[HN Gopher] AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
___________________________________________________________________
AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
Author : benbeingbin
Score : 485 points
Date : 2026-02-19 19:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kasava.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kasava.dev)
| delichon wrote:
| If we find an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent
| in the economy without a human responsible for it, we should kill
| it. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see an AI terminator
| profession emerge. We could call them blade runners.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| It happened not too long ago!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
| Windchaser wrote:
| Was it ever verified that this was an independent AI?
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| It was not. In the article, first few paragraphs.
| orphea wrote:
| > an AI that is truly operating as an independent agent in the
| economy without a human responsible for it
|
| Sounds like the "customer support" in any large company (think
| Google, for example), to be honest.
| m_ke wrote:
| It's the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace
| you.
|
| People need to understand that we have the technology to train
| models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing
| that's missing is the data.
|
| If you can record a human doing anything on a computer, we'll
| soon have a way to automate it
| xnx wrote:
| Exactly. If there's any opportunity around AI it goes to those
| who have big troves of custom data (Google Workspace, Office
| 365, Adobe, Salesforce, etc.) or consultants adding data
| capture/surveillance of workers (especially high paid ones like
| engineers, doctors, lawyers).
| cesarvarela wrote:
| LLMs have a large quantity of chess data and still can't play
| for shit.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Hm.. but do they need it.. at this point, we do have custom
| tools that beat humans. In a sense, all LLM need is a way to
| connect to that tool ( and the same is true is for counting
| and many other aspects ).
| Windchaser wrote:
| Yeah, but you know that manually telling the LLM to operate
| other custom tools is not going to be a long-term solution.
| And if an LLM could design, create, and operate a separate
| model, and then return/translate its results to you, that
| would be huge, but it also seems far away.
|
| But I'm ignorant here. Can anyone with a better background
| of SOTA ML tell me if this is being pursued, and if so, how
| far away it is? (And if not, what are the arguments against
| it, or what other approaches might deliver similar
| capacities?)
| yunyu wrote:
| This has been happening for the past year on verifiable
| problems (did the change you made in your codebase work
| end-to-end, does this mathematical expression validate,
| did I win this chess match, etc...). The bulk of data, RL
| environment, and inference spend right now is on coding
| agents (or broadly speaking, tool use agents that can
| make their own tools).
|
| Recent advances in mathematical/physics research have all
| been with coding agents making their own "tools" by
| writing programs: https://openai.com/index/new-result-
| theoretical-physics/
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Not anymore. This benchmark is for LLM chess ability:
| https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-
| Benchmark?tab=r.... LLMs are graded according to FIDE rules
| so e.g. two illegal moves in a game leads to an immediate
| loss.
|
| This benchmark doesn't have the latest models from the last
| two months, but Gemini 3 (with no tools) is already at 1750 -
| 1800 FIDE, which is approximately probably around 1900 - 2000
| USCF (about USCF expert level). This is enough to beat almost
| everyone at your local chess club.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why do we care about this? Chess AI have long been solved
| problems and LLMs are just an overly brute forced approach.
| They will never become very efficient chess players.
|
| The correct solution is to have a conventional chess AI as
| a tool and use the LLM as a front end for humanized output.
| A software engineer who proposes just doing it all via raw
| LLM should be fired.
| rodiger wrote:
| It's a proxy for generalized reasoning.
|
| The point isn't that LLMs are the best AI architecture
| for chess.
| runarberg wrote:
| > It's a proxy for generalized reasoning.
|
| And so for I am only convinced that they have only
| succeeded on appearing to have generalized reasoning.
| That is, when an LLM plays chess they are performing
| Searle's Chinese room thought experiment while claiming
| to pass the Turing test
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why? Beating chess is more about searching a probability
| space, not reasoning.
|
| Reasoning would be more like the car wash question.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| It's not entirely clear how LLMs that can play chess do
| so, but it is clearly very different from the way other
| machines do so. The construct a board, they can estimate
| a players skill and adjust accordingly, and unlike other
| machines and similarly to humans, they are sensitive to
| how a certain position came to be when predicting the
| next move.
|
| Regardless, there's plenty of reasoning in chess.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It's very clear how, chess moves and positions are vector
| encoded into their training data, when they are prompted
| with a certain board state, they respond with the most
| probable response to that. There is no reason.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| Actual Researchers can't give you a complete answer but
| you can. Whatever you say.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| Yeah, but 1800 FIDE players don't make illegal moves, and
| Gemini does.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| That benchmark methodology isn't great, but regardless,
| LLMs can be trained to play Chess with a 99.8% legal move
| rate.
| recursive wrote:
| That doesn't exactly sound like strong chess play.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| It's enough to reliably beat amateur (e.g. maia-1900)
| chess engines.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| 1800 FIDE players do make illegal moves. I believe they
| make about one to two orders of magnitude less illegal
| moves than Gemini 3 does here. IIRC the usual statistic
| for expert chess play is about 0.02% of expert chess
| games have an illegal move (I can look that up later if
| there's interest to be sure), but that is only the ones
| that made it into the final game notation (and weren't
| e.g. corrected at the board by an opponent or arbiter).
| So that should be a lower bound (hence why it could be up
| to one order lower, although I suspect two orders is
| still probably closer to the truth).
|
| Whether or not we'll see LLMs continue to get a lower
| error rate to make up for those orders of magnitude
| remains to be seen (I could see it go either way in the
| next two years based on the current rate of progress).
| cesarvarela wrote:
| A player at that level making an illegal move is either
| tired, distracted, drunk, etc. An LLM makes it because it
| does not really "understand" the rules of chess.
| overgard wrote:
| I think LLM's are just fundamentally the wrong AI
| technique for games like this. You don't want a
| prediction for the next move, you want the best move
| given knowledge of how things would play out 18 moves
| ahead if both players played the optimal move. Outside of
| an academic interest/curiosity, there isn't really a
| reason to use LLMs for chess other than thinking LLMs
| will turn into AGI (I doubt it)
| runarberg wrote:
| Wait, I may be missing something here. These benchmarks are
| gathered by having models play each other, and the second
| illegal move forfeits the game. This seems like a flawed
| method as the models who are more prone to illegal moves
| are going to bump the ratings of the models who are less
| likely.
|
| Additionally, how do we know the model isn't benchmaxxed to
| eliminate illegal moves.
|
| For example, here is the list of games by Gemini-3-pro-
| preview. In 44 games it preformed 3 illegal moves (if I
| counted correctly) but won 5 because opponent forfeits due
| to illegal moves.
|
| https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/games?page=5&model=gemin
| i...
|
| I suspect the ratings here may be significantly inflated
| due to a flaw in the methodology.
|
| EDIT: I want to suggest a better methodology here (I am not
| gonna do it; I really really really don't care about this
| technology). Have the LLMs play rated engines and rated
| humans, the first illegal move forfeits the game (same
| rules apply to humans).
| emp17344 wrote:
| That's a devastating benchmark design flaw. Sick of these
| bullshit benchmarks designed solely to hype AI. AI
| boosters turn around and use them as ammo, despite not
| understanding them.
| runarberg wrote:
| I like this game between grok-4.1-fast and maia-1100
| (engine, not LLM).
|
| https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/37d0d260-d63b-4e4
| 1-9...
|
| This exact game has been played 60 thousand times on
| lichess. The peace sacrifice Grok performed on move 6 has
| been played 5 million times on lichess. Every single move
| Grok made is also the top played move on lichess.
|
| This reminds me of Stefan Zweig's _The Royal Game_ where
| the protagonist survived Nazi torture by memorizing every
| game in a chess book his torturers dropped (excellent
| book btw. and I am aware I just committed Godwin's law
| here; also aware of the irony here). The protagonist
| became "good" at chess, simply by memorizing a lot of
| games.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| The LLMs that can play chess, i.e not make an illegal
| move every game do not play it simply by memorized plays.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| Relax. Anyone who's genuinely interested in the question
| will see with a few searches that LLMs can play chess
| fine, although the post-trained models mostly seem to be
| regressed. Problem is people are more interested in
| validating their own assumptions than anything else.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15498
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17186
|
| https://github.com/adamkarvonen/chess_gpt_eval
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > That's a devastating benchmark design flaw
|
| I think parent simply missed until their later reply that
| the benchmark includes rated engines.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| The LLMs do play rated engines (maia and eubos). They
| provide the baselines. Gemini e.g. consistently beats the
| different maia versions.
|
| The rest is taken care of by elo. That is they then play
| each other as well, but it is not really possible for
| Gemini to have a higher elo than maia with such a small
| sample size (and such weak other LLMs).
|
| Elo doesn't let you inflate your score by playing low
| ranked opponents if there are known baselines (rated
| engines) because the rated engines will promptly crush
| your elo.
|
| You could add humans into the mix, the benchmark just
| gets expensive.
| runarberg wrote:
| I did indeed miss something. I learned after posting (but
| before my EDIT) that there are anchor engines that they
| play.
|
| However these benchmarks still have flaws. The two
| illegal moves = forfeit is an odd rule which the authors
| of the benchmarks (which in this case was Claude Code)
| added[1] for mysterious reasons. In competitive play if
| you play an illegal move you forfeit the game.
|
| Second (and this is a minor one) Maia 1900 is currently
| rated at 1774 on lichess[2], but is 1816 on the
| leaderboard, to the author's credit they do admit this in
| their methodology section.
|
| Third, and this is a curiosity, gemini-3-pro-preview
| seems to have played the same game twice against Maia
| 1900[3][4] and in both cases Maia 1900 blundered (quite
| suspiciously might I add) mate in one when in a winning
| position with Qa3?? Another curiosity about this game.
| Gemini consistently played the top 2 moves on lichess.
| Until 16. ...O-O! (which has never been played on
| lichess) Gemini had played 14 most popular lichess moves,
| and 2 second most popular. That said I'm not gonna rule
| out that the fact that this game is listed twice might
| stem from an innocent data entry error.
|
| And finally, apart from Gemini (and Survival bot for some
| reason?), LLMs seem unable to pass Maia-1100 (rated 1635
| on lichess). The only anchor bot before that is random
| bot. And predictably LLMs cluster on both sides of it,
| meaning they play as well as random (apart from the
| illegal moves). This smells like benchmaxxing from
| Gemini. I would guess that the entire lichess repertoire
| features prominently in Gemini's training data, and the
| model has memorized it really well. And is able to play
| extremely well if it only has to play 5-6 novel moves
| (especially when their opponent blunders checkmate in 1).
|
| 1: https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-
| Benchmark/commi...
|
| 2: https://lichess.org/@/maia9
|
| 3: https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/6574c5d6-c85a-
| 4cb3-b...
|
| 4: https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/4af82d60-8ef4-
| 47d8-8...
