pressure of systems that optimize on granting credentials and
| which just assume the education will be behind those systems
| (Goodhart's Law anyone)? Those questions don't exist because of
| genAI, but genAI greatly increased our need to answer them.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work
| with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive
| change for both teachers and students.
|
| Since we're using anecdotes, let me leave one as well--it's
| been my experience that humans choose the path of least
| resistance. In the context of education, I saw a large
| percentage of my peers during K-12 do the bare minimum to get
| by in the classes, and in college I saw many resorting to Chegg
| to cheat on their assignments/tests. In both cases I believe it
| was the same motivation--half-assing work/cheating takes less
| effort and time.
|
| Now, what happens when you give those same children access to
| an LLM that can do essentially ALL their work for them? If I'm
| right, those children will increasingly lean on those LLMs to
| do as much of their schoolwork/homework as possible, because
| the alternative means they have less time to scroll on Tik Tok.
|
| But wait, this isn't an anecdote, it's already happening!
| Here's an excellent article that details the damage these tools
| are already causing to our students
| https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/.
|
| >[blank] is an amazing tool ... when used properly
|
| You could say the same thing about a myriad of controversial
| things that currently exist. But we don't live in a perfect
| world--we live in a world where money is king, and often times
| what makes money is in direct conflict with utilitarianism.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Now, what happens when you give those same children access
| to an LLM that can do essentially ALL their work for them? If
| I'm right, those children will increasingly lean on those
| LLMs to do as much of their schoolwork/homework as possible,
| because the alternative means they have less time to scroll
| on Tik Tok.
|
| I think schools are going to have to very quickly re-evaluate
| their reliance on "having done homework" and using essays as
| evidence that a student has mastered a subject. If an LLM can
| easily do something, then that thing is no longer measuring
| anything meaningful.
|
| A school's curriculum should be created assuming LLMs exist
| and that students will always use them to bypass make-work.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >A school's curriculum should be created assuming LLMs
| exist and that students will always use them to bypass
| make-work
|
| Okay, how do they go about this?
|
| Schools are already understaffed as is, how are the
| teachers suddenly going to have time to revamp the entire
| educational blueprint? Where is the funding for this
| revolution in education going to come from when we've just
| slashed the Education fund?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm not an educator, so I honestly have no idea. The
| world has permanently changed though... we can't put the
| toothpaste back into the tube. Any student, with a few
| bucks and a few keystrokes, can instantly solve written
| homework assignments and generate an any-number-of-words
| essay about any topic. _Something_ needs to change in the
| education process, but who knows what it will end up
| looking like?
| usefulcat wrote:
| I would think that at least part of the solution would
| have to involve having students do more work at school
| instead of as homework.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Okay, and how do you make room for that when there's
| barely enough time to teach the curriculum as is?
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> an amazing tool to support learning, when used properly.
|
| how can kids, think K-12, who don't even know how to "use" the
| internet properly - or even their phones - learn how to learn
| with AI? The same way social media and mobile apps made the
| internet easy, mindless clicking, LLMs make school a mechanical
| task. It feels like your argument is similar to LLMs helping
| experienced, senior developers code more effectively, while
| eliminating many chances to grow the skills needed to join that
| group. Sounds like you already know how to learn and use AI to
| enhance that. My 12-yr-old is not there yet and may never get
| there.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > My 12-yr-old is not there yet and may never get there.
|
| Wouldn't class room exams enforce that though? Like,
| imagining LLMs like an older sibling or parent that would
| help pupils cheat on essays.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| >> how can kids, think K-12, who don't even know how to "use"
| the internet properly - or even their phones - learn how to
| learn with AI?
|
| For every person/child that just wants the answer there will
| be at least some that will want to know why. And these
| endlessly patient machines are very good at feeding that
| curiosity.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >For every person/child that just wants the answer there
| will be at least some that will want to know why
|
| You're correct, but let's be honest here, the majority will
| use it as a means to get their homework over and done with
| so they can return to Tik Tok. Is that the society we want
| to cultivate?
|
| >And these endlessly patient machines are very good at
| feeding that curiosity
|
| They're also very good at feeding you factually incorrect
| information. In comparison, a textbook was crafted by
| experts in their field, and is often fact checked by many
| more experts before it becomes published.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Minor off-topic quibble about streams: I've been learning about
| network programming for realtime multiplayer games, specifically
| about input and output streams. I just want to voice that the
| names are a bit confusing due to the perspective I adopt when I
| think about them.
|
| Input stream = output from the perspective of the consumer.
| Things come out of this stream that I can programmatically react
| to. Output stream = input from the perspective of the producer.
| This is a stream you put stuff into.
|
| ...so when this article starts "My input stream is full of it..."
| the author is saying they're seeing output of fear and angst in
| their feeds.
|
| Am I alone in thinking this is a bit unintuitive?
| nemomarx wrote:
| I think an input stream is input from the perspective of the
| consumer? Like it's things you are consuming or taking as
| inputs. Output is things you emit.
|
| Your input is ofc someone else's output, and vice versa, but
| you want to keep your description and thoughts to one
| perspective, and in a first person blog that's clearly the
| authors pov, right?
| absurdo wrote:
| Poor HN.
|
| Is there a glimpse of the next hype train we can prepare to board
| once AI gets dulled down? This has basically made the site
| unusable.
| acedTrex wrote:
| It has made large parts of the internet and frankly previously
| solid tools and products unusable.
|
| Just look at the Github product being transformed into absolute
| slop central its wild. Github universe was exclusively focused
| on useless LLM additions.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| I'm interested to see what the landscape of public code will
| look like in the next few years, with sites like
| StackOverflow dropping off and discussions moving to discord,
| plus code generation flooding github, writing your own high
| quality code in the open might become very valuable.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I am very bearish on that idea to be honest, I think the
| field will stagnate.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Giving away secret sauce for free is not the way of the
| new guilded era.
| yoz-y wrote:
| At the moment 6 out of 30 front page articles are about AI.
| That's honesty quite okay.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I use something called the Rust Index, where I compare a term
| or topic to the number of posts with "written in Rust" in the
| title.
| absurdo wrote:
| C-can we get an open source of this?
|
| Is it written in Rust?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| HN old timers would call this it Erlang Index.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I was just thinking about you.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| My sentiments exactly, lately browsing HN feels like a sales
| pitch for LLMs, complete with the same snark about "luddites"
| and promises of future glory I remember back when NFTs were the
| hot new thing in tech. Two more weeks I guess.
| Kiro wrote:
| NFTs had zero utility but even the most anti AI posts are now
| "ok, AI can be useful but what are the costs?". It's clearly
| something different.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Really? I feel like hackernews is so anti-AI I go to other
| places for the latest. Anything posted here gets destroyed by
| cranky programmers desperately hoping this is just a fad.
| tptacek wrote:
| I share this complaint, for what it's worth.
| layer8 wrote:
| Anti-aging is an evergreen.
| piker wrote:
| > I really don't think there's a coherent pro-genAI case to be
| made in the education context
|
| I use ChatGPT as an RNG of math problems to work through with my
| kid sometimes.
| Herring wrote:
| I used it to generate SQL questions set in real-world
| scenarios. I needed to pick up joins intuitively, and the
| websites I could find were pretty dull.
| lowsong wrote:
| > at the moment I'm mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek's My AI
| Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It's long and (fortunately) well-
| written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with.
|
| Ptacek has spent the past week getting dunked on in public for
| that article. I don't think it lends you a lot of credence to
| align with it.
|
| > If you're interested in that thinking, here's a sample; a slide
| deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which,
| granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these
| days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong
| emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It's also useful
| in that it talks specifically about costs.
|
| You're not wrong here. I read the deck and the word that comes to
| mind is "disgusting". Then again, the morally bankrupt have
| always done horrible things to make a quick buck -- AI is no
| different.
| icedchai wrote:
| Getting "dunked" only means it's controversial, not necessarily
| wrong. Developers who don't embrace AI tools are going to get
| left behind.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Sure, tptacek will outprogram all of us. With his two GitHub
| repositories, one of which is a POC.
| icedchai wrote:
| Have you tried any of the tools, like Cursor or Zed? They
| increase productivity _if you use them correctly._ If you
| give them quality inputs like well written, spec-like
| prompts, instruct them to work in phases, provide feedback
| on testing, the results can be very, very good.
| Unsurprisingly, this is similar to what you need to give to
| a human to also get positive results.
| kiitos wrote:
| Then maybe replace "getting dunked on" with "getting ratio'd"
| -- underlying point is the same, the post was a bad take.
| icedchai wrote:
| What was bad about it? Everything he wrote all sounded very
| pragmatic to me.
| tptacek wrote:
| To be fair, you had the same response to Kenton Varda's
| post about using Claude Code to build an OAuth component
| for Cloudflare, to the point of calling his work just a
| tiny step away from "vibe coding".
| kiitos wrote:
| I called that project one step away from vibe coding,
| which I stand behind -- 'tiny' is your editorializing.
| But his thing wasn't as summarily dunked-on, or ratio'd,
| or however you want to call it, as your thing was, I
| don't think! ;)
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't feel like I got "ratio'd" at all? I'd say the
| response broke down roughly 50/50, as I expected it to. I
| got "dunked on" here yesterday for suggesting that
| userland TCP/IP stacks were a good idea; I'm not all that
| sensitive to "dunking".