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > The two illegal moves = forfeit is an odd rule which
| the authors of the benchmarks (which in this case was
| Claude Code) added[1] for mysterious reasons. In
| competitive play if you play an illegal move you forfeit
| the game.
|
| This is not true. This is clearly spelled out in FIDE
| rules and is upheld at tournaments. First illegal move is
| a warning and reset. Second illegal move is forfeit. See
| here https://rcc.fide.com/article7/
|
| I doubt GDM is benchmarkmaxxing on chess. Gemini is a
| weird model that acts very differently from other LLMs so
| it doesn't surprise me that it has a different capability
| profile.
| runarberg wrote:
| >> _7.5.5 After the action taken under Article 7.5.1,
| 7.5.2, 7.5.3 or 7.5.4 for the first completed illegal
| move by a player, the arbiter shall give two minutes
| extra time to his /her opponent; for the second completed
| illegal move by the same player the arbiter shall declare
| the game lost by this player. However, the game is drawn
| if the position is such that the opponent cannot
| checkmate the player's king by any possible series of
| legal moves._
|
| I stand corrected.
|
| I've never actually played competitive chess, I've just
| heard this from people who do. And I thought I remembered
| once in the Icelandic championships where a player
| touched one piece but moved the other, and subsequently
| made to forfeit the game.
| runarberg wrote:
| Replying in a split thread to clearly separate where I
| was wrong.
|
| If Gemini is so good at chess because of a non-LLM
| feature of the model, then it is kind of disingenuous to
| rate it as an LLM and claim that LLMs are approaching
| 2000 ELO. But the fact it still plays illegal moves
| sometimes, is biased towards popular moves, etc. makes me
| think that chess is still handled by an LLM, and makes me
| suspect benchmaxxing.
|
| But even if no foul play, and Gemini is truly a capable
| chess player with nothing but an LLM underneath it, then
| all we can conclude is that Gemini can play chess well,
| and we cannot generalize to other LLMs who play about the
| level of random bot. My fourth point above was my
| strongest point. There are only 4 anchor engines, one
| beats all LLMs, second beats all except Gemini, the third
| beats all LLMs except Gemini and Survival bot (what is
| Survival bot even doing there?) and the forth is random
| bot.
| overgard wrote:
| They have literally every chess game in existence to train
| on, and they can't do better than 1800?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Why do you think they won't continue to improve?
| overgard wrote:
| Because of how LLM's work. I don't know exactly how
| they're using it for chess, but here's a guess. If you
| consider the chess game a "conversation" between two
| opponents, the moves written out would be the context
| window. So you're asking the LLM, "given these last 30
| moves, what's the most likely next move?". Ie, you're
| giving it a string like "1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bb5 a6,
| 4..?".
|
| That's basically what you're doing with LLMs in any
| context "Here's a set of tokens, what's the most likely
| continuation?". The problem is, that's the wrong question
| for a chess move. If you're going with "most likely
| continuation", that will work great for openings and
| well-studied move sequences (there are a lot of well
| studied move sequences!), however, once the game becomes
| "a brand new game", as chess streamers like to say when
| there's no longer a game in the database with that set of
| moves, then "what's the most likely continuation from
| this position?" is not the right question.
|
| Non-LLM AI's have obviously solved chess, so, it doesn't
| really matter -- I think Chess shows how LLM's lack of a
| world model as Gary Marcus would say is a problem.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Are you saying an LLM can't produce a chess engine that will
| easily beat you?
| emp17344 wrote:
| Plagiarizing Stockfish doesn't make me good at chess. Same
| principle applies.
| menaerus wrote:
| Did you already forget about the AlphaZero?
| polotics wrote:
| How much practice have you got on software development with
| agentic assistance. Which rough edges, surprising failure
| modes, unexpected strengths and weaknesses, have you already
| identified?
|
| How much do you wish someone else had done your favorite SOTA
| LLM's RLHF?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Sure, but do you want abundance of software, or scarcity?
|
| The price of having "star trek computers" is that people who
| work with computers have to adapt to the changes. Seems worth
| it?
| worldsayshi wrote:
| My only objection here is that technology wont save us unless
| we also have a voice in how it is used. I don't think
| personal adaptation is enough for that. We need to adapt our
| ways to engage with power.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Both abundance and scarcity can be bad. If you can't imagine
| a world where abundance of software is a very bad thing, I'd
| suggest you have a limited imagination?
| krackers wrote:
| Abundance of services before abundance of physical resources
| seems like the worst of both worlds.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Aggressively expanding solar would make electrical power a
| solved problem, and other previously non-abatable sources
| of kinetic energy are innovating to use this instead of
| fossil fuels
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's not worth it because we don't have the Star Trek culture
| to go with it.
|
| Given current political and business leadership across the
| world, we are headed to a dystopian hellscape and AI is
| speeding up the journey exponentially.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Data clearly isn't the only issue. LLMs have been trained on
| orders of magnitude more data than any person has ever seen.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I think we're past the "if only we had more training data" myth
| now. There are pretty obviously far more fundamental issues
| with LLMs than that.
| m_ke wrote:
| i've been working in this field for a very long time, i
| promise you, if you can collect a dataset of a task you can
| train a model to repeat it.
|
| the models do an amazing job interpolating and i actually
| think the lack of extrapolation is a feature that will allow
| us to have amazing tools and not as much risk of
| uncontrollable "AGI".
|
| look at seedance 2.0, if a transformer can fit that, it can
| fit anything with enough data
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a strange economical morbid dependency. AI companies
| promises incredible things but AI agents cannot produce it
| themselves, they need to eat you slowly first.
| gtowey wrote:
| Perfect analogy for capitalism.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| > the new underpaid employee that you're training to replace
| you.
|
| and who is also compiling a detailed log of your every action
| (and inaction) into a searchable data store -- which will
| certainly never, NEVER be used against you
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "The AI handles the scale. The human interprets the meaning."_
|
| Claude is that you? Why haven't you called me?
| ares623 wrote:
| But the meaning has been scaled massively. So the human still
| kinda needs to handle the scale.
| xnx wrote:
| An electric bicycle for the mind.
| ares623 wrote:
| I prefer mind vibe-rator.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| An electric chair for the mind?
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Maybe more of a mobility scooter for the mind.
| xnx wrote:
| Indeed that may be more apt.
|
| I like the ebike analogy because [on many ebikes] you can
| press the button to go or pedal to amplify your output.
| oxag3n wrote:
| Owners intent is more like electric chair (for SWEs), but some
| people are trying to use it as office chair.
| blibble wrote:
| an exoskeleten made of cheese
| bGl2YW5j wrote:
| I like the analogy and will ponder it more. But it didn't take
| long before the article started spruiking Kasava's amazing
| solution to the problem they just presented.
| ge96 wrote:
| It's funny developing AI stuff eg. RAG tools and being against AI
| at the same time, not drinking the kool aid I mean.
|
| But it's fun, I say "Henceforth you shall be known as Jaundice"
| and it's like "Alright my lord, I am now referred to as Jaundice"
| functionmouse wrote:
| blogger who fancies themselves an ai vibe code guru with 12 arms
| and a 3rd eye yet can't make a homepage that's not totally broken
|
| How typical!
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Exoskeletons sound cool but somebody please put an LLM into a
| spider tank.
| lukev wrote:
| Frankly I'm tired of metaphor-based attempts to explain LLMs.
|
| Stochastic Parrots. Interns. Junior Devs. Thought partners.
| Bicycles for the mind. Spicy autocomplete. A blurry jpeg of the
| web. Calculators but for words. Copilot. The term "artificial
| intelligence" itself.
|
| These may correspond to a greater or lesser degree with what LLMs
| are capable of, but if we stick to metaphors as our primary tool
| for reasoning about these machines, we're hamstringing ourselves
| and making it impossible to reason about the frontier of
| capabilities, or resolve disagreements about them.
|
| A understanding-without-metaphors isn't easy -- it requires a
| grasp of math, computer science, linguistics and philosophy.
|
| But if we're going to move forward instead of just finding
| slightly more useful tropes, we _have_ to do it. Or at least to
| try.
| gf263 wrote:
| "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child
| will never see that bird again."
| cmsp12 wrote:
| Well since their capabilities change over time maybe it would
| be useful to assign it an age based on what a human can do at
| that age. Right now it could be like a 13 year old
| xlerb wrote:
| Humans don't have an internal notion of "fact" or "truth." They
| generate statistically plausible text.
|
| Reliability comes from scaffolding: retrieval, tools, validation
| layers. Without that, fluency can masquerade as authority.
|
| The interesting question isn't whether they're coworkers or
| exoskeletons. It's whether we're mistaking rhetoric for
| epistemology.
| kiba wrote:
| A much more useful tool is a technology that check for our
| blind spots and bugs.
|
| For example fact checking a news article and making sure what's
| get reported line up with base reality.
|
| I once fact check a virology lecture and found out that the
| professor confused two brothers as one individual.
|
| I am sure about the professor having a super solid grasp of how
| viruses work, but errors like these probably creeps in all the
| time.
| whyenot wrote:
| > LLMs aren't built around truth as a first-class primitive.
|
| neither are humans
|
| > They optimize for next-token probability and human approval,
| not factual verification.
|
| while there are outliers, most humans also tend to tell people
| what they want to hear and to fit in.
|
| > factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by
| architecture.
|
| like humans; as far as we know, there is no "factuality" gene,
| and we lie to ourselves, to others, in politics, scientific
| papers, to our partners, etc.
|
| > If we're going to treat them as coworkers or exoskeletons, we
| should be clear about that distinction.
|
| I don't see the distinction. Humans exhibit many of the same
| behaviours.
| 13415 wrote:
| Strangely, the GP replaced the ChatGPT-generated text you're
| commenting on by an even worse and more misleading ChatGPT-
| generated one. Perhaps in order to make a point.
| recursive wrote:
| If an employee repeatedly makes factually incorrect
| statements, we will (or could) hold them accountable. That
| seems to be one difference.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's a ground truth to human cognition in that we have to
| feed ourselves and survive. We have to interact with others,
| reap the results of those interactions, and adjust for the
| next time. This requires validation layers. If you don't see
| them, it's because they're so intrinsic to you that you can't
| see them.
|
| You're just indulging in sort of idle cynical judgement of
| people. To lie well even takes careful truthful evaluation of
| the possible effects of that lie and the likelihood and
| consequences of being caught. If you yourself claim to have
| observed a lie, and can verify that it was a lie, then you
| understand a truth; you're confounding truthfulness with
| _honesty._
|
| So that's the (obvious) distinction. A distributed algorithm
| that predicts likely strings of words doesn't do any of that,
| and doesn't have any concerns or consequences. It doesn't
| exist at all (even if calculation is existence - maybe we're
| all reductively just calculators, right?) _after_ your query
| has run. You have to save a context and feed it back into an
| algorithm that hasn 't changed an iota from when you ran it
| the last time. There's no capacity to evaluate _anything._
|
| You'll know we're getting closer to the fantasy abstract AI
| of your imagination when a system gets more out of the second
| time it trains on the same book than it did the first time.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Ethical realists would disagree with you.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Humans don't have an internal notion of "fact" or "truth."
| They generate statistically plausible text.
|
| This doesn't jive with reality at all. Language is a relatively
| recent invention, yet somehow Homo sapiens were able to survive
| in the world and even use tools before the appearance of
| language. You're saying they did this without an internal
| notion of "fact" or "truth"?
|
| I hate the trend of downplaying human capabilities to make the
| wild promises of AI more plausible.
| dwheeler wrote:
| I prefer the term "assistant". It can do some tasks, but today's
| AI often needs human guidance for good results.
| yifanl wrote:
| AI is not an exoskeleton, it's a pretzel: It only tastes good if
| you douse it in lye.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| it's a dry scone
| hintymad wrote:
| Or software engineers are not coachmen while AI is diesel engine
| to horses. Instead, software engineers are mistrels -- they
| disappear if all they do is moving knowledge from one place to
| another.
| oxag3n wrote:
| > We're thinking about AI wrong.
|
| And this write up is not an exception.
|
| Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs
| openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh
| interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there's 90% less
| demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a
| spectrum."
|
| So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in
| near future (6-12 months according to Amodei).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that
| all these developers building the tools are going to be the
| first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me
| again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job
| and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there
| is too much wind in our cardboard box."
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| I have a feeling they internally say "not me, I won't be
| replaced" and just keep moving...
| oxag3n wrote:
| Or they get FY money and fatFIRE.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Still risky if you have no labor value anymore.
| moron4hire wrote:
| "Well son, we made a lot of shareholder value."
| overgard wrote:
| Couldn't agree more, isn't that the bizarre thing? "We have
| this great intellectually challenging job where we as workers
| have leverage. How can we completely ruin that while also
| screwing up every other white collar profession"
| entrox wrote:
| Why is it bizarre? It is inevitable. After all, AI has not
| ruined creative professions, it merely disrupted and
| transformed them. And yes, I fully understand my whole
| comment here being snarky, but please bear with me.
|
| Let's rewind 4 years to this HN article titled "The AI Art
| Apocalypse": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133
| and read some of the comments.
|
| > Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge
| impact on a lot of lives--otherwise it is not progress. By
| definition it will impact many, by displacing those who
| were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster.
| The trouble is when people hold back progress just to
| prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the
| impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the
| cost of progress.
|
| Now it's the software engineers turn to not hold back
| progress.
|
| Or this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541693
|
| > [...] At the same time, a part of me feels art has no
| place being motivated by money anyway. Perhaps this change
| will restore the balance. Artists will need to get real
| jobs again like the rest of us and fund their art as a side
| project.
|
| Replace "Artists" with "Coders" and imagine a plumber
| writing that comment.
|
| Maybe this one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856326
|
| > [...] Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid
| 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able
| to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read
| basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll
| be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement
| job than before. And all those artists who devoted their
| lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal
| adjustment.
|
| Again, replace "Artists" with coders and fill in the
| replacement.
|
| So, please get in line and adapt. And stop clinging to your
| "great intellectually challenging job" because you are
| holding back progress. It can't be that challenging if it
| can be handled by a machine anyway.
| tovej wrote:
| The premise of those comments, just like the premise in
| this thread, is ridiculous and fantastical.
|
| The only way generative AI has changed the creative arts
| is that it's made it easier to produce low quality slop.
|
| I would not call that a true transformation. I'd call
| that saving costs at the expense of quality.
|
| The same is true of software. The difference is, unlike
| art, quality in software has very clear safety and
| security implications.
|
| This gen AI hype is just the crypto hype all over again
| but with a sci-fi twist in the narrative. It's a worse
| form of work just like crypto was a worse form of money.
| entrox wrote:
| I do not disagree, in fact I'm feeling more and more
| Butlerian with every passing day. However, it is
| undeniable that a transformation is taking place -- just
| not necessarily to the better.
| topocite wrote:
| I just don't understand this line of thinking.
|
| Gen AI is the opposite of crypto. The use is immediate,
| obvious and needs no explanation or philosophizing.
|
| You are basically showing your hand that you have zero
| intellectual curiosity or you are delusional in your own
| ability if you have never learned anything from gen AI.
| tovej wrote:
| I play with generative AI quite often. Mostly for shits
| and giggles. It's fun to try to make it hallucinate in
| the dumbest way possible. Or to make up context.
|
| E.g. try to make any image generating model take an
| existing photo of a humanoid and change it so the
| character does a backflip.
|
| It's also interesting to generate images in a long loop,
| because it usually reveals interesting patterns in the
| training data.
|
| Outside these distractions I've never had generative AI
| be useful. And I'm currently working in AI research.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I still can't get over how bad the coca cola AI generated
| Xmas advert was. That someone approved it for release too
| boggles my mind.
|
| And, bizarrely, I've really not bought any since. It's
| diminished my desire for the brand.
| overgard wrote:
| > It is inevitable.
|
| Is it though? I agree the technology evolving is
| inevitable, but, the race/rush to throw as much money at
| scaling and marketing as possible before these things are
| profitable and before society is ready is not inevitable
| at all. It feels extremely forced. And the way it's being
| shoved into every product to juice usage numbers seems to
| agree with me that it's all premature and rushed and most
| people don't really want it. The bubble is essentially
| from investing way more money in datacenters and GPU's
| than they can even possibly pay for or build, and there's
| no evidence there's even a market for using that
| capacity!
|
| It's funny you bring up artists, because I used to work
| in game development and I've worked with a lot of
| artists, and they almost universally HATE this stuff.
| They're not like "oh thank you Mr. Altman", they're more
| like "if we catch you using AI we'll shun you." And it's
| not just producers, a lot of gamers are calling out games
| that are made using AI, so the customers are mad too.
|
| You keep talking about "progress", but "progress" towards
| what exactly? So far these things aren't making anything
| new or advancing civilization, they're remixing stuff we
| already did well before, but sloppily. I'm not saying
| they don't have a place -- they definitely do, they can
| be useful. My argument is against the bizarre hype
| machine and what sometimes seems like sock puppets on
| social media. If the marketting was just "hey, we have
| this neat AI, come use it" I think there'd be a lot less
| backlash then people saying "Get in line and adapt"
|
| > And stop clinging to your "great intellectually
| challenging job" because you are holding back progress.
|
| Man, I really wish I had the power you think I have.
| Also, I use these tools daily, I'm deeply familiar with
| them, I'm not holding back anyone's progress, not even my
| own. That doesn't mean I think they're beyond criticism
| or that the companies behind them are acting responsibly,
| or that every product is great. I plan to be part of the
| future, but I'm not just going to pretend like I think
| every part of it is brilliant.
|
| > It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a
| machine anyway.
|
| This will be really funny when it comes for your job.
| arcxi wrote:
| Is it the first time when workers directly work on their own
| replacement? If so, software developer may go down in history
| as the dumbest profession ever.
| rXwubXUGAm wrote:
| I'm assuming they all have enough equity that if they
| actually managed to build an AI capable of replacing
| themselves they'll be financially set for the rest of their
| lives.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I don't think anyone serious believes this. Replacing
| developers with a less costly alternative is obviously a very
| market bullish dream, it has existed since as long as I've
| worked in the field. First it was supposed to be UML generated
| code by "architects", then it was supposed to be developers
| from developing countries, then no-code frameworks, etc.
|
| AI will be a tool, no more no less. Most likely a good one, but
| there will still need to be people driving it, guiding it,
| fixing for it, etc.
|
| All these discourses from CEO are just that, stock market
| pumping, because tech is the most profitable sector, and
| software engineers are costly, so having investors dream about
| scale + less costs is good for the stock price.
| oxag3n wrote:
| Ah, don't take me wrong - I don't believe it's possible for
| LLMs to replace 90% or any number of SWEs with existing
| technology.
|
| All I'm saying is - why to think what AI is (exoskeleton, co-
| worker, new life form), when its owners intent is to create
| SWE replacement?
|
| If your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his shed
| from a pile of smoke detectors, you don't say "think about
| this as a science experiment" because it's impossible, just
| call police/NRC because of intent and actions.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| > If your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his
| shed from a pile of smoke detectors, you don't say "think
| about this as a science experiment" because it's
| impossible, just call police/NRC because of intent and
| actions.
|
| Only if you're a snitch loser
| user3939382 wrote:
| If you gave the LLM your carefully written UML maybe its
| output would be better lol. That's what we're missing, a
| mashup of the hype cycle tools.
| overgard wrote:
| The funny thing is I think these things would work much better
| if they WEREN'T so insistent on the agentic thing. Like, I find
| in-IDE AI tools a lot more precise and I usually move just as
| fast as a TUI with a lot less rework. But Claude is CONSTANTLY
| pushing me to try to "one shot" a big feature while asking me
| for as little context as possible. I'd much rather it work with
| me as opposed to just wandering off and writing a thousand
| lines. It's obviously designed for anthropic's best interests
| rather than mine.
| joquarky wrote:
| Tell it to ask clarifying questions.
| overgard wrote:
| I do. But, there's a lot of annoying things about it being
| a TUI. I can't select a block of text in my editor and ask
| it to do something with it. It doesn't know what I'm
| looking at. Giving it context feels imprecise because I'm
| writing out filenames by hand instead of referencing them
| with the tools. A lot of other small things that I find are
| better in an IDE
| dasil003 wrote:
| I sort of agree the random pontification and bad analogies
| aren't super useful, but I'm not sure why you would believe the
| intent of the AI CEOs has more bearing on outcomes than, you
| know, actual utility over time. I mean those guys are so far
| out over their skis in terms of investor expectations, it's the
| last opinion I would take seriously in terms of best-effort
| predictions.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Where is this "90% less demand for SWEs" going to come from?
| Are we going to run out software to write?
|
| Historically when SWEs became more efficient then we just
| started making more complicated software (and SWE demand
| actually increased).
| elevatortrim wrote:
| That happens in times of bullish markets and growing
| economies. Then we want a lot of SWEs.
|
| In times of uncertainty and things going south, that changes
| to we need as little SWEs as possible, hence the current
| narrative, everyone is looking to cut costs.
|
| Had GPT 3 emerged 10-20 years ago, the narrative would be
| "you can now do 100x more thanks to AI".
| anyonecancode wrote:
| If the goal is to reduce the need for SWE, you don't need AI
| for that. I suspect I'm not alone in observing how companies
| are often very inefficient, so that devs end up spending a lot
| of time on projects of questionable value--something that seems
| to happen more often the larger the organization. I recall at
| one job my manager insisted I delegate building a react app for
| an internal tool to a team of contractors rather than letting
| me focus for two weeks and knock it out myself.
|
| It's always the people management stuff that's the hard part,
| but AI isn't going to solve that. I don't know what my previous
| manager's deal was, but AI wouldn't fix it.
| filipeisho wrote:
| By reading the title, I already know you did not try OpenClaw. AI
| employees are here.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Looking into OpenClaw, I really do want to believe all the
| hype. However, it's frustrating that I can find very few,
| concrete examples of people showcasing their work with it.
|
| Can you highlight what you've managed to do with it?