| lowsong wrote:
| > Getting "dunked" only means it's controversial, not
| necessarily wrong.
|
| It undermines the author's position of being "moderate" if
| they align with perhaps the most decisive and aggressively
| written pro-AI puff piece doing the rounds.
|
| > Developers who don't embrace AI tools are going to get left
| behind.
|
| I'm not sure how to respond to this. I am doubtful a comment
| on Hacker News will change your mind, but I'd ask you to
| think about two questions.
|
| If AI is going to be as revolutionary in our industry as
| other changes of the past, like web or mobile, then how would
| a similar statement sound around those? Is saying "Developers
| who don't embrace mobile development are going to get left
| behind" a sensible statement? I don't think so, even with how
| huge mobile has been. Same with other big shifts. "Developers
| who don't embrace microservice architecture are going to get
| left behind"? Maybe more comparable, but equally silly. So,
| why would it be different than those? Do you think LLM tools
| are more impactful than any other change in history?
|
| Second, if AI truly as as groundbreakingly revolutionary as
| you suggest, what happens to us? Maybe you'll call me a
| luddite, raging against the loss of jobs when confronted with
| automated looms, but you'll have to forgive me for not
| welcoming my own destruction with open arms.
| icedchai wrote:
| I understand your skepticism. I think, in 20 years, when we
| look back, we'll see this time was the beginning of a
| fundamental paradigm shift in software development. This
| will be similar in magnitude to the move from desktop to
| web development in the 90's. If I told you, in 1996, that
| "developers who don't embrace web development will be left
| behind", it would be an accurate statement.
| cloverich wrote:
| You have to compare it at the right level. A _developer_
| who did not embrace mobile is fine, because the market
| _grew_ as a result of mobile. For developers, there were
| strictly more opportunities to branch out and find work.
| For _companies_ however, yes, if they failed to embrace
| mobile many of them absolutely were hard-passed (or lost
| substantial market share) compared against those who did.
| Just like those who failed to embrace the internet were
| hard passed before that.
|
| A more apt comparison might be comparing it to the arrival
| of IDE's and quality source control? Do you think
| developers (outside of niche cases) working out of text
| editors and rsyncing code to production are able to find
| jobs as easily as those who are well versed in using e.g. a
| modern language tooling + Github in a team environment?
| Because I've directly seen many such developers being
| turned down by screening and interviews; I've seen
| companies shed talent when they refused to embrace git
| while clinging to SVN and slow deployment processes; said
| talent would go on to join companies that were later IPOing
| in the same space for a billion+ while their former
| colleagues were laid off. To me it feels quite similar to
| those moments.
| stevage wrote:
| I guess we're all trying to figure out where we sit along the
| continuum from anti-AI Luddite to all-in.
|
| My main issue with vibe coding etc is I simply don't enjoy it.
| Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I
| don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just
| not fun. It doesn't give me any of the same kind of intellectual
| satisfaction that I get out of actually writing code.
|
| I'm happy to use Copilot to auto-complete, and ask a few
| questions of ChatGPT to solve a pointy TypeScript issue or debug
| something, but stepping back and letting Claude or something
| write whole modules for me just feels sloppy and unpleasant.
| Garlef wrote:
| > Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I
| don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is
| just not fun.
|
| Same for me. But maybe that's ultimately an UX issue? And maybe
| things will straighten out once we figure out how to REALLY do
| AI assisted software development.
|
| As an anology: Most people wouldn't want to dig through machine
| code/compiler output. At least not without proper tooling.
|
| So: Maybe once we have good tools to understand the output it
| might be fun again.
|
| (I guess this would include advances in
| structuring/architecting the output)
| bitwize wrote:
| I think that AI assistance in coding will become enjoyable
| for me once the technology exists for AI to translate my
| brainwaves into text. Then I could _think_ my code into
| computer, greatly speeding the OODA loop of programming.
|
| As it is, giving high-level directives to an LLM and
| debugging the output seems like a waste of my time and a
| hindrance to my learning process. But that's how professional
| coding will be done in the near future. 100% human written
| code will become like hand-writing a business letter in
| cursive: something people used to be taught in school, but no
| one actually does in the real world because it's too time-
| consuming.
|
| Ultimately, the business world only cares about productivity
| and what the stopwatch says is faster, not whether you enjoy
| or learn from the process.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Tim doesn't address this in his essay, so I'm going to harp
| on it: "AI will soon be able to...". That phrase is far too
| load-bearing. The part of AI hype that says, "sure, it's
| kinda janky now, but this is just the beginning" has been
| repeated for 3 years now, and everything has been just around
| the corner the entire time. It's the first step fallacy,
| saying that if we can build a really tall ladder now, surely
| we'll soon be able to build a ladder tall enough to reach the
| moon.
|
| The reality is that we've seen incremental and diminishing
| returns, and the promises haven't been met.
| tptacek wrote:
| _Diminishing_ returns? Am I reading right that you believe
| the last 6 months has been marked by a _decrease_ in the
| capability of these systems?
| cratermoon wrote:
| That's not what diminishing returns means.
| tptacek wrote:
| That's true, but it's nearest bit of evidence at hand to
| how the "returns" could be "diminishing". I'm fine if
| someone wants to provide any _other_ coherent claim as to
| how we 're in a "diminishing returns" state with coding
| LLMs right now.
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/ai-scaling-laws-are-
| showin...
| tptacek wrote:
| What's the implication of this story to someone who had
| started writing code with LLMs 6 months ago, and is today
| as well. How has their experience changed? Have the
| returns to that activity diminished?
| username223 wrote:
| > As an anology: Most people wouldn't want to dig through
| machine code/compiler output. At least not without proper
| tooling.
|
| My analogy is GUI builders from the late 90s that let you
| drag elements around, then generated a pile of code. They
| worked sometimes, but God help you if you wanted to do
| something the builder couldn't do, and had to edit the
| generated code.
|
| Looking at compiler output is actually more pleasant. You
| profile your code, find the hot spots, and see that something
| isn't getting inlined, vectorized, etc. At that point you can
| either convince the compiler to do what you want or rewrite
| it by hand, and the task is self-contained.
| layer8 wrote:
| The compiler analogy doesn't quite fit, because the essential
| difference is that source code is (mostly) deterministic and
| thus can be reasoned about (you can largely predict in detail
| what behavior code will exhibit even before writing it),
| which isn't the case for LLM instructions. That's a major
| factor why many developers don't like AI coding, because
| every prompt becomes a non-reproducible, literally un-
| reasonable experiment.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I think the "largely" in there is interesting and load-
| bearing: a lot of people find compiler output quite
| surprising!
|
| But that doesn't mean that it's not a gradient, and LLM
| output may be meaningfully harder to reason about than
| compiler output, and that may matter.
| layer8 wrote:
| Assembly output may sometimes be surprising, but
| maintains the language semantics. The surprise comes from
| either misunderstanding the language semantics, or from
| performance aspects. Nevertheless, if you understand the
| language semantics correctly, the program behavior
| resulting from the output is deterministic and
| predictable. This is not true for LLMs.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I don't disagree on a factual level, I am just describing
| some people's subjective experiences: some language
| semantics can be very subtle, and miscompilation bugs are
| real. Determining if it is just an aggressive
| optimization or a real codegen bug can be difficult
| sometimes, that's all.
| pandler wrote:
| In addition to not enjoying it, I also don't learn anything,
| and I think that makes it difficult to sustain anything in the
| middle of the spectrum between "I won't even look at the code;
| vibes only" and advanced autocomplete.
|
| My experience has been that it's difficult to mostly vibe with
| an agent, but still be an active participant in the codebase.
| That feels especially true when I'm using tools, frameworks,
| etc that I'm not already familiar with. The vibing part of the
| process simultaneously doesn't provide me with any deeper
| understanding or experience to be able to help guide or
| troubleshoot. Same thing for maintaining existing skills.
| daxfohl wrote:
| It's like trying to learn math by reading vs by doing. If all
| you're doing is reading, it robs you of the depth of
| understanding you'd gain by solving things yourself. Going
| down wrong paths, backtracking, finally having that aha
| moment where things click, is the only way to truly
| understand something.
|
| Now, for all the executives who are trying to force-feed
| their engineering team to use AI for everything, this is the
| result. Your engineering staff becomes equivalent to a
| mathematician who has never actually done a math problem,
| just read a bunch of books and trusted what was there. Or a
| math tutor for your kid who "teaches" by doing your kid's
| homework for them. When things break and the shit hits the
| fan, is that the engineering department you want to have?
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that I lost a job opportunity because
| the manager interviewing me kept asking me variations of
| how I use AI when I code.
|
| Unless I'm stuck while experimenting with a new language or
| finding something in a library's documentation, I don't use
| AI at all. I just don't feel the need for it in my primary
| skill set because I've been doing it so long that it would
| take me longer to get AI to an acceptable answer than doing
| it myself.
|
| The idea seemed rather offensive to him, and I'm quite glad
| I didn't go to work there, or anywhere that using AI is an
| expectation rather than an option.
|
| I definitely don't see a team that relies on it heavily
| having fun in the long run. Everyone has time for new
| features, but nobody wants to dedicate time to rewriting
| old ones that are an unholy mess of bad assumptions and
| poorly understood.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| My company recently issued an "Use AI in your workflow or
| else" mandate and it has absolutely destroyed my
| motivation to work
|
| Even though there are still private whispers of "just
| keep doing what you're doing no one is going to be fired
| for not using AI", just the existence of the top down
| mandate has made me want to give up and leave
|
| My fear is that this is every company right now, and I'm
| basically no longer a fit for this industry at all
|
| Edit: I'm a long way from retirement unfortunately so I'm
| really stuck. Not sure what my path forward is. Seems
| like a waste to turn away from my career that I have
| years of experience doing, but I struggle like crazy to
| use AI tools. I can't get into any kind of flow with
| them. I'm constantly frustrated by how aggressively they
| try to jump in front of my thought process. I feel like
| my job changed from "builder" to "reviewer" overnight and
| reviewing is one of the least enjoyable parts of the job
| for me
|
| I remember an anecdote about Ian McKellen crying on a
| green screen set when filming the Hobbit, because Talking
| to a tennis ball on a stick wasn't what he loved about
| acting
|
| I feel similarly with AI coding I think
| daxfohl wrote:
| The other side of me thinks that maybe the eventual
| landing point of all this is a merger of engineering and
| PM. A sizeable chunk of engineering work isn't really
| anything new. CRUD, jobs, events, caching,
| synchronization, optimizing for latency, cost, staleness,
| redundancy. Sometimes it amazes me that we're still
| building so many ad-hoc ways of doing the same things.
|
| Like, say there's a catalog of 1000 of the most common
| enterprise (or embedded, or UI, or whatever) design
| patterns, and AI is good at taking your existing system,
| your new requirements, identifying the best couple design
| patterns that fit, give you a chart with the various
| tradeoffs, and once you select one, are able to add that
| pattern to your existing system, with the details that
| match your requirements.
|
| Maybe that'd be cool? The system/AI would then be able to
| represent the full codebase as an integration of various
| patterns, and an engineer, or even a technical PM, could
| understand it without needing to dive into the codebase
| itself. And hopefully since everything is managed by a
| single AI, the patterns are fairly consistent across the
| entire system, and not an amalgamation of hundreds of
| different individuals' different opinions and ideals.
|
| Another nice thing would be that huge migrations could be
| done mostly atomically. Currently, things like, say,
| adding support in your enterprise for, say, dynamic
| authorization policies takes years to get every team to
| update their service's code to handle the new authz
| policy in their domain, and so the authz team has to
| support the old way and the new way, and a way to sync
| between them, roughly forever. With AI, maybe all this
| could just be done in a single shot, or over the course
| of a week, with automated deployments, backfill, testing,
| and cleanup of the old system. And so the authz team
| doesn't have to deal with all the "bugging other teams"
| or anything else, and the other teams also don't have to
| deal with getting bugged or trying to fit the migration
| into their schedules. To them it's an opaque thing that
| just happened, no different from a library version
| update.
|
| With that, there's fewer things in flight at any one
| time, so it allows engineers and PMs to focus on their
| one deliverable without worrying how it's affecting
| everyone else's schedules etc. Greater speed begets
| greater serializability begets better architecture begets
| greater speed.
|
| So, IDK, maybe the end game of AI will make the job more
| interesting rather than less. We'll see.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I just don't understand your company and the company OP
| interviewed for. This is like mandating everyone use
| syntax highlighting or autocomplete, or sit in special
| type of chair or use a standing desk, and making their
| use a condition for being hired. Why are companies so
| insistent that their developers "use AI somehow" in their
| workflows?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Shareholders are salivating at the prospect of doing
| either the same amount of work with fewer salaries or
| more work with the same salaries
|
| There is nothing a VC loves more than the idea of
| extracting more value from people without investing more
| into them
| daxfohl wrote:
| FOMO. They don't want to risk being the one company left
| behind because their engineers haven't learned to use AI
| as efficiently as others.
| ponector wrote:
| There are lots of ways to use AI coding tools.
|
| Cursor is great for fuzy search across the legacy
| project. Requests like "how you do X here" can help a lot
| while fixing old bug.
|
| Or adding a documents. Commit description generated based
| on diff. Or adding a javadoc to your methods.
|
| Whatever step in your workflow which consists of
| rewriting existing text but not creating anything new -
| use Cursor or similar AI tool.
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I haven't had this much fun programming in
| years. I can quickly iterate, focus on the creative parts and
| it really helps with procrastination.
| timr wrote:
| > My main issue with vibe coding etc is I simply don't enjoy
| it. Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that
| I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is
| just not fun. It doesn't give me any of the same kind of
| intellectual satisfaction that I get out of actually writing
| code.
|
| I am the opposite. After a few decades of writing code, it
| wasn't "fun" to write yet another file parser or hook widget A
| to API B -- which is >99% of coding today. I moved into product
| management because while I still enjoy _building_ things, it 's
| much more satisfying/challenging to focus on the higher-level
| issues of making a product that solves a need. My professional
| life became writing specs, and reviewing code. It's therefore
| actually kind of fun to work with AI, because I can think
| technically, but I don't have to do the tedious parts that make
| me want to descend into a coma.
|
| I could care less if I'm writing a spec for a robot, or I'm
| writing a spec for a junior front-end engineer. They're both
| going to screw up, and I'm going to have to spend time
| explaining the problem again and again...at least the robot
| never complains and _tries really hard_ to do exactly what I
| ask, instead of slacking off, doing something more
| intellectually appealing, getting mired in technical
| complexity, etc.
| kiitos wrote:
| > After a few decades of writing code, it wasn't "fun" to
| write yet another file parser or hook widget A to API B --
| which is >99% of coding today.
|
| If this is your experience of programming, then I feel for
| you, my dude, because that sucks. But it is definitely not my
| experience of programming. And so I absolutely reject your
| claim that this experience represents "99% of programming" --
| that stuff is rote and annoying and automate-able and all
| that, no argument, but it's not what any senior-level
| engineer worth their salt is spending any of their time on!
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| People who don't do 1)API connecting, 2)Web design using
| popular frameworks or 3) requirements wrangling with
| business analysts have jobs that will not be taken over by
| AI anytime soon. I think 99% of jobs is pushing it, but I
| definitely think the vast majority of IT jobs fit into the
| above categories. Another benchmark would be how much of
| your job is closer to research work.
| dlisboa wrote:
| You touched on the significant thing that separates most of
| the AI code discourse in the two extremes: some people just
| don't like programming and see it as a simple means to an
| end, while others love the process of actually crafting code.
|
| Similar to the differences between an art collector and a
| painter. One wants the ends, the other desires the means.
| morkalork wrote:
| I think I could be happy switching between the two modes.
| There's tasks that are completely repetative slop that I've
| fully offloaded to AI with great satisfaction. There's
| others I enjoy that I prefer to use AI for consultation
| only. Regardless, few people liked doing code review before
| with their peers and somehow we've increased one of the
| least fun parts of the job.
| timr wrote:
| That's not fair, and not what I am saying at all.
|
| I enjoy writing code. I just don't enjoy writing code _that
| I 've written a thousand times before_. It's like saying
| that Picasso should have enjoyed painting houses for a
| living. They're both painting, right?
|
| (to be painfully clear, I'm not comparing myself to
| Picasso; I'm extending on your metaphor.)
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| You would rather debug the low quality LLM code that you
| know you could write better, a thousand times?
| timr wrote:
| Well, I don't write bugs in _my_ code, of course, but let
| 's just say that you were the type of person who does:
| having a bot that writes code 100x faster than you, that
| also occasionally makes mistakes (but can also _fix_
| them!), is still a huge win.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > occasionally makes mistakes
|
| Well. Maybe we have to agree to disagree but I think it
| makes mistakes far more frequently than I do
|
| Even if it makes mistakes exactly as often as I do,
| making 100x as many mistakes in the same amount as time
| seems like it would be absolutely impossible to keep up
| with
| d0100 wrote:
| I love programming, I just don't like CRUDing, or
| API'ing...
|
| I also love programming behaviours and interactions, just
| not creating endless C# classes and looking at how to
| implement 3D math
|
| After a long day at the CRUD factory, being able to vibe
| code as a hobby is fun. Not super productive, but it's
| better than the alternative (scrolling reels or playing
| games)
| tptacek wrote:
| I love coding, do it for fun outside of my job, and find
| coding with an LLM very enjoyable.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've been experimenting with LLM coding for the past few
| months on some personal projects. I find it makes coding
| those projects more enjoyable since it eliminates much of
| the tedium that was causing me to delay the project in
| the first place.
| timr wrote:
| Exactly the same for me...now whenever I hit something
| like _" oh god, I want to change the purpose of this
| function/variable, but I need to go through 500 files,
| and see where it's used, then make local changes, then
| re-test everything..."_, I can just tell the bot to do
| it.
|
| I know a lot of folks would say that's what search &
| replace is for, but it's far easier to ask the bot to do
| it, and then check the work.
| cesarb wrote:
| > "oh god, I want to change the name of this
| function/variable, but I need to go through 500 files,
| and see where it's used, then make local changes, then
| re-test everything..."
|
| Forgive me for being dense, but isn't it just clicking
| the "rename" button on your IDE, and letting it propagate
| the change to all definitions and uses? This already
| existed and worked fine well before LLMs were invented.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, that particular example modern editors do just fine.