| tokenless wrote:
| That ol' question. Reminds me of new cryptocurrency
| opportunities of 2019. "Few understand this" as they say.
| esafak wrote:
| What are your digital 'employees' doing? Did they replace any
| humans or was there nobody before?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Closer to a really capable intern. Lots of potential for good and
| bad; needs to be watched closely.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I've been playing with qwen3-coder recently and that intern is
| definitely not getting hired, despite the rave reviews
| elsewhere.
| icedchai wrote:
| Have you tried Claude Code with Opus or Sonnet 4.5? I've
| played around with a ton of open models and they just don't
| compare in terms of quality.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Honestly I'm not very keen on a SAAS company deciding what
| code I'm allowed to write, or charging me to write it.
| icedchai wrote:
| I get it. I still experiment with local AI as a hobby,
| but the quality just isn't there.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I like this. This is an accurate state of AI at this very moment
| for me. The LLM is (just) a tool which is making me "amplified"
| for coding and certain tasks.
|
| I will worry about developers being completely replaced when I
| see something resembling it. Enough people worry about that (or
| say it to amp stock prices) -- and they like to tell everyone
| about this future too. I just don't see it.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Amplified means more work done by fewer people. It doesn't need
| to replace a single entire functional human being to do things
| like kill the demand for labor in dev, which in turn, will kill
| salaries.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I would disagree. Amplified meens me and you get more s**
| done.
|
| Unless there a limited amount of software we need to produce
| per year globally to keep everyone happy, then nobody wants
| more -- and we happen to be at that point right NOW this
| second.
|
| I think not. We can make more (in less time) and people will
| get more. This is the mental "glass half full" approach I
| think. Why not take this mental route instead? We don't know
| the future anyway.
| kiba wrote:
| Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more
| work not less.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Jevon's Paradox is an important observation but I don't
| think it's an immutable law of the universe,
| topocite wrote:
| It is a 19th century economic observation around the use
| of coal.
|
| It is like saying the PDF is going to be good for
| librarian jobs because people will read more. It is
| stupid. It completely breaks down because of
| substitution.
|
| Farming is the most obvious comparison to me in this.
| Yes, there will be more food than ever before, the farmer
| that survives will be better off than before by a lot but
| to believe the automation of farming tasks by machines
| leads to more farm jobs is completely absurd.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Hm. More of what? Functionality, security, performance?
|
| Current software is often buggy because the pressure to
| ship is just too high. If AI can fix some loose threads
| within, the overall quality grows.
|
| Personally, I would welcome a massive deployment of AI to
| root out various zero-days from widespread libraries.
|
| But we may instead get a larger quantity of even more buggy
| software.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| In fact, there isn't infinite demand for software.
| Especially not for _all kinds_ of software.
|
| And if corporate wealth means people get paid more, why are
| companies that are making more money than ever laying off
| so many people? Wouldn't they just be happy to use them to
| meet the inexhaustible demand for software?
| jimbokun wrote:
| I do wonder though if we have about enough (or too much)
| software.
|
| I hear people complaining about software being forced on
| them to do things they did just fine without software
| before, than people complaining about software they want
| that doesn't exist.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yeah I think being annoyed by software is far more
| prevalent than wishing for more software. That said, I
| think there is still a lot of room for software growth as
| long as it's solving real problems and doesn't get in
| people's way. What I'm not sure about is what will the
| net effect of AI be overall when the dust settles.
|
| On one hand it is very empowering to individuals, and
| many of those individuals will be able to achieve grander
| visions with less compromise and design-by-committee. On
| the other hand, it also enables an unprecedented level of
| slop that will certainly dilute the quality of software
| overall. What will be the dominant effect?
| emp17344 wrote:
| This is incorrect. It's basic economics - technology that
| boosts productivity results in higher salaries and more jobs.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Well, that depends on whether the technology requires
| expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.
|
| I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software
| systems is in that class currently, but it isn't
| necessarily always going to be the case.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| That's not basic economics. Basic economics says that
| salaries are determined by the demand for labor vs the
| supply of labor. With more efficiency, each worker does
| more labor, so you need fewer people to accomplish the same
| thing. So unless the demand for their product increases
| around the same rate as productivity increases, companies
| will employ fewer people. Since the market for products is
| not infinite, you only need as much labor as you require to
| meet the demand for your product.
|
| Companies that are doing better than ever are laying people
| off by the shipload, not giving people raises for a job
| well done.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Nah, most of it just gets returned to capital holders.
| topocite wrote:
| You obviously haven't thought about economics much at all
| to say something this simplistic.
|
| There are so many counter examples of this being wrong that
| it is not even worth bothering.
|
| I love economics, but it is largely a field based around
| half truths and intellectual fraud. It is actually why it
| is an interesting subject to study.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Denial of economic truths is denial of science. Not sure
| what to tell you. What parts do you reject?
| cogman10 wrote:
| The more likely outcome is that fewer devs will be hired as
| fewer devs will be needed to accomplish the same amount of
| output.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The old shrinking markets aka lump of labour fallacy. It's a
| bit like dreaming of that mythical day, when all of the work
| will be done.
| cogman10 wrote:
| No it's not that.
|
| Tell me, when was the last time you visited your shoe
| cobbler? How about your travel agent? Have you chatted with
| your phone operator recently?
|
| The lump labour fallacy says it's a fallacy that automation
| reduces the net amount of human labor, importantly, across
| all industries. It does not say that automation won't
| eliminate or reduce jobs in specific industries.
|
| It's an argument that jobs lost to automation aren't a big
| deal because there's always work somewhere else but not
| necessarily in the job that was automated away.
| imiric wrote:
| Jobs are replaced when new technology is able to produce
| an equivalent or better product that meets the demand,
| cheaper, faster, more reliably, etc. There is no evidence
| that the current generation of "AI" tools can do that for
| software.
|
| There is a whole lot of marketing propping up the
| valuations of "AI" companies, a large influx of new users
| pumping out supremely shoddy software, and a split in a
| minority of users who either report a boost in
| productivity or little to no practical benefits from
| using these tools. The result of all this momentum is
| arguably net negative for the industry and the world.
|
| This is in no way comparable to changes in the footwear,
| travel, and telecom industries.
| danny_codes wrote:
| I was with you till like a month ago. Now I'm not so
| sure..
| 9rx wrote:
| Current generation "AI" has already largely solved
| cheaper, faster, and more reliable. But it hasn't figured
| out how to curb demand. So far, the more software we
| build, the more people want even more software. Much like
| is told in the lump of labor fallacy, it appears that
| there is no end to finding productive uses for software.
| And certainly that has been the "common wisdom" for at
| least the last couple of decades; that whole "software is
| eating the world" thing.
|
| What changed in the last month that has you thinking that
| a demand wall is a real possibility?
| slopinthebag wrote:
| When computers came onto the market and could automate a
| large percentage of office jobs, what happened to the job
| market for office jobs?
| cogman10 wrote:
| They changed, significantly.
|
| We lost the pneumatic tube [1] maintenance crew.
| Secretarial work nearly went away. A huge number of
| bookkeepers in the banking industry lost their jobs. The
| job a typist was eliminated/merged into everyone else's
| job. The job of a "computer" (someone that does
| computations) was eliminated.
|
| What we ended up with was primarily a bunch of customer
| service, marketing, and sales workers.
|
| There was never a "office worker" job. But there were a lot
| of jobs under the umbrella of "office work" that were
| fundamentally changed and, crucially, your experience in
| those fields didn't necessarily translate over to the new
| jobs created.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qman4N3Waw4
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I expect something like this will happen to some degree,
| although not to the extent of what happened with
| computers.
|
| But the point is that we didn't just lose all of those
| jobs.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Right, and my point is that specific jobs, like the job
| of a dev, were eliminate or significantly curtailed.
|
| New jobs may be waiting for us on the other side of this,
| but my job, the job of a dev, is specifically under
| threat with no guarantee that the experience I gained as
| a dev will translate into a new market.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I think as a dev if you're just gluing API's together or
| something akin to that, similar to the office jobs that
| got replaced, you might be in trouble, but tbh we should
| have automated that stuff _before_ we got AI. It 's kind
| of a shame it may be automated by something not
| deterministic tho.
|
| But like, if we're talking about all dev jobs being
| replaced then we're also talking about most if not all
| knowledge work being automated, which would probably
| result in a fundamental restructuring of society. I don't
| see that happening anytime soon, and if it does happen
| it's probably impossible to predict or prepare for
| anyways. Besides maybe storing rations and purchasing
| property in the wilderness just in case.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| This implication completely depends on the elasticity (or
| lack thereof) of demand for software. When marginal profit
| from additional output exceeds labor cost savings, firms
| expand rather than shrink.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| This utterly boring AI writing. Go, please go away...
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| > Autonomous agents fail because they don't have the context that
| humans carry around implicitly.
|
| Yet.
|
| This is mostly a matter of data capture and organization. It
| sounds like Kasava is already doing a lot of this. They just need
| more sources.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Self-conscious efforts to formalize and concentrate information
| in systems controlled by firm management, known as "scientific
| management" by its proponents and "Taylorism" by many of its
| detractors, are a century old[1]. It has proven to be a
| constantly receding horizon.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
| hintymad wrote:
| In the latest interview with Claude Code's author:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product...,
| Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me
| to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing
| to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough
| to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or
| is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most
| of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?
| biztos wrote:
| Or does the field _become_ plateaued because engineers treat
| "writing code" as a "solved problem?"
|
| We could argue that writing poetry is a solved problem in much
| the same way, and while I don't think we especially need 50,000
| people writing poems at Google, we do still need poets.
| hintymad wrote:
| > we especially need 50,000 people writing poems at Google,
| we do still need poets.
|
| I'd assume that an implied concern of most engineers is how
| many software engineers the world will need in the future. If
| it's the situation like the world needing poets, then the
| field is only for the lucky few. Most people would be out of
| job.
| fhub wrote:
| He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the
| context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably
| strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to
| have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar
| to his. But in areas where they don't exist, writing code isn't
| a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be
| more friendly to agents.
|
| Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla
| CSS is scattered around and wasn't well thought out originally
| is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as
| much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser
| automation.
| swordsith wrote:
| Truth. I've had much easier time grappling with code bases I
| keep clean and compartmentalized with AI, over-stuffing
| context is one of the main killers of its quality.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly
| to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to
| have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality
| tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context
| and verifiability.
|
| The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the
| easier it is for an LLM generally.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I had this epiphany a few weeks ago, I'm glad to see others
| agreeing. Eventually most models will handle large enough
| context windows where this will sadly not matter as much,
| but it would be nice for the industry to still do
| everything to make better looking code that humans can see
| and appreciate.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's really interesting. It suggests that intelligence is
| intelligence, and the electronic kind also needs the same
| kinds of organization that humans do to quickly make sense
| of code and modify it without breaking something else.