| Now imagine having that for almost any rote
| transformation you wanted regardless of complexity (so
| long as the change was rote and describable).
| timr wrote:
| Yeah, sorry...I re-read the comment and realized I wasn't
| being clear. It's bigger than just search/replace.
| Already updated what I wrote.
|
| The far more common situation is that I'm refactoring
| something, and I realize that I want to make some change
| to the semantics or signature of a method (say, the
| return value), and now I can't just use search w/o _also_
| validating the context of every change. That 's annoying,
| and today's bots do a great job of just handling it.
|
| Another one, I just did a second ago: "I think this
| method X is now redundant, but there's a minor difference
| between it, and method Y. Can I remove it?"
|
| Bot went out, did the obvious scan for all references to
| X, but then _evaluated each call context to see if I
| could use Y instead_.
|
| (But even in the case of search & replace, I've had my
| butt saved a few times by agent when it caught something
| I wasn't considering....)
| tptacek wrote:
| I really like working with LLMs but one thing I've
| noticed is that the obvious transformation of "extract
| this functionality into a helper function and then apply
| that throughout the codebase" is one I really actually
| enjoy doing myself; replacing 15 lines of boilerplate-y
| code in a couple dozen places with a single helper call
| is _really_ satisfying; it's like my ASMR.
| timr wrote:
| Hah, well, to each their own. That's exactly the kind of
| thing that makes me want to go outside and take a walk.
|
| Regardless of what your definition of horrible and boring
| happens to be, just being able to tell the bot to do a
| horrible boring thing and having it done with like a
| junior level intelligence is so experience enhancing that
| it makes coding more fun.
| tptacek wrote:
| I find elimination of inertia and preservation of
| momentum to be the biggest wins; it's just that my
| momentum isn't depleted by extracting something out into
| a helper.
|
| People should try this kind of coding a couple times just
| because it's an interesting exercise in figuring out what
| parts of coding are important to you.
| icedchai wrote:
| Same. After doing this for decades, so much programming work
| is tedious. Maybe 5% to 20% of the work is interesting. If I
| can get a good chunk of that other 80%+ built out quickly
| with a reasonable level of quality, then we're good.
| prmph wrote:
| After like the 20th time explaining the same (simple) problem
| to the AI that it is unable to fix, you just might change
| your mind [1]. At that point you just have to jump in and get
| dirty.
|
| Do this a few times and you start to realize it is kinda of
| worse than just being in the driver's seat in terms of the
| coding right from the start. For one thing, when you jump in,
| you are working with code that is probably architectured
| quite differently from the way you normally do, and you have
| no developed the deep mental model that is needed to work
| with the code effectively.
|
| Not to say the LLMs are not useful, especially in agent mode.
| But the temptation is always to trust and task them with more
| than they can handle. maybe we need an agent that limits the
| scope of what you can ask it to do, to keep you involved at
| the necessary level.
|
| People keep thinking we are at the level where we can forget
| about the nitty gritty of the code and rise up the
| abstraction level, when this is nothing close to the truth.
|
| [1] Source: me last week trying really hard to work like you
| are talking about with Claude Code.
| timr wrote:
| > After like the 20th time explaining the same (simple)
| problem to the AI that it is unable to fix, you just might
| change your mind [1]. At that point you just have to jump
| in and get dirty.
|
| You're assuming that I haven't. Yes, sometimes you have to
| do it yourself, and the people who are claiming that you
| can replace experienced engineers with these are wrong (at
| least for now, and for non-trivial problems).
|
| > Do this a few times and you start to realize it is kinda
| of worse than just being in the driver's seat in terms of
| the coding right from the start. For one thing, when you
| jump in, you are working with code that is probably
| architectured quite differently from the way you normally
| do, and you have no developed the deep mental model that is
| needed to work with the code effectively.
|
| Disagree. There's not a single piece of code I've written
| using these that I haven't carefully curated myself.
| Usually the result (after rounds of prompting) is smaller,
| significantly better, and closer to my original intended
| design than what I got out of the machine on first prompt.
|
| I still find them to be a significant net enhancement to my
| productivity. For me, it's very much like working with a
| tireless junior engineer who is available at all hours,
| willing to work through piles of thankless drudgery without
| complaint, and also codes about 100x faster than I do.
|
| But again, I know what I'm doing. For an inexperienced
| coder, I'm more inclined to agree with your comment. The
| first drafts that these things emit is often pretty bad.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| > and then have to try to review
|
| I think (at least by the original definition[0]) this is not
| vibe coding. You aren't supposed to be reviewing the code, just
| execute and pray.
|
| [0]: https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
| potatolicious wrote:
| Yeah, I will say now that I've played with the AI coding tools
| more, it seems like there are two distinct use cases:
|
| 1 - Using coding tools in a context/language/framework you're
| already familiar with.
|
| This one I have been having a lot of fun with. I am in a good
| position to review the AI-generated code, and also examine its
| implementation plan to see if it's reasonable. I am also able
| to decompose tasks in a way that the AI is better at handling
| vs. giving it vague instructions that it then does poorly on.
|
| I feel more in control, and it feels like the AI is stripping
| away drudgery. For example, for a side project I've been using
| Claude Code with an iOS app, a domain I've spent many years in.
| It's a treat - it's able to compose a lot of boilerplate and do
| light integrations that I can easily write myself, but find
| annoying.
|
| 2 - Using coding tools in a context/language/framework you
| don't actually know.
|
| I know next to nothing about web frontend frameworks, but for
| various side projects wanted to stand up some simple web
| frontends, and this is where AI code tools have been a
| frustration.
|
| I don't know what exactly I want from the AI, because I don't
| know these frameworks. I am poorly equipped to review the code
| that it writes. When it fails (and it fails a lot) I have
| trouble diagnosing the underlying issues and fixing it myself -
| so I have to re-prompt the LLM with symptoms, leading to
| frustrating loops that feel like two cave-dwellers trying to
| figure out a crashed spaceship.
|
| I've been able to stand up a lot of stuff that I otherwise
| would never have been able to, but I'm 99% sure the code is
| utter shit, but I also am not in a position to really quantify
| or understand the shit in any way.
|
| I suppose if I were properly "vibe coding" I shouldn't care
| about the fact that the AI produced a katamari ball of code
| held together by bubble gum. But I _do_ care.
|
| Anyway, for use case #1 I'm a big fan of these tools, but it's
| really not the "get out of learning your shit" card that it's
| sometimes hyped up to be.
| saratogacx wrote:
| For case 2, I've had a lot of luck starting with asking the
| LLM "I have experience in X, Y, and Z technologies, help me
| translate this project in those terms, list anything this
| code does that doesn't align with the typical use of the
| technologies they've chosen". This has given me a great
| "intro" to move me closer to being able to understand.
|
| Once I've done that and piked a few follow up questions, I
| feel much better in diving into the generated code.
| rowanseymour wrote:
| This was my experience until recently.. now I'm currently quite
| enjoying assigning small PRs to copilot and working through
| them via the GitHub PR interface. It's basically like managing
| a junior programmer but cheaper and faster. Yes that's not as
| much fun as writing code but there isn't time for me to write
| all the code myself.
| cloverich wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the "assign PR's" bit?
|
| I use Cursor / ChatGPT extensively and am ready to dip into
| more of an issue / PR flow but not sure what people are doing
| here exactly. Specifically for side projects, I tend to think
| through high level features, then break it down into sub-
| items much like a PM. But I can easily take it a step further
| and give each sub issue technical direction, e.g. "Allow font
| customization: Refactor tailwind font configuration to use
| CSS variables. Expose those CSS variables via settings
| module, and add a section to the Preferences UI to let the
| user pick fonts for Y categories via dropdown; default to X Y
| Z font for A B C types of text".
|
| Usually I spend a few minutes discussing w/ ChatGPT first,
| e.g. "What are some typical idioms for font configuration in
| a typical web / desktop application". Once I get that idea
| solidified I'd normally start coding, but could just as
| easily hand this part off for simple-ish stuff and start
| ironing out he next feature. In the time I'd usually have
| planned the next 1-2 months of side project work (which
| happens, say, in 90 minute increments 2x a week), the Agent
| could knock out maybe half of them. For a project i'm
| familiar with, I expect I can comfortably review and comment
| on a PR with much less mental energy than it would take to
| re-open my code editor for my side project, after an entire
| day of coding for work + caring for my kids. Personally I'm
| pretty excited about this.
| rowanseymour wrote:
| I have not had great experiences interacting directly with
| LLMs except when asking for a snippet of code that is
| generic and commonly done. Now with GitHub Copilot (you
| need a Pro Plus I think) I'm creating an issues, assigning
| to Copilot, and then having a back and forth on the PR with
| Copilot until it's right. Exactly as I would with a junior
| dev and honestly it's the first time I've felt like AI
| could make a noticeable difference to my productivity.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'm not your parent, but Claude at least has the ability to
| integrate with GitHub such that you can say "@claude please
| try to fix this bug" on an issue and it'll just go do it.
| gs17 wrote:
| > My main issue with vibe coding etc is I simply don't enjoy
| it.
|
| I _almost_ enjoy it. It 's kind of nice getting to feel like
| management for a second. But the moment it hits a bug it can't
| fix and you have to figure out its horrible mess of code any
| enjoyment is gone. It's really nice for "dumb" changes like
| renumbering things or very basic refactors.
| tptacek wrote:
| When the agent spins out, why don't you just take the wheel
| and land the feature yourself? That's what I do. I'm having
| trouble integrating these two skeptical positions of "LLMs
| suck all the joy out of actually typing code into an editor"
| and "LLMs are bad because they sometimes force you to type
| code into an editor".
| tobr wrote:
| I tried Cursor again recently. Starting with an empty folder,
| asking it to use very popular technologies that it surely must
| know a lot about (Typescript, Vite, Vue, and Tailwind). Should
| be a home run.
|
| It went south immediately. It was confused about the
| differences between Tailwind 3 and 4, leading to a broken
| setup. It wasn't able to diagnose the problem but just got more
| confused even with patient help from me in guiding it. Worse,
| it was unable to apply basic file diffs or deletes reliably. In
| trying to diagnose whether this is a known issue with Cursor,
| it decided to search for bug reports - great idea, except it
| tried to search _the codebase_ for it, which, I remind you,
| only contained code that it had written itself over the past
| half hour or so.
|
| What am I doing wrong? You read about people hyping up this
| technology - are they even using it?
|
| EDIT: I want to add that I did not go into this
| antagonistically. On the contrary, I was excited to have a use
| case that I thought must be a really good fit.
| windows2020 wrote:
| My recent experience has been similar.
|
| I'm seeing that the people hyping this up aren't programmers.
| They believe the reason they can't create software is they
| don't know the syntax. They whip up a clearly malfunctioning
| and incomplete app with these new tools and are amazed at
| what they're created. The deficiencies will sort themselves
| out soon, they believe. And then programmers won't be needed
| at all.
| norir wrote:
| Most people do not have the talent and/or discipline to
| become good programmers and resent those who do. This alone
| explains a lot of the current argument.
| gs17 wrote:
| > It was confused about the differences between Tailwind 3
| and 4
|
| I have the same issue with Svelte 4 vs 5. Adding some notes
| to the prompt to be used for that project helps sort of.
| tobr wrote:
| It didn't seem like it ever referred to documentation? So,
| obviously if it's only going to draw on its "instinctual"
| knowledge of Tailwind, it's more likely to fallback on a
| version that's been around for longer, leading to
| incompatibilities with the version that's actually
| installed. A human doing the same task would probably have
| the setup guide on the website at hand if they realized
| they were feeling confused.
| antifa wrote:
| It would be nice if you could download some minified-for-
| LLM doc file that gave the LLM the public interface of
| the lib(s) you were using.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| https://context7.com/jj-vcs/jj?tokens=55180 is supposed
| to be this, I have yet to try it though.
| varjag wrote:
| I had some success doing two front-end projects. One in 2023
| using Mixtral 7b local model and one just this month with
| Codex. I am an experienced programmer (35 years coding, 28
| professionally). I hate Web design and I never cared to learn
| JavaScript.
|
| The first project was a simple touch based control panel that
| communicates via REST/Websocket and runs a background visual
| effect to prevent the screen burn-in. It took a couple of
| days to complete. There were often simple coding errors but
| trivial enough to fix.
|
| The second is a 3D wireframe editor for distributed
| industrial equipment site installations. I started by just
| chatting with o3 and got the proverbial 80% within a day. It
| includes orbital controls, manipulation and highlighting of
| selected elements, property dialogs. Very soon it became too
| unwieldy for the laggard OpenAI chat UI so I switched to
| Codex to complete most of the remaining features.
|
| My way with it is mostly:
|
| - ask no fancy frameworks: my projects are plain JavaScript
| that I don't really know, makes no sense to pile on React and
| TypeScript atop of it that I am even less familiar with
|
| - explain what I want by defining data structures I believe
| are the best fit for internal representation
|
| - change and test one thing at a time, implement a test for
| it
|
| - split modules/refactor when a subsystem gets over a few
| hundred LOC, so that the reasoning can remain largely
| localized and hierarchical
|
| - make o3 write an llm-friendly general design document and
| description of each module. Codex uses it to check the
| assumptions.
|
| As mentioned elsewhere the code is mediocre at best and it
| feels a bit like when I've seen a C compiler output vs my
| manually written assembly back in the day. It works tho, and
| it doesn't look to be terribly inefficient.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Tailwind 4 has been causing Claude a lot of problems for me,
| especially when upgrading projects.
|
| I managed to get it to do one just now, but it struggled
| pretty hard, and still introduced some mistakes I had to fix.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Just trying to help explain the issues you've been hitting,
| not to negate your experience.
|
| First, you might've been using a model like Sonnet 3.7, whose
| knowledge cutoff doesn't include Tailwind 4.0. The model
| should know a lot about the tech stack you mentioned, but it
| might not know the latest major revisions if they were very
| recent. If that is the case (you used an older model), then
| you should have better luck with a model like Sonnet 4 / Opus
| 4 (or by providing the relevant updated docs in the chat).
|
| Second, Cursor is arguably not the top tier hotness anymore.
| Since it's flat-rate subscription based, the default mode of
| it will have to be pretty thrifty with the tokens it uses.
| I've heard (I don't use Cursor) in Cursor Max Mode[0]
| improves on that (where you pay based on tokens used), but
| I'd recommend just using something like Claude Code[1],
| ideally with its VS Code or IntelliJ integration.
|
| But in general, new major versions of sdk's or libraries will
| cause you a worse experience. Stable software fares much
| better.
|
| Overall, I find AI extremely useful, but it's hard to know
| which tools and even ways of using these tools are the
| current state-of-the-art without being immersed into the
| ecosystem. And those are changing pretty frequently. There's
| also a ton of over-the-top overhyped marketing of course.
|
| [0]: https://docs.cursor.com/context/max-mode
|
| [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| > What am I doing wrong?
|
| Wrong tool..
| 9d wrote:
| Considering _the actual Vatican_ literally linked AI to _the
| apocalypse_ , and did so in _the most official capacity_ [1], I
| don't think avoiding AI has to be ludditism.
|
| [1] Antiqua et Nova p. 105, cf. Rev. 13:15
| 9d wrote:
| Full link and relevant quote:
|
| https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu.
| ..
|
| > Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional
| idols for, unlike idols that "have mouths but do not speak;
| eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear" (Ps. 115:5-6),
| AI can "speak," or at least gives the illusion of doing so
| (cf. Rev. 13:15).
|
| It quotes Rev. 13:15 which says (RSVCE):
|
| > and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast
| so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to
| cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to
| be slain.
| ultimafan wrote:
| That was a very interesting read, thanks for linking it!
|
| I think the unfortunate reality of human innovation is that
| too many people consider that technological progress is
| always good for progresses sake. Too many people create new
| tools, tech, etc. without really stopping to take a moment
| and think or have a discussion on what the absolute worst
| case applications of their creation will be and how
| difficult it'd be to curtail that kind of behavior. Instead
| any potential (before creation) and actual (when it's
| released) human suffering is hand waved away as growing
| pains necessary for science to progress. Like those
| websites that search for people's online profiles based on
| image inputs sold by their creators as being used to find
| long lost friends or relatives when everyone really knows
| it's going to be swamped by people using it to doxx or
| stalk their victims, or AI photo generation models for
| "personal use" being used to deep fake nudes to embarrass
| and put down others. In many such cases the creators sleep
| easy at night with the justification that it's not THEIR
| fault people are misusing their platforms, they provided a
| neutral tool and are absolved of all responsibility. All
| the while they are making money or raking in clout fed by
| the real pain of real people.
|
| If everyone took the time to weigh the impact of what
| they're doing even half as diligently as that above article
| (doesn't even have to be from a religious perspective) the
| world would be a lot brighter for it.
| 9d wrote:
| > Too many people create new tools, tech, etc. without
| really stopping to take a moment and think or have a
| discussion on what the absolute worst case applications
| of their creation will be
|
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not
| they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
| -Jeffrey L. Goldblum when ILM showed him an early
| screening of Jurassic Park.
|
| > In many such cases the creators sleep easy at night
| with the justification that it's not THEIR fault people
| are misusing their platforms, they provided a neutral
| tool and are absolved of all responsibility.
|
| The age old question of gun control.
| ultimafan wrote:
| Guns (and really most forms of progress in warfare and
| violence) undoubtedly fall under a similar conundrum.
|
| Funny to note that at least one inventor who contributed
| greatly to modern warfare (the creator of the gatling
| gun) did seem to reflect on his future impact but figured
| it'd go in the opposite direction- that a weapon that
| could replace a hundred soldiers with one would make wars
| smaller and less devastating, not more!
| 9d wrote:
| I emphasize that it's _the Vatican_ because they are the most
| theologically careful of all. This isn 't some church with a
| superstitious pastor who jumps to conclusions about the
| rapture at a dime drop. This is the Church which is hesitant
| to say _literally anything_ about the book of Revelation _at
| all_ , which is run by tired men who just want to keep the
| status quo so they can hopefully hit retirement without any
| trouble.
| 9d wrote:
| > It doesn't give me any of the same kind of intellectual
| satisfaction that I get out of actually writing code.
|
| Writing code is a really fun creative process:
|
| 1. Conceive an exciting and useful idea
|
| 2. Comprehend the idea fully from its top to its bottom
|
| 3. Translate the idea into specific instructions utilizing
| known mechanics
|
| 4. Find the beautiful middleground between instruction and
| abstraction
|
| 5. Write lots and lots of code!