| cromka wrote:
| Turns out the single point of failure irreplaceable type of
| employees who intentionally obfuscated the projects code
| for the last 10+ years were ahead of their time.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Having picked up a few long neglected projects in the past
| year, AI has been tremendous in rapidly shipping quality of
| dev life stuff like much improved test suites, documenting
| the existing behavior, handling upgrades to newer framework
| versions, etc.
|
| I've really found it's a flywheel once you get going.
| jimbokun wrote:
| All those people who thought clean well architected code
| wasn't important...now with LLMs modifying code it's even
| more important.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > He is likely working on
|
| ... a laundry list phone app.
| therealpygon wrote:
| I don't believe people who have dedicated their lives to open
| source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter how
| much is or is not written by AI. I also have to agree, I find
| myself more and more lately laughing about just how much
| resources we waste creating exactly the same things over and
| over in software. I don't mean generally, like languages, I
| mean specifically. How many trillions of times has a form with
| username and password fields been designed, developed, had
| meetings over, tested, debugged, transmitted, processed, only
| to ultimately be re-written months later?
|
| I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time
| could be saved.
| hintymad wrote:
| > I don't believe people who have dedicated their lives to
| open source will simply want to stop working on it, no matter
| how much is or is not written by AI.
|
| Yeah, hence my question can only be hypothetical.
|
| > I wonder what all we might build instead, if all that time
| could be saved
|
| If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then the
| investment into such repetitive work is not investment but
| waste. Once we stop such investment, we will have a lot more
| resources to work on something else, bring out a new chapter
| of the tech revolution. Or so I hope.
| Gormo wrote:
| > If we subscribe to Economics' broken-window theory, then
| the investment into such repetitive work is not investment
| but waste. Once we stop such investment, we will have a lot
| more resources to work on something else, bring out a new
| chapter of the tech revolution. Or so I hope.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with the application of the broken-
| window theory here. That's a metaphor intended to counter
| arguments in favor of make-work projects for economic
| stimulus: the idea here is that breaking a window always
| has a net negative on the economy, since even though it
| creates demand for a replacement window, the resources that
| are necessary to replace a window that already existed are
| just being allocated to restore the status quo ante, but
| the opportunity cost of that is everything else the same
| resources might have bee used for instead, if the window
| hadn't been broken.
|
| I think that's quite distinct from manufacturing _new_
| windows for new installations, which _is_ net positive
| production, and where newer use cases for windows create
| opportunities for producers to iterate on new window
| designs, and incrementally refine and improve the product,
| which wouldn 't happen if you were simply producing
| replacements for pre-existing windows.
|
| Even in this example, lots of people writing lots of
| different variations of login pages has produced
| incremental improvements -- in fact, as an industry, we
| haven't been writing the same exact login page over and
| over again, but have been gradually refining them in ways
| that have evolved their appearance, performance, security,
| UI intuitiveness, and other variables considerably over
| time. Relying on AI to design, not just implement, login
| pages will likely be the thing that causes this process to
| halt, and perpetuate the status quo indefinitely.
| e40 wrote:
| _> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem_
|
| That's just so dumb to say. I don't think we can trust anything
| that comes out of the mouths of the authors of these tools.
| They are conflicted. Conflict of interest, in society today, is
| such a huge problem.
| timacles wrote:
| Its all basically: Sensationalist take to shock you and get
| attention
| shimman wrote:
| There are bloggers that can't even acknowledge that they're
| only invited out to big tech events because they'll glaze
| them up to high heavens.
|
| Reminds me of that famous exchange, by noted friend of
| Jeffrey Epstein, Noam Chomsky: "I'm not saying you're self-
| censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what
| I'm saying is if you believed something different you
| wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
| chrisjj wrote:
| > That's just so dumb to say
|
| Depends. Its true of dumb code and dumb coders. Anorher
| reason why yes, smart pepple should not trust.
| groby_b wrote:
| That is the same team that has an app that used React for TUI,
| that uses gigabytes to have a scrollback buffer, and that had
| text scrolling so slow you could get a coffee in between.
|
| And that then had the gall to claim writing a TUI is as hard as
| a video game. (It clearly must be harder, given that most dev
| consoles or text interfaces in video games consistently use
| less than ~5% CPU, which at that point was completely out of
| reach for CC)
|
| He works for a company that crowed about an AI-generated C
| compiler that was so overfitted, it couldn't compile "hello
| world"
|
| So if he tells me that "software engineering is solved", I take
| that with rather large grains of salt. It is _far_ from solved.
| I say that as somebody who 's extremely positive on AI
| usefulness. I see massive acceleration for the things I do with
| AI. But I also know where I need to override/steer/step in.
|
| The constant hypefest is just vomit inducing.
| mccoyb wrote:
| I wanted to write the same comment. These people are fucking
| hucksters. Don't listen to their words, look at their
| software ... says all you need to know.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| Even as the field evolves, the phoning home telemetry of closed
| models creates a centralized intelligence monopoly. If open
| source atrophies, we lose the public square of architectural
| and design reasoning, the decision graph that is often just as
| important as the code. The labs won't just pick up new
| patterns; they will define them, effectively becoming the high
| priests of a new closed-loop ecosystem.
|
| However, the risk isn't just a loss of "truth," but model
| collapse. Without the divergent, creative, and often weird
| contributions of open-source humans, AI risks stagnating into a
| linear combination of its own previous outputs. In the long
| run, killing the commons doesn't just make the labs powerful.
| It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's
| no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.
|
| Humans will likely continue to drive consensus building around
| standards. The governance and reliability benefits of open
| source should grow in value in an AI-codes-it-first world.
| hintymad wrote:
| > It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because
| it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at
| scale.
|
| My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that
| the work of far fewer number of elites will define the
| patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-
| level networking code can be the combination of patterns of
| zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't
| know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so
| why not just ask them to command the AI instead.
| dogleash wrote:
| >My read of the recent discussion is that people assume
| that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the
| patterns for the future.
|
| Even if we assume that's true, what will prevent atrophy of
| the skillset among the elites with such a small pool of
| practitioners?
| layer8 wrote:
| I think you mean software engineering, not computer science.
| And no, I don't think there is reason for software engineering
| (and certainly not for computer science) to be plateauing.
| Unless we let it plateau, which I don't think we will. Also,
| writing code isn't a solved problem, whatever that's supposed
| to mean. Furthermore, since the patterns we use often aren't
| orthogonal, it's certainly not a _linear_ combination.
| hintymad wrote:
| I assume that new business scenarios will drive new
| workflows, which requires new work of software engineering.
| In the meantime, I assume that computer science will drive
| paradigm shift, which will drive truly different software
| engineering practice. If we don't have advances in
| algorithms, systems, and etc, I'd assume that people can
| slowly abstract away all the hard parts, enabling AI to do
| most of our jobs.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that
| most of what we do is linear combination of well established
| patterns?
|
| Computer science is different from writing business software to
| solve business problems. I think Boris was talking about the
| second and not the first. And I personally think he is mostly
| correct. At least for my organization. It is very rare for us
| to write any code by hand anymore. Once you have a solid
| testing harness and a peer review system run by multiple and
| different LLMs, you are in pretty good shape for agentic
| software development. Not everybody's got these bits figured
| out. They stumble around and them blame the tools for their
| failures.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Not everybody's got these bits figured out. They stumble
| around and them blame the tools for their failures.
|
| Possible. Yet that's a pretty broad brush. It could also be
| that some businesses are more heavily represented in the
| training set. Or some combo of all the above.
| gip wrote:
| My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the
| one doing the exploration and building better ways to write
| code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being
| said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there
| will be far less of them.
|
| Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a
| decent amount of information, not an expert or insider
| overgard wrote:
| I really doubt it. So far these things are good at remixing
| old ideas, not coming up with new ones.
| danielbln wrote:
| Generally us humans come up with new things by remixing old
| ideas. Where else would they come from? We are synthesizing
| priors into something novel. If you break the problem space
| apart enough, I don't see why some LLM can't do the same.
| tovej wrote:
| LLM's cannot synthesize text, they can only concatenate
| or mix statistically. Synthesis requires logical
| reasoning. That's not how LLMs work.
| danielbln wrote:
| Yes it is, LLMs perform logical multi step reasoning all
| the time, see math proofs, coding etc. And whether you
| call it synthesis or statistical mixing is just
| semantics. Do LLMs truly understand? Who knows, probably
| not, but they do more than you make it out to be.
| overgard wrote:
| I don't want to speak too much out of my depth here, I'm
| still learning how these things work on a mechanical
| level, but my understanding of how these things "reason"
| is it seems like they're more or less having a
| conversation with themselves. IE, burning a lot of tokens
| in the hopes that the follow up questions and answers it
| generates leads to a better continuation of the
| conversation overall. But just like talking to a human,
| you're likely to come up with better ideas when you're
| talking to _someone else_ , not just yourself, so the
| human in the loop seems pretty important to get the AI to
| remix things into something genuinely new and useful.
| tovej wrote:
| They do not. The "reasoning" is just adding more text in
| multiple steps, and then summarizing it. An LLM does not
| apply logic at any point, the "reasoning" features only
| use clever prompting to make these chains more likely to
| resemble logical reasoning.
|
| This is still only possible if the prompts given by the
| user resembles what's in the corpus. And the same applies
| to the reasoning chain. For it to resemble actual logical
| reasoning, the same or extremely similar reasoning has to
| exist in the corpus.
|
| This is not "just" semantics if your whole claim is that
| they are "synthesizing" new facts. This is your choice of
| misleading terminology which does not apply in the
| slightest.
| stuaxo wrote:
| "Writing code is a solved problem" disagree.
|
| Yes, there are common parts to everything we do, at the same
| time - I've been doing this for 25 years and most of the
| projects have some new part to them.
| danielbln wrote:
| Novel problems are usually a composite of simpler and/or
| older problems that have been solved before. Decomposition
| means you can rip most novel problems apart and solve the
| chunks. LLMs do just fine with that.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| There's so many timeless books on how to write software, design
| patterns, lessons learned from production issues. I don't think
| AI will stop being used for open source, in fact, with the
| number of increasing projects adjusting their contributor
| policies to account for AI I would argue that what we'll see is
| always people who love to hand craft their own code, and people
| who use AI to build their own open source tooling and
| solutions. We will also see an explosion is needing specs for
| things. If you give a model a well defined spec, it will follow
| it. I get better results the more specific I get about how I
| want things built and which libraries I want used.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| I saw Boris give a live demo today. He had a swarm of Claude
| agents one shot the most upvoted open issue on Excalidraw while
| he explained Claude code for about 20 minutes.
|
| No lines of code written by him at all. The agent used Claude
| for chrome to test the fix in front of us all and it worked. I
| think he may be right or close to it.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Did he pick Excalidraw as the project to work on, or did the
| audience?
|
| It's easy to be conned if you're not looking for the sleight
| of hand. You need to start channelling your inner Randi
| whenever AI demos are done, there's a lot of money at stake
| and a lot of money to prep a polished show.
|
| To be honest, even if the audience "picked" that project, it
| could have been a plant shouting out the project.