|
| 6. Find where your conception was flawed and fix it as
| necessary.
|
| 7. Repeat steps 2-6 until the thing works just as you dreamed
| or you give up.
|
| It's maybe the most fun and exciting mixture of art and
| technology ever.
| 9d wrote:
| I forgot to say the second part:
|
| Using AI is the same as code-review or being a PM:
|
| 1. Have an ideal abstraction
|
| 2. Reverse engineer an actual abstraction from code
|
| 3. Compare the two and see if they match up
|
| 4. If they don't, ask the author to change or fix it until it
| does
|
| 5. Repeat steps 2-4 until it does
|
| This is incredibly _not_ fun, because it 's _not_ a creative
| process.
|
| You're essentially just an accountant or calculator at this
| point.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _that I don 't entirely understand_
|
| That's the bigger issue in the whole LLM hype that irks me. The
| tacit assumption that _actually understanding things_ is now
| obsolete, as long as the LLM delivers results. And if it doesn
| 't we can always do yet another finetuning or try yet another
| magic prompt incantation to try and get it back on track. And
| that this is somehow progress.
|
| It feels like going back to pre-enlightenment times and
| collecting half-rationalized magic spells instead of having a
| solid theoretical framework that let's you reason about your
| systems.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well... I'm torn here.
|
| There is a magic in understanding.
|
| There is a different magic in being able to use something
| that you don't understand. Libraries are an instance of this.
| (For that matter, so is driving a car.)
|
| The problem with LLMs is that you don't understand, and the
| stuff that it gives you that you don't understand isn't
| solid. (Yeah, not all libraries are solid, either. LLMs give
| you stuff that is less solid than that.) So LLMs give you a
| taste of the magic, but not much of the substance.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > Luddite
|
| The luddites were not against progress or the technology
| itself. They were opposed to how it was used, for whose
| benefit, and for whose loss [0].
|
| The AI-Luddite position isn't ain't AI, it's (among other
| things anti mass copyright theft from creators to train
| something with the explicit goal of putting them out of a job,
| without compensation. All while producing an objectively
| inferior product but passing it off as a higher quality one.
|
| [0]: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-
| merchant/bloo...
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. I can't help but think that proponents of
| LLMs are not seriously considering the impact it will have on our
| ability to communicate with each other, or to reason on our own
| accord without the assistance of an LLM.
|
| It confounds me how these people would trust the same companies
| who fueled the decay of social discourse via the internet with
| the creation of AI models which aim to encroach on every aspect
| of our lives.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Some of us realize this technology was inevitable and are more
| focused on figuring out how society evolves from here instead
| of complaining and trying to legislate away math and prevent
| honest people from using these tools while criminals freely
| make use of them.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >Some of us realize this technology was inevitable
|
| How was any of this inevitable? Point me to which law of
| physics demanded we reach this state of the universe. These
| companies actively choose to train these models, and by
| framing their development as "inevitable" you are helping
| absolve them of any of the negative shit they have/will
| cause.
|
| >figuring out how society evolves from here instead of
| complaining and trying to legislate away math
|
| Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of
| nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy of
| the commons?
|
| >prevent honest people from using these tools while criminals
| freely make use of them
|
| What is your argument here? Should we suggest that everyone
| learn how to money launder to even the playing field against
| criminals?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > Point me to which law of physics demanded we reach this
| state of the universe
|
| _Gestures vaguely around at everything_
|
| Intelligence is intelligence, and we are beginning to
| really get down to the fundamentals of self-organization
| and how order naturally emerges from chaos.
|
| > Could you not apply this exact logic to the creation of
| nuclear weaponry--perhaps the greatest example of tragedy
| of the commons?
|
| Yes, I can. Access to information is one thing (must be
| carefully handled, but information wants to be free, and
| there should be no law determining what one person can say
| to another, barring NDAs and government classification of
| national secrets (which doesn't include math and physics)
| but we absolutely have international treaties to limit
| nuclear proliferation, and we also have countries who do
| not participate in these treaties, or violate them, which
| illustrates my point that criminals will do whatever they
| want.
|
| > Should we suggest that everyone learn how to money
| launder to even the playing field against criminals?
|
| I have no interest in entertaining your straw mans. You're
| intelligent enough to understand context.
| collingreen wrote:
| If only there were more nuances and options between those two
| extremes! Oh well, back to the anti math legislation pits I
| guess.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| There are many nuances to this argument, but I am not
| trying to write a novel in a hacker news comment. Certain
| broad strokes absolutely apply, and when you get down to
| brass tacks it's about respecting personal freedom.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| This is a really negative and insulting comment towards
| people who are struggling with a very real, very emotional
| response to AI, and super-concerned about both the real and
| potential negatives that the rabid boosters won't even
| acknowledge. You don't have to "play the game" to make an
| impact, it's valid to try and challenge the math and change
| the rules too.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > This is a really negative and insulting comment towards
| people who are struggling with a very real, very emotional
| response to AI
|
| I disagree that my comment was negative at all. Many of
| those same people (not all) spend a lot of time making
| negative comments towards my work in AI, and tossing around
| authoritarian ideas of restriction in domains they
| understand like art and literature, while failing to also
| properly engage with the real issues such as intelligent
| mass surveillance and increased access to harmful
| information. They would sooner take these new freedom
| weapons out of the hands of the people while companies like
| Palintir and NSO Group continue to use them at scale.
|
| > super-concerned about both the real and potential
| negatives that the rabid boosters won't even acknowledge
|
| So am I, the difference is I am having a rational and not
| an emotional response, and I have spent a lot of time
| deeply understanding machine learning for the last decade
| in order to be able to have a measured, informed response.
|
| > You don't have to "play the game" to make an impact, it's
| valid to try and challenge the math and change the rules
| too
|
| I firmly believe you cannot ethically outlaw math, and this
| is part of why I have trouble empathizing with those who
| feel otherwise. People are so quick to support
| authoritarian power structures the moment it supposedly
| benefits them or their world view. Meanwhile, the informed
| are doing what they can to prevent this stuff from being
| used to surveil and classify humanity, and to find a
| balance that allows humans to coexist with artificial
| intelligence.
|
| We are not falling prey to reactionary politics and
| disinformation, and we are not willing to needlessly expand
| government overreach and legislate away critical individual
| freedom in order to achieve our goals.
| spencerflem wrote:
| its not outlawing math, its outlawing what companies can
| sell as a product.
|
| that's like saying that you can't outlaw selling bombs in
| a store because its "chemistry".
|
| Or even for usage- can we not outlaw shooting someone
| with a gun because it is "projectile physics"?
|
| Im glad you do oppose Palantir - we're on the same side
| and I support what you're doing! - but I also think
| you're leaving the most effective solution on the table
| by ignoring regulatory options.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| We can definitely regulate people's and especially
| organizations' actions. But a lot of the emotional
| responses to AI that I encounter are having a different
| conversation, and many just blindly hate "AI" without
| even understanding what it is, and want to infringe on
| the freedoms of individuals to use this groundbreaking
| technology. They're like the antivaxxers of the digital
| world, and I encountered many of the same people whenever
| I worked in the decentralized web space, using the same
| vague arguments about electricity usage and such.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I feel like its less antivaxx, and more the anti nuclear
| style movement. The antivaxxers are Just Wrong.
|
| But for nuclear - there's certainly good uses for nuclear
| power but its scary! and powers evil world ending bombs!
| and if it goes wrong people end up secretly mutated and
| irradiated and its all so awful and we should shut it
| down now !!
|
| And to be honest I don't know my own feelings on nuclear
| power or "good" AI either, but I do get it when people
| want to Shut it All Down Right Now !! Even if there is a
| legitimate case for being genuinely useful to real
| people.
| bgwalter wrote:
| DDT was a very successful insecticide that was outlawed due
| to its adverse effects on humans.
| absurdo wrote:
| It didn't have a trillion dollar marketing campaign behind
| it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I shouldn't have to tell you that producing, distributing
| and using a toxic chemical that negatively affects the
| earth and its biosphere are much, much different than
| allowing people to train and use models for personal use.
| This is a massive strawman and doesn't even deserve as much
| engagement as I've given it here.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Have they come up with anything? So far I haven't seen any
| solutions presented that are both politically viable and
| don't result in people being even more under the thumb of
| late stage capitalism.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This is one of the most complicated issues humanity has
| ever dealt with. Don't hold your breath, it's gonna be a
| while. Society at large doesn't even have a healthy
| relationship with the internet and mobile phones, these
| advancements in artificial intelligence came at both a good
| and awful time.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| For me it threatens to be like a spell check. Back 20 years ago
| when I was still in school and still hand writing for many
| assignments, my spelling was very good.
|
| Nowadays it's been a long time since my brain totally checked
| out on spelling. Everything I write in every case has spell
| check, so why waste neurons on spelling?
|
| I fear the same will happen on a much broader level with AI.
| kiitos wrote:
| What? Who is spending any brain cycles on spelling? When you
| write a word, you just write the word, the spelling is...
| intrinsic? automatic? certainly not something that you have
| to, like, actively think about?
| username223 wrote:
| ... until spellcheck gets "AI," and starts turning
| correctly-spelled words into different words that it thinks
| are more likely. (Don't get me started on "its" vs. "it's,"
| which autocorrect frequently randomly incorrects.)
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I both agree and disagree, I don't regularly think about
| spelling, but there are certain words I _know_ my brain
| always gets wrong, so when I run into one of those, things
| come crashing to a halt for a second while I try to
| remember if I 'm still spelling them wrong or if I've
| finally trained myself to do it correctly.
| throwawaybob420 wrote:
| It's not angst to see the people who run the companies we work
| for "encourage" us to use Claude to write our code knowing full
| well it's their attempt to see if they really can fire us without
| a hit in "productivity".
|
| It's not angst to see students throughout the entire spectrum end
| up using ChatGPT to write their papers, summarize 3 paragraphs,
| and use it to bypass any learning.
|
| It's not angst to see people ask a question to an LLM and talk
| what it says as gospel.
|
| It's not angst to understand the environmental impact of all this
| stupid fucking shit.
|
| It's not angst to see the danger in generative AI not only just
| creating slop, but further blurring the lines of real and fake.
|
| It's not angst to see the vast amount of non-consensual porn
| being generated of people without their knowledge.
|
| Feel like I'm going fucking crazy here, just day after day of
| people bowing down at the altar and legit not giving a single
| fuck about what happens after rofl
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Hey for what it's worth, you aren't alone
|
| This is a really wild and unpredictable time, and it's ok to
| see the problems looming and feel unsettled at how easily
| people are ignoring the potential oncoming train
|
| I would suggest taking some time for yourself to distance
| yourself from this as much as you can for your own mental
| health
|
| Ride this out as best you can until things settle down a bit.
| You aren't alone
| timr wrote:
| > On the money side? I don't see how the math and the capex work.
| And all the time, I think about the carbon that's poisoning the
| planet my children have to live on.
|
| The "math and capex" are inextricably intertwined with "the
| carbon". If these tools have some value, then we can finally
| invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the
| underlying problem, and we'll all be better off. If the tools
| have no net value at a market-clearing price for energy (as
| purported), then it won't be a problem.
|
| I mean, maybe the productive way to say this is that we should
| more formally link the environmental cost of energy production to
| the market cost of energy. But as phrased (and I _suspect_ ,
| implied), it sounds like "people who use LLMs are just
| _profligate consumers_ who don 't care about the environment the
| way that _I_ do, " and that any societal advancement that
| consumes energy (as most do) is subject to this kind of
| generalized luddite criticism.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > If these tools have some value, then we can finally invest in
| forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the underlying
| problem
|
| I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the market"
| will somehow do something to address climate change? By what
| mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that?
|
| The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant amounts
| of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a global increase
| in ecological destruction and carbon emissions. [
| https://www.greenmemag.com/science-technology/googles-contro...
| ]
|
| That's not exactly a new thing, just making the problem worse.
| What is now different with LLMs as opposed to for example
| crypto mining?
| timr wrote:
| > I'm confused what you are saying, do you suggest "the
| market" will somehow do something to address climate change?
| By what mechanism? And what do LLMs have to do with that?
|
| No, I'm suggesting that the market will take care of the
| cost/benefit equation, and that the externalities are part of
| the costs. We could always do a better job of making sure
| that costs capture these externalities, but that's not the
| same thing as what the author seems to be saying.
|
| (Also I'm saying that we need to get on with nuclear already,
| but that's a secondary point.)
|
| > The problem with LLMs is that they require exorbitant
| amounts of energy and fresh water to operate, driving a
| global increase in ecological destruction and carbon
| emissions.
|
| They no more "require" this, than operating an electric car
| "requires" the same thing. While there may be environmental
| extremists who advocate for a wholesale elimination of cars,
| most sane people would be _happy_ for the balance between
| cost and benfit represented by electric cars. _Ergo,_ a
| similar balance must exist for LLMs.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > I'm suggesting that the market will take care of the
| cost/benefit equation, and that the externalities are part
| of the costs.
|
| You believe that climate change is an externality that the
| market is capable of factoring in the cost/benefit
| equation. Then I don't understand why you disagreed with
| the statement "the market will somehow do something to
| address climate change". There is a more fundamental
| disagreement here.
|
| You said:
|
| > If these tools [LLMs/ai] have some value, then we can
| finally invest in forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will
| solve the underlying problem
|
| And again, why? By what mechanism? Let's say Microsoft 10x
| it's profit through AI, then it will "finally invest in
| forms of energy (i.e. nuclear) that will solve the
| underlying problem". But why? Why would it? Why do you say
| "we" if we talk about the market.
| schmichael wrote:
| > I really don't think there's a coherent pro-genAI case to be
| made in the education context.
|
| I think it's simple: the reign of the essay is over. Educators
| must find a new way to judge a student's understanding.
|
| Presentations, artwork, in class writing, media, discussions and
| debates, skits, even good old fashioned quizzes all still work
| fine for getting students to demonstrate understanding.
|
| As the son of two teachers I remember my parents spending hours
| in the evenings grading essays. While writing is a critical
| skill, and essays contain a good bit of information, I'm not sure
| education wasn't overindexing on them already. They're easy to
| assign and grade, but there's so much toil on both ends unrelated
| to the core subject matter.
| thadt wrote:
| I posit that of the various uses of student writing, the most
| important isn't communication or even assessment, but
| synthesis. Writing forces you to grapple with a subject in a
| way that clarifies your thinking. It's easy to think you
| understand something until you have to explain or apply it.
|
| Skipping that entirely, or using a LLM to do most of it for
| you, skips something rather important.
| schmichael wrote:
| > Writing forces you
|
| I agree entirely with you except for the word "forces."
| Writing _can_ cause synthesis. It should. It should be graded
| to encourage that...
|
| ...but all of that is a whole lot of work for everyone
| involved: student and teacher alike.
|
| And that kind of synthesis is in no way unique to essays! All
| of the other mediums I mention can make synthesis more
| readily apparent then paragraphs of (often very low quality)
| prose. A clever meme lampooning the "mere merchant" status of
| the Medici family could demonstrate a level of understanding
| that would take paragraphs of prose to convey.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'd also say that the era of graded homework in general is
| over, and using "proof of toil" assignments as a meaningful
| measurement of a student's progress/mastery.
| bgwalter wrote:
| I notice a couple of things in the pro-AI [1] posts: All start
| writing in a lengthy style like Steve Yegge in his peak. All are
| written by ex-programmers who are on the management/founder side
| now. All of them cite programmer friends who claim that AI is
| useful.
|
| It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in
| any way. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what
| their manager wants them to say? Or they no longer care? Or they
| work in "AI" companies?
|
| [1] He does mention return on investment doubts and waste of
| energy, but claims that the agent nonsense works (without public
| evidence).
| bwfan123 wrote:
| There is a large number of wannabe hands-on coders who have
| moved on to become management - and they all either have coder-
| envy or coder-hatred.
|
| To them, gen-ai is a savior - Earlier, they felt out of the
| game - now, they feel like they can compete. Earlier they were
| wannabe coders. Now they are legit.
|
| But, this will last only until they accept a chunk of code put
| out by co-pilot and then spend the next 2 days wrangling with
| it. At that point, it dawns on them what these tools can
| actually do.
| orangecat wrote:
| I'm a programmer, not a manager. I don't have a blog. AI is
| useful.
|
| _It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI"
| in any way._
|
| How do you know? Given the strong opposition that lots of
| people have I wouldn't expect its use to be actively
| publicized. But yes, I would expect that plenty of open source
| contributors are at the very least using Cursor-style tab
| completion or having AIs generate boilerplate code.
|
| _Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what
| their manager wants them to say?_
|
| "Everyone who disagrees with me is paid to lie" is a really
| tiresome refrain.
| rjsw wrote:
| At least in my main open source project, use of AI is
| prohibited due to potentially tainting the codebase with stuff
| derived from other GPL projects.
| zurfer wrote:
| Using AI in real projects is not super simple but if you lean
| into it, it can accelerate things.
|
| Anecdotally check this out
| https://github.com/antiwork/gumroad/graphs/contributors
|
| Devin is an AI agent
| cesarb wrote:
| > It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI"
| in any way.
|
| Using genAI is particularly hard on open source projects due to
| worries about licensing: if your project is under license X,
| you don't want to risk including any code with a license
| incompatible with X, or even under a license compatible with X
| but without the correct attribution.
|
| It's still not settled whether genAI can really "launder" the
| license of the code in its training set, or whether legal
| theories like "subconscious copying" would apply. In the later
| case, using genAI could be very risky.
| thadt wrote:
| On Learning:
|
| My wife, a high school teacher, remarked to me the other day "you
| know, it's sad that my new students aren't going to be able to do
| any of the fun online exercises that I used to run."
|
| She's all but entirely removed computers from her daily class
| workflow. Almost to a student, "research" has become "type it
| into Google and write down whatever the AI spits out at the top
| of the page" - no matter how much she admonishes them not to do
| it. We don't even need to address what genAI does to their
| writing assignments. She says this is prevalent across the board,
| both in middle and high school. If educators don't adapt rapidly,
| this is going to hit us hard and fast.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| > Go programming language is especially well-suited to LLM-driven
| automation. It's small, has a large standard library, and a
| culture that has strong shared idioms for doing almost anything
|
| +1 to this. thank you `go fmt` for uniform code. (even culture of
| uniform test style!). thank you culture of minimal dependencies.