|
| I'm not saying they prepped the answer, I'm saying they
| prepped picking a project it could definitely work on. An AI
| solvable problem.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >writing code is a solved problem
|
| sure is news for the models tripping on my thousands of LOC
| jquery legacy app...
| nake89 wrote:
| Could the LLM rewrite it from scratch?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| boss, the models can't even get all the api endpoints from
| a single file and you want to rewrite everything?!
|
| not to mention that maybe the stakeholders don't want a
| rewrite, they just to modernize the app and add some new
| features
| overgard wrote:
| Even if you like them, I don't think there's any reason to
| believe what people from these companies say. They have every
| reason to exaggerate or outright lie, and the hype cycle moves
| so quickly that there are zero consequences for doing so.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Prediction: open source will stop.
|
| Sure, people did it for the fun and the credits, but the fun
| quickly goes out of it when the credits go to the IP laundromat
| and the fun is had by the people ripping off your code. Why
| would anybody contribute their works for free in an environment
| like that?
| orangecoffee wrote:
| Many did it for liberty - a philosophical position on freedom
| in software. They're supercharged with AI.
| pu_pe wrote:
| I believe the exact opposite. We will see open source
| contributions skyrocket now. There are a ton of people who
| want to help and share their work, but technical ability was
| a major filter. If the barrier to entry is now lowered,
| expect to see many more people sharing stuff.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, more people will be sharing stuff. And none of it will
| have long term staying power. Or do you honestly believe
| that a project like GCC or Linux would have been created
| and maintained over as long as they have been by the use of
| AI tools in the hands of noobs?
|
| Technical ability is an absolute requirement for the
| production of quality work. If the signal drowns in the
| noise then we are much worse off than where we started.
| pu_pe wrote:
| Ok but now you have raised the bar from "open source" to
| "quality work" :)
|
| Even then, I am not sure that changes the argument. If
| Linus Torvalds had access to LLMs back then, why would
| that discourage him from building Linux? And we now have
| the capability of building something like Linux with
| fewer man-hours, which again speaks in favor of more open
| source projects.
| signatoremo wrote:
| I'm sure you know the majority of GCC and Linux
| contributors aren't volunteers, but employees who are
| paid to contribute. I'm struggling to name a popular
| project that it isn't the case. Can you?
|
| If AI is powerful enough to flood open source projects
| with low quality code, it will be powerful enough to be
| used as gatekeeper. Major players who benefit from OSS,
| says Google, will make sure of that. We don't know how it
| will play out. It's shortsighted to dismiss it all
| together.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I'm struggling to name a popular project that it isn't
| the case. Can you?
|
| There's emacs, vim, and popular extensions of the two.
| OpenBSD, lots of distros (some do develop their own
| software), SDL,...
| ochronus wrote:
| The creator of the hammer says driving nails into wood planks
| is a solved problem. Carpenters are now obsolete.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > Boris said that writing code is a solved problem.
|
| No way, the person selling a tool that writes code says said
| tool can now write code? Color me shocked at this revelation.
|
| Let's check in on Claude Code's open issues for a sec here, and
| see how "solved" all of its issues are? Or my favorite, how
| their shitty React TUI that pegs modern CPUs and consumes all
| the memory on the system is apparently harder to get right than
| Video Games! Truly the masters of software engineering, these
| Anthropic folks.
| ottah wrote:
| Make centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to
| be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient.
| Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI
| systems (assuming a competent human).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| What about centaur unicorns? A cenintaunicorn?
| ottah wrote:
| You go figure out what that means.
| datakazkn wrote:
| The exoskeleton framing resonates, especially for repetitive data
| work. Parts where AI consistently delivers: pattern recognition,
| format normalization, first-draft generation. Parts where human
| judgment is still irreplaceable: knowing when the data is wrong,
| deciding what 'correct' even means in context, and knowing when
| to stop iterating.
|
| The exoskeleton doesn't replace instinct. It just removes
| friction from execution so more cycles go toward the judgment
| calls that actually matter.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| And your muscles degrade, a pretty good analogy
| Human-Cabbage wrote:
| Use the exoskeleton at the warehouse to reduce stress and
| injury; just keep lifting weights at home to not let yourself
| atrophy.
| konmok wrote:
| I guess so, but if you have to keep lifting weights at home
| to stay competent at your job, then lifting weights is part
| of your job, and you should be paid for those hours.
| protocolture wrote:
| Petition to make "AI is not X, but Y" articles banned or limited
| in some way.
| ares623 wrote:
| that will crash the stock market
| nnevatie wrote:
| Hear, hear! I knew this is AI slop before opening the link.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I like this analogy, and in fact in have used it for a totally
| different reason: why I don't like AI.
|
| Imagine someone going to a local gym and using an exosqueleton to
| do the exercises without effort. Able to lift more? Yes. Run
| faster? Sure. Exercising and enjoying the gym? ... No, and
| probably not.
|
| I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for me,
| and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for me is
| just...not fun.
|
| Someone going to the gym isn't trying to lift more or run faster,
| but instead improving and enjoying. Not using AI for coding has
| the same outcome for me.
| gtCameron wrote:
| We've all been raised in a world where we got to practice the
| 'art' of programming, and get paid extraordinarily well to do
| so, because the output of that art was useful for businesses to
| make more money.
|
| If a programmer with an exoskeleton can produce more output
| that makes more money for the business, they will continue to
| be paid well. Those who refuse the exoskeleton because they are
| in it for the pure art will most likely trend towards earning
| the types of living that artists and musicians do today. The
| truly extraordinary will be able to create things that the
| machines can't and will be in high demand, the other 99% will
| be pursing an art no one is interested in paying top dollar
| for.
| xienze wrote:
| You're forgetting that the "art" part of it is writing sound,
| scalable, performant code that can adapt and stand the test
| of time. That's certainly more valuable in the long run than
| banging out some dogshit spaghetti code that "gets the job
| done" but will lead to all kinds of issues in the future.
| Human-Cabbage wrote:
| > the "art" part of it is writing sound, scalable,
| performant code that can adapt and stand the test of time.
|
| Sure, and it's possible to use LLM tools to aid in writing
| such code.
| jryle70 wrote:
| You can continue to do that for your personal projects. Nobody
| forces you to like AI. You may not have the choice at your job
| though, and you can't take Claude Code et al. from me. I've
| been programming for 30 years, and I still have fun with it,
| even with AI.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I like writing code, even if it's boilerplate. It's fun for
| me, and I want to keep doing it. Using AI to do that part for
| me is just...not fun.
|
| Good news for you is that you can continue to do what you are
| doing. Nobody is going to stop you.
|
| There are people who like programming in assembly. And they
| still get to do that.
|
| If you are thinking that in the future employers may not want
| you to do that, then yes, that is a concern. But, if the AI
| based dev tool hype dies out, as many here suspect it will,
| then the employers will see the light and come crawling back.
| random3 wrote:
| I'll guess we'll se a lot of analogies and have to get used to
| it, although most will be off.
|
| AI _can_ be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also
| replace _you_ and your whole team.
|
| The "Office Space"-question is what are _you_ particularly within
| an organization and concretely when you 'll become the
| bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing
| its job independently.
|
| There's no other question that's relevant for any practical
| purposes for your employer and your well being as a person that
| presumably needs to earn a living based on their utility.
| qudat wrote:
| > It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your
| whole team.
|
| You drank the koolaide m8. It fundamentally cannot replace a
| single SWE and never will without fundamental changes to the
| model construction. If there is displacement, it'll be short
| lived when the hype doesn't match reality.
|
| Go take a gander at openclaws codebase and feel at-ease with
| your job security.
|
| I have seen zero evidence that the frontier model companies are
| innovating. All I see is full steam ahead on scaling what
| exists, but correct me if I'm wrong.
| random3 wrote:
| Isn't it delusional to argue about now, while ignoring the
| trajectory?
| qudat wrote:
| The trajectory hasn't changed: they scaled generating code,
| a great feat, but someone has to apply higher level
| abstract thinking to make the tool useful. Running agents
| in a cron or having non SWEs use it will not last longer
| than a prototype. That will not change with scaling pattern
| matching algorithms.
| jazz9k wrote:
| This is true. AI won't replace software developers
| completely, but it will reduce the need for software
| developers in the long-run, making it harder to find a
| job.
|
| A few seniors+AI will be able to do the job of a much
| larger team. This is already starting to look like
| reality now. I can't imagine what we will see within 5
| years.
| qudat wrote:
| It's a tool like a linter. It's a fancy tool, but calling it
| anything more than a tool is hype
| margorczynski wrote:
| Did you ever you the newest LLMs with a harness? Because I
| usually hear this kind of talk from people whose most recent
| interaction was with GPT-4o copy-pasting code into the chat
| window.
|
| Maybe I'm biased but I don't buy someone truly thinking that
| "it's just a tool like a linter" after using it on non-trivial
| stuff.
| qudat wrote:
| I use it pretty extensively. The reason why it's a tool is
| because it cannot work without an SWE running it. You have to
| prompt it and re-prompt it. We are doing a lot of the heavy
| lifting with code agents that people hyping it are ignoring.
| Sure, as a non-swe, you can vibe a project from zero-to-
| proto, but that's not going to happen in an enterprise
| environment, certainly not without extensive QA/Code review.
|
| Just take a look at the openclaw codebase and tell me you
| want to maintain that 500k loc project in the long-term. I
| predict that project will be dead within 6 months.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm using Claude Code (and Codex) (with the expensive
| subscriptions) on an app I'm building right now. I'm trying
| to be maximalist with them (to learn the most I can about
| them .. and also that subscription isn't cheap!). My
| impression, and yes, this is using the latest models and
| harness and all that would agree with the GP. They're a very
| handy tool. They make me faster. They also do a lot of things
| that, as a professional software developer, I have to
| frequently correct. They duplicate code like nobodies
| business. They decide on weird boundaries for functions and
| parameters. They undo bug fixes they just made. I think
| they're useful, but the hype is out of control. I would not
| trust software made with these tools by someone that couldn't
| write that software by hand. It might work superficially, but
| I'm definitely not giving any personal data to a vibe coded
| app with all the security implications.
| euroderf wrote:
| In the language of Lynch's Dune, AI is not an exoskeleton, it is
| a pain amplifier. Get it all wrong more quickly and deeply and
| irretrievably.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| Neither, AI is a tool to guide you in improving your process in
| any way and/or form.
|
| The problem is people using AI to do the heavy processing making
| them dumber. Technology itself was already making us dumber, I
| mean, Tesla drivers not even drive anymore or know how, coz the
| car does everything.
|
| Look how company after company is being either breached or have
| major issues in production because of the heavy dependency on AI.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| I agree. I call it my Extended Mind in the spirit of Clark (1).
| One thing I realized while working a lot in the last weeks with
| openClaw that this Agents are becoming an extension of my self.
| They are tools that quickly became a part of my Being. I
| outsource a lot of work to them, they do stuff for me, help me
| and support me and therefore make my (work-)life easier and more
| enjoyable. But its me in the driver seat.
|
| (1) https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-
| chalmers-1998.p...
| Havoc wrote:
| The amount of "It's not X it's Y" type commentary suggests to me
| that A) nobody knows and B) there is solid chance this ends up
| being either all true or all false
|
| Or put differently we've managed to hype this to the moon but
| somehow complete failure (see studies about zero impact on
| productivity) seem plausible. And similarly kills all jobs seems
| plausible.
|
| That's an insane amount of conflicting opinions being help in the
| air at same time
| cheema33 wrote:
| You appear to have said a lot. Without saying anything.
| rester324 wrote:
| You appear to have written a lot. Without understanding
| anything.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| This reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Lots of hype
| around something that was clearly globally transformation, but
| most people weren't benefiting hugely from it in the first few
| years.
|
| It might have replaced sending a letter with an email. But now
| people get their groceries from it, hail rides, an even track
| their dogs or luggage with it.
|
| Too many companies have been to focused on acting like AI
| 'features' have made their products better, when most of them
| haven't yet. I'm looking at Microsoft and Office especially.
| But tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Github Copilot CLI
| have shown that LLMs can do incredible things in the right
| applications.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > zero impact on productivity
|
| i'm sure someone somewhere will find the numbers (pull requests
| per week, closed tickets per sprint etc) to make it look
| otherwise...
| AntiDyatlov wrote:
| It's possible we actually never had good metrics on software
| productivity. That seems very difficult to measure. I
| definitely use AI at my job to work less, not to produce more,
| and Claude Code is the only thing that has enabled me to have
| side-projects (had never tried it before, I have no idea how
| there are people with a coding full time job that also have a
| coding side project(s)).
| shnpln wrote:
| AI is the philosophers stone. It appears to break equivalence,
| when in reality you are using electricity for an entire town.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| I said this in 2015... just not as well!
|
| "Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron"
| https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313
| stuaxo wrote:
| not AI, but IA: Intelligence Augmentation.
| alphazard wrote:
| There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not
| replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run,
| at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting
| formal systems like playdoh.
|
| In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The
| idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software
| is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge
| communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on
| projects by adding teams of people. Software is going to become
| an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly. The benefits we
| get from checking in with other humans, like error correction,
| and delegation can all be done better by AI. I would rather a
| single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of
| agents than a team of humans.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly
| communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable
| of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift.
|
| And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by
| others.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| no but if the old '10x developer' is really 1 in 10 or 1 in
| 100, they might just do fine while the rest of us, average
| PHP enjoyers, may go to the wayside
| alphazard wrote:
| > This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly
| communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable
| of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries
| shift.
|
| I think there are people who want to use software to
| accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use
| software. The people who only use software because the world
| around them has forced it on them, either through work or
| friends, are probably cognitively excluded from building
| software.
|
| The people who seek out software to solve a problem (I think
| this is most people) and compare alternatives to see which
| one matches their mental model will be able to skip all that
| and just build the software they have in mind using AI.
|
| > And that there is little value in reusing software
| initiated by others.
|
| I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code
| reuse. Trying to fit a round peg in a square hole produces
| more problems than it solves. A sign of an elite engineer is
| knowing when to just copy something and change it as needed
| rather than call into it. Or to re-implement something
| because the library that does it is a bad fit.
|
| The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols.
| Communication requires that both sides have a shared
| understanding.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code
| reuse[...]The only time reuse really matters is in network
| protocols.
|
| The whole idea of an OS is code reuse (and resources
| management). No need to setup the hardware to run your
| application. Then we have a lot of foundational subsystems
| like graphics, sound, input,... Crafting such subsystems
| and the associated libraries are hard and requires a lot of
| design thinking.
| joquarky wrote:
| There is a balance. Some teams take DRY too far.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Which is why we should always just write and train our own
| LLMs.
|
| I mean it's just software right? What value is there in
| reusing it if we can just write it ourselves?
| bandrami wrote:
| Every internal piece of software you write is a
| potentially-infinite money sink of training
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> The only time reuse really matters is in network
| protocols. Communication requires that both sides have a
| shared understanding._
|
| A lot of things are like network protocols. Most things
| require communication. External APIs, existing data,
| familiar user interfaces, contracts, laws, etc.
|
| Language itself (both formal and natural) depends on a
| shared understanding of terms, at least to some degree.
|
| AI doesn't magically make the coordination and
| synchronisation overhead go away.
|
| Also, reusing well debugged and battle tested code will
| always be far more reliable than recreating everything
| every time anything gets changed.
| lioeters wrote:
| Even within a single computer or program, there is need
| for communication protocols and shared understanding -
| such as types, data schema, function signatures. It's the
| interface between functions, programs, languages,
| machines.
|
| It could also be argued that "reuse" doesn't necessarily
| mean reusing the actual code as material, but reusing the
| concepts and algorithms. In that sense, most code is
| reuse of some previous code, written differently every
| time but expressing the same ideas, building on prior art
| and history.
|
| That might support GP's comment that "code reuse" is
| overemphasized, since the code itself is not what's
| valuable, what the user wants is the computation it
| represents. If you can speak to a computer and get the
| same result, then no code is even necessary as a medium.
| (But internally, code is being generated on the fly.)
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I think we shouldn't get too hung up on specific
| artifacts.
|
| The point is that specifying and verifying requirements
| is a lot of work. It takes time and resources. This work
| has to be reused somehow.
|
| We haven't found a way to precisely specify and verify
| requirements using only natural language. It requires
| formal language. Formal language that can be used by
| machines is called code.
|
| So this is what leads me to the conclusion that we need
| some form of code reuse. But if we do have formal
| specifications, implementations can change and do not
| necessarily have to be reused. The question is why not.
| saezbaldo wrote:
| This reframes the whole conversation. If implementations
| are cheap to regenerate, specifications become the
| durable artifact.
|
| Something like TLA+ model checking lets you verify that a
| protocol maintains safety invariants across all reachable
| states, regardless of who wrote the implementation. The
| hard part was always deciding what "correct" means in
| your specific domain.
|
| Most teams skip formal specs because "we don't have
| time." If agents make implementations nearly free, that
| excuse disappears. The bottleneck shifts from writing
| code to defining correctness.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > The only time reuse really matters is in network
| protocols.
|
| And long term maintenance. If you use something. You have
| to maintain it. It's much better if someone else maintains
| it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > I think there are people who want to use software to
| accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to
| use software.
|
| Typically people feel they're "forced" to use software for
| entirely valid reasons, such as said software being
| absolutely terrible to use. I'm sure that most people like
| using software that they feel like actually helps rather
| than hinders them.
| Thanemate wrote:
| >This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly
| communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable
| of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries
| shift.
|
| It's true that at first not everyone is just as efficient,
| but I'd be lying if I were to claim that someone needs a
| 4-year degree to communicate with LLM's.
| overgard wrote:
| Well, without the self soothing I think what's left is
| pitchforks.
| capital_guy wrote:
| Maybe it's time for pitchforks.
| thwarted wrote:
| > _We pay huge communication /synchronization costs to eek out
| mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people._
|
| Something Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, and the industry has
| never fully acknowledged. Throw more bodies at it, be they
| human bodies or bot agent bodies.
| falcor84 wrote:
| But there is a level of magnitude difference between
| coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much
| faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as
| Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them
| build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and
| days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is
| so much lower that it's just a different ball game.
|
| [0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-
| town-4f25ee16d...
|
| [1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
| jimbokun wrote:
| Then why aren't we seeing orders of magnitude more software
| being produced?
| danielbln wrote:
| Claude Code released just over a year ago, agentic coding
| came into its own maybe in May or June of last year.
| Maybe give it a minute?
| ok_dad wrote:
| It's been a minute and a half and I don't see the
| evidence you can task an agent swarm to produce useful
| software without your input or review. I've seen a few
| experiments that failed, and I've seen manic garbage, but
| not yet anything useful outside of the agent operators
| imagination.
| danielbln wrote:
| Agent swarms are what, a couple of months old? What are
| you even talking about. Yes, people/humans still drive
| this stuff, but if you think there isn't useful software
| out there that can be handily implemented with current
| gen agents that need very little or no review, then I
| don't know what to tell you, apart from "you're
| mistaken". And I say that as someone who uses three tools
| heavily but has otherwise no stake in them. The copium in
| this space is real. Everyone is special and
| irreplaceable, until another step change pushes them out.
| ok_dad wrote:
| The whole point is that an agent swarm doesn't need a
| month, supposedly.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| We're talking about whether the human users have caught
| up with usage of tech, not the speed of the tech itself.
| dandellion wrote:
| The next thing after agent swarms will be swarm colonies
| and people will go "it's been a month since agentic swarm
| colonies, give it a month or two". People have been
| moving the goal posts like that for a couple years now,
| it's starting to grow stale. This is like self driving
| cars which were going to be workingin 2016 and replace
| 80% of drivers by 2017, all over again. People falling
| for hype instead of admitting that while it appears
| somewhat useful, nobody has any clue if it's 97% useful
| or just 3% useful but so far it's looking like the later.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I generally agree, but counterpoint: Waymo is
| successfully running robocabs in many cities today.
| viking123 wrote:
| When does it come to Mumbai?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| They're launching in London this year. So... 2035?
| viking123 wrote:
| I would love to see this in Mumbai or Dhaka or something
| like that, just like thrown in there. Can it move 2
| meters without stopping?
|
| Don't take me wrong, I like Waymo but 2035 is probably
| realistic for the cities in more developing countries.
| johnfn wrote:
| Didn't we have a post the other day saying that the
| number of "Show HN" posts is skyrocketing?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804
| itemize123 wrote:
| we are. you can check the APP STORE release yoy. it's
| skyrocketing.
| refactor_master wrote:
| Here's a talk about leaning into the garbage flow. And
| that was a decade ago.
|
| https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk
|
| I can't imagine the number being economically meaningful
| now.
| viking123 wrote:
| I have barely downloaded any apps in the last 5-10 years
| except some necessary ones like bank apps etc. Who even
| needs that garbage? Steam also has tons of games but 80%
| make like no money at all and no one cares. Just piles of
| garbage. We already have limited hours per day and those
| are not really increasing so I wonder where are the
| users.
| ukuina wrote:
| Why do you assume there isn't?
|
| Enterprise (+API) usage of LLMs has continued to grow
| exponentially.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I work for one of those enterprises with lots of people
| trying out AI (thankfully leadership is actually sane, no
| mandates that you _have_ to use it, just giving devs
| access to experiment with the tools and see what
| happens). Lots of people trying it out in earnest, lots
| of newsletters about new techniques and all that kinda
| stuff. Lots of people too, so there 's all sorts of
| opinions from very excited to completely indifferent.
|
| Precisely 0 projects are making it out any faster or (IMO
| more importantly) better. We have a PR review bot
| clogging up our PRs with fucking _useless_ comments,
| rewriting the PR descriptions in obnoxious ways, that
| basically everyone hates and is getting shut off soon.
| From an actual productivity POV, people are just using it
| for a quick demo or proof of concept here and there
| before actually building the proper thing manually as
| before. And we have all the latest and greatest
| techniques, all the AGENTS.mds and tool calling and MCP
| integrations and unlimited access to every model we care
| to have access to and all the other bullshit that OpenAI
| et al are trying to shove on people.
|
| It's not for a lack of trying, plenty of people are
| trying to make any part of it work, even if it's just to
| handle the truly small stuff that would take 5 minutes of
| work but is just tedious and small enough to be annoying
| to pick up. It's just not happening, even with extremely
| simple tasks (that IMO would be better off with a
| dedicated, small deterministic script) we still need
| human overview because it often shits the bed regardless,
| so the effort required to review things is equal or often
| greater than just doing the damn ticket yourself.
|
| My personal favorite failure is when the transcript bots
| just... Don't transcript random chunks of the
| conversation, which can often lead to more confusion than
| if we just didn't have anything transcribed. We've turned
| off the transcript and summarization bots, because we've
| found 9/10 times they're actively detrimental to our
| planning and lead us down bad paths.
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| I build a code reviewer based on the claude code sdk that
| integrates with gitlab, pretty straightforward. The hard
| work is in the integration, not the review itself. That
| is taken care of with SDK.
|
| Devs, even conservative ones, like it. I've built a lot
| of tooling in my life, but i never had the experience
| that devs reach out to me that fast because it is
| 'broken'. (Expired token or a bug for huge MRs)
| bandrami wrote:
| This question remains the 900-pound gorilla of this
| discussion
| leoedin wrote:
| I think we are. There's definitely been an uptick in
| "show HN" type posts with quite impressively complex apps
| that one person developed in a few weeks.
|
| From my own experience, the problem is that AI slows down
| a lot as the scale grows. It's very quick to add extra
| views to a frontend, but struggles a lot more in making
| wide reaching refactors. So it's very easy to start a
| project, but after a while your progress slows
| significantly.
|
| But given I've developed 2 pretty functional full stack
| applications in the last 3 months, which I definitely
| wouldn't have done without AI assistance, I think it's a
| fair assumption that lots of other people are doing the
| same. So there is almost certainly a lot more software
| being produced than there was before.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I think the proportion of new software that is novel has
| absolutely plummeted after the advent of AI. In my
| experience, generative AI will easily reproduce code for
| which there are a multitude of examples on GitHub, like
| TODO CRUD React Apps. And many business problems can be
| solved with TODO CRUD React Apps (just look at Excel's
| success), but not every business problem can be solved by
| TODO CRUD React Apps.
|
| As an analogy: imagine if someone was bragging about
| using Gen AI to pump out romantasy smut novels that were
| spicy enough to get off to. Would you think they're
| capable of producing the next Grapes of Wrath?
| robocat wrote:
| > I think the proportion of new software that is novel
| has absolutely plummeted after the advent of AI.
|
| We were not awash in novel software before AI (say last
| decade in 2019).
|
| I can only assume what you're really trying to say is "AI
| bad".
| autoexec wrote:
| It doesn't appear to have improved the quality of the
| software we have either.
| falcor84 wrote:
| "The future is already here, it's just not evenly
| distributed"
| thwarted wrote:
| > _But there is a level of magnitude difference between
| coordinating AI agents and humans_
|
| And yet, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048599
|
| > _One of the tips, especially when using Claude Code, is
| explictly ask to create a "tasks", and also use subagents.
| For example I want to validate and re-structure all my
| documentation - I would ask it to create a task to research
| state of my docs, then after create a task per specific
| detail, then create a task to re-validate quality after it
| has finished task._
|
| Which sounds pretty much the same as how work is broken
| down and handed out to humans.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Yes, but you can do this at the top level, and then have
| AI agents do this themselves for all the low level tasks,
| which is then orders of magnitude faster than with human
| coordination.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| The point of the mythical man month is not that more people
| are necessarily worse for a project, it's just that adding
| them _at the last minute_ doesn 't work, because they take a
| while to get up to speed and existing project members are
| distracted while trying to help them.
|
| It's true that a larger team, formed well in advance, is also
| less efficient per person, but they still can achieve more
| overall than small teams (sometimes).
| jsumrall wrote:
| Interesting point. And from the agents point of view, it's
| always joining at the last minute, and doesn't stick around
| longer than its context window. There's a lesson in there
| maybe...
| saezbaldo wrote:
| The context window is the onboarding period. Every
| invocation is a new hire reading the codebase for the
| first time.
|
| This is why architecture legibility keeps getting more
| important. Clean interfaces, small modules, good naming.
| Not because the human needs it (they already know the
| codebase) but because the agent has to reconstruct
| understanding from scratch every single time.
|
| Brooks was right that the conceptual structure is the
| hard part. We just never had to make it this explicit
| before.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > AI will leverage me
|
| I think I know what you mean, and I do recall once seeing "this
| experience will leverage me" as indicating that something will
| be good for a person, but my first thought when seeing "x will
| leverage y" is that x will step on top of y to get to their
| goal, which does seem apt here.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of
| `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have
| almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you
| can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-
| software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct...
|
| Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new
| event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook
| modeled on the Trinity engine, a new WASM compiler, AVX-512
| implementations of all the cryptography primitives that
| approach theoretical maximums, a new store that will hit
| theoretical maximums, the first formal specification of the
| `nix` daemon protocol outside of an APT, and I'm upgrading
| those specifications to `lean4` proof-bearing codegen:
| https://github.com/straylight-software/cornell.
|
| 34 hours.
|
| Why can I do this and no one else can get `ca-derivations` to
| work with `ssh-ng`?
| benreesman wrote:
| And it's teachable.
|
| Here's a colleague who is nearly done with a correct
| reimplementation of the OpenCode client/server API:
| https://github.com/straylight-software/weapon-server-hs
|
| Here's another colleague with a Git forge that will always
| work and handle 100x what GitHub does per infrastructure
| dollar while including stacked diffs and Jujitsu support as
| native in about 4 days: https://github.com/straylight-
| software/strayforge
|
| Here's another colleague and a replacement for Terraform that
| is well-typed in all cases and will never partially apply an
| infrastructure change in about 4 days:
| https://github.com/straylight-software/converge
|
| Here's the last web framework I'll ever use:
| https://github.com/straylight-software/hydrogen
|
| That's all *begun in the last 96 hours.
|
| This is why: https://github.com/straylight-
| software/.github/blob/main/pro...
| bschwarz wrote:
| Please check your links, 3/7 don't work and it's the most
| interesting ones.
| benreesman wrote:
| ah, not my place to early launch my colleague's work, my
| bad.
|
| keep an eye on https://straylight.software, it'll all be
| there extremely soon. well, everything i mentioned, which
| is different than _all of it_. :)
| chasd00 wrote:
| /tangent i've always like the word "straylight", I use to
| run a fansite for a local band and the site was called
| straylight6. This was maybe 20 years ago.
| achierius wrote:
| I mean, have you tried getting `ca-derivations` to work with
| `ssh-ng`? That sounds like a good way to answer your own
| question.
| benreesman wrote:
| I have ca-derivations working with ssh-ng.
|
| It's a fairly hairy patch and now the broken ass eval cache
| breaks more.
|
| I'm fixing it all. Read the fucking repo friend, it's
| biblical.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like
| error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI.
|
| Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a
| logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's
| just really good at saying things which sound plausible.
| p-e-w wrote:
| You're committing the classic fallacy of confusing mechanics
| with capabilities. Brains are just electrons and chemicals
| moving through neural circuits. You can't infer constraints
| on high-level abilities from that.
| Tade0 wrote:
| This goes both ways. You can't assume capabilities based on
| impressions. Especially with LLMs, which are purpose built
| to give an impression of producing language.
|
| Also, designers of these systems appear to agree: when it
| was shown that LLMs can't actually do calculations, tool
| calls were introduced.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's true that they only give plausible sounding answers.
| But let's say we ask a simple question like "What's the
| sum of two and two?" The only plausible sounding answer
| to that will be "four." It doesn't need to have any fancy
| internal understanding or anything else beyond prediction
| to give what really is the same answer.
|
| The same goes for a lot of bugs in code. The best
| prediction is often the correct answer, being the
| highlighting of the error. Whether it can "actually find"
| the bugs--whatever that means--isn't really so important
| as whether or not it's correct.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It becomes important the moment your particular bug is on
| one hand typical, but has a non-typical reason. In such
| cases you'll get nonsense which you need to ignore.
|
| Again - they're very useful, as they give great answers
| based on someone else's knowledge and vague questions on
| part of the user, but one has to remain vigilant and keep
| in mind this is just text presented to you to look as
| believable as possible. There's no real promise of
| correctness or, more importantly, critical thinking.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 100% They're not infallible but that's a different
| argument to "they can't find bugs in your code."
| xnorswap wrote:
| > it can't find actual flaws in your code
|
| I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience
| with claude-code.
|
| It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it
| can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix
| issues in source.
|
| It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with
| sequencing and logic.
|
| That might not be what is actually happening at a technical
| level, but it is indistinguishable from actual reasoning, and
| produces real world fixes.
| LoganDark wrote:
| What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's
| summarizing, which current models are known to be
| relatively good at.
|
| It is true that models can happen to produce a sound
| reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso
| than humans, anyway).
|
| There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a
| deterministic result without significantly quashing the
| output space (excluding most correct solutions).
|
| I believe we'll see a different landscape of benefits and
| drawbacks as diffusion language models begin to emerge, and
| as even more architectures are invented and practiced.
|
| I have a tentative belief that diffusion language models
| may be easier to make deterministic without quashing nearly
| as much expressivity.
| nielsole wrote:
| > moreso than humans
|
| Citation needed.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Much of the space of artificial intelligence is based on
| a goal of a general reasoning machine comparable to the
| reasoning of a human. There are many subfields that are
| less concerned with this, but in practice, artificial
| intelligence is perceived to have that goal.
|
| I am sure the output of current frontier models is
| convincing enough to outperform the appearance of humans
| to some. There is still an ongoing outcry from when
| GPT-4o was discontinued from users who had built a
| romantic relationship with their access to it. However I
| am not convinced that language models have actually
| reached the reliability of human reasoning.
|
| Even a dumb person can be consistent in their beliefs,
| and apply them consistently. Language models strictly
| cannot. You can prompt them to maintain consistency
| according to some instructions, but you never quite have
| any guarantee. You have far less of a guarantee than you
| could have instead with a human with those beliefs, or
| even a human with those instructions.
|
| I don't have citations for the objective reliability of
| human reasoning. There are statistics about unreliability
| of human reasoning, and also statistics about
| unreliability of language models that far exceed them.
| But those are both subjective in many cases, and success
| or failure rates are actually no indication of
| reliability whatsoever anyway.
|
| On top of that, every human is different, so