| and of course go standard library and static/runtime tooling.
| thank you simple code that is easy to write for humans..
|
| and as it turns out for AIs too.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have found LLMs (mainly using Claude) are, indeed, excellent
| at spitting out Go boilerplate.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| I found that bit slightly ironic because it always seems to
| produce slightly cringy Go code for me that might get the job
| done but skips over some of the usual design philosophies like
| use of interfaces, channels, and context. But for many parts,
| yeah, I've been very satisfied with Go code gen.
| greybox wrote:
| This is probably the best opinion piece I've read so far on GenAI
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| Yep, basically sums up all of my thoughts about ai perfectly,
| especially the environmental impact.
| greybox wrote:
| > horrifying survey of genAI's impact on secondary and tertiary
| education.
|
| I agree with this. It's probably terrible for structured
| education for our children.
|
| The one and only one caveat: Self-Driven language learning
|
| The one and only actual use (outside of generating funny memes)
| I've had from any LLM so far, is language learning. That I would
| pay for. Not $30/pcm mind you . . . but something. I ask the
| model to break down a target language sentence for me, explaining
| each and every grammar point, and it does so very well. sometimes
| even going to explain the cultural relevance of certain phrases.
| This is great.
|
| I've not found any other use for it yet though. As a game engine
| programmer (C++) The code I write now a days quite deliberate and
| relatively little compared to a web-developer (I used to be one,
| I'm not pooping on web devs). so if we're talking about the
| time/cost of having me as a developer work on the game engine,
| I'm not saving any time or money by first asking Claude to type
| what I was going to type anyway. And it's not advanced enough yet
| to hold the context of our entire codebases spanning multiple
| components.
|
| Edit, Migaku [https://migaku.com/] is a great language learning
| application that uses this
|
| As OP, I'm not sure it's worth all that CO2 we're pumping into
| our atmosphere.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| AI progress has also made high quality language translation a
| lot cheaper. When I started https://nuenki.app last year, the
| options were exorbitantly priced DeepL for decent quality low
| latency translation or Sonnet for slightly cheaper, much
| slower, but higher quality translation.
|
| Now, just a year later, DeepL is beaten by open models served
| by https://groq.com for most languages, and Claude 4 / GPT-4.1
| / my hybrid LLM translator (https://nuenki.app/translator)
| produce practically perfect translations.
|
| LLMs are also better at critiquing translations than producing
| them, but pre-thinking doesn't help at all, which is just
| fascinating. Anyway, it's a really cool topic that I'll happily
| talk at length about! They've made so much possible. There's a
| blog on the website, if anyone's curious.
| Havoc wrote:
| > I think about the carbon that's poisoning the planet my
| children have to live on.
|
| Tbh I think we're going to need a big breakthrough to fix that
| anyway. Like fusion etc.
|
| A bit less proompting isnt going to save the day
|
| That's not to say one shouldn't be mindful. Just think it's no
| longer enough
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think the concerns about climate and CO2 emissions are valid
| but not a show stopper. The big picture here is that we are
| living through two amazing revolutions at the same time:
|
| 1) The emergence of LLMs and AIs that have turned the Turing test
| from science fiction into basically irrelevant. AI is improving
| at an absolutely mind boggling rate.
|
| 2) The transition from fossil fuel powered world to a world that
| will be net zero in few decades. The pace in the last five years
| has been amazing. China is basically rolling out amounts of solar
| and batteries that were unthinkable in even the most optimistic
| predictions a few years ago. The rest of the world is struggling
| to keep up and that's causing some issues with some countries
| running backward (mainly the US).
|
| It's true that a lot of AI is powered by mix of old coal plants,
| cheap Texan gas and a few other things that aren't sustainable
| (or cheap if you consider the cleanup cost). However, I live in
| the EU and we just got cut off from cheap Russian gas, are now
| running on imported expensive gas (e.g. from Texas) and have some
| pet peeves about data sovereignty that are causing companies like
| OpenAI, Meta, and Google to have to use local data centers for
| serving their European users. Which means that stuff is being
| powered with electricity that is locally supplied with a mix of
| old dirty legacy infrastructure and new more or less clean
| infrastructure. That mix is shifting rapidly towards renewables.
|
| The thing is that old dirty infrastructure has been on a downward
| trajectory for years. There are not a lot of new gas plants being
| built (LNG is not cheap) and coal plants are going extinct in a
| hurry because they are dirty and expensive to operate. And the
| few gas plants that are still being built are in stand by mode
| much of the time and losing money. Because renewables are
| cheaper. Power is expensive here but relatively clean. The way to
| get prices down is not to import more LNG and burn it but to do
| the opposite.
|
| What I like about things that increase demand for electricity is
| that they generate investments in providing solutions to clean
| energy and actually accelerate. The big picture here is that the
| transition to net zero is going to vastly increase demands on
| power grids. If you add up everything needed for industry,
| transport, domestic and industrial heating, aviation, etc. it's a
| lot. But the payoffs are also huge. People think of this as cost.
| That's short term thinking. The big picture here is long term.
| And the payoff is net zero and cheap power making energy
| intensive things both affordable and sustainable. We're not there
| yet but we're on a path towards that.
|
| For AI that means, yes, we need a lot of TW of power and some of
| the uses of AI seem frivolous and not that useful. But the big
| picture is that this is changing a lot of things as well. I see
| power needs as a challenge rather than a problem or reason to sit
| on our hands. It would be nice if that power was cheap. It so
| happens that currently the cheapest way to generate power happens
| to be through renewables. I don't think dirty power is long term
| smart, profitable, or necessary. And we could definitely do more
| to speed up its demise. But at the same time, this increased
| pressure on our grids is driving the very changes we need to make
| that happen.
| swyx wrote:
| > Just to be clear, I note an absence of concern for cost and
| carbon in these conversations. Which is unacceptable. But let's
| move on.
|
| hold on, its very simple. here's a oneliner even degrowthers
| would love: extra humans cost a lot more in money and carbon than
| it cost to have an llm spin up and down to do this work that
| would otherwise not get done.
| spacephysics wrote:
| I disagree with genAI not having an education use case.
|
| I think a useful LLM for education would be one with heavy
| guardrails, which is "forced" to provide step-by-step back and
| forth tutoring instead of just giving out answers.
|
| Right now hallucinations would be problematic, but assuming its
| in a domain like Math (and maybe combined with something like
| Wolfram to verify outputs), i could see this theoretical tool
| being very helpful to learning mathematics, or even other
| sciences.
|
| For more open-ended subjects like english, history, etc then it
| may be less useful.
|
| Perhaps only as a demonstration, maybe an LLM is prompted to
| pretend to be a peasant from Medieval Europe, and with text to
| voice we could have students as a group interact with and ask
| questions of the LLM. In this case, maybe the LLM is only trained
| on historical text from specific time periods, with settings to
| be more deterministic and reduce hallucinations
| prmph wrote:
| I finally tried Claude Code for most of last week on a toy
| Typescript project of moderate complexity. It's supposedly the
| pinnacle of agentic coding assistants, and I tend to agree,
| finding it far ahead of Copilot et al. Seeing it working was like
| a bit of magic, and it was very addictive. It successfully
| distracted me from my main projects that I code mostly by hand.
|
| That said, and it's kind of hard to express this well, not only
| is the actual productivity still far from what the hype suggests,
| but I regard agentic coding to be like a bad addictive drug right
| now. The promise of magic from the agent is always just seems
| around the corner: just one more prompt to finally fix the rough
| edges of what it has spat out, just one more helpful hint to put
| it on the right path/approach, just one more reminder for it to
| actually apply everything in CLAUDE.md each time...
|
| Believe it or not, I spent several days with it, crafting very
| clear and specific prompts, prodding with all kinds of hints,
| even supplying it with legacy code that mostly works (although
| written in CSharp), and at the end it had written a lot of that
| almost works, except a lot of simple things just wouldn't work,
| not matter how much time I spent with it.
|
| In the end, after a couple of hours of writing the code myself, I
| had a high a quality type design and basic logic, and a clear
| path to implementing the all the basic features.
|
| So, I don't know, for now even Claude seems mostly useful only as
| a sporadic helper within small contexts (drafting specific
| functions, code review of moderate amounts of code, relatively
| simple refactoring, etc). I believe knowing when AI would help vs
| slow you down is becoming key.
|
| For this tech to improve, maybe a genetic/evolutionary approach
| would be needed. Given a task, the agent should launch several
| models to work on the problem, with each model also launching
| several randomized approaches to working on the problem. Then the
| agent should evaluate all the responses and pick the "best" one
| to return.
| keybored wrote:
| > My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and
| cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and
| whether it's Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the
| channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts
| and business-news stories. So there's lots of AI angst out there,
| but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because
| it focuses on cost, working backward from there. As for the genAI
| tech itself, I guess I'm a moderate; there is a there there, it's
| not all slop.
|
| Let's see.
|
| > But, while I have a lot of sympathy for the contras and am
| sickened by some of the promoters, at the moment I'm mostly in
| tune with Thomas Ptacek's My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts.
| It's long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it
| hard to disagree with.
|
| So the Moderate is a Believer. But it's offset by being concerned
| about The Climate and The Education and The Investments.
|
| You can try to write a self-aware/moment-aware intro. It's the
| same fodder for the front page.
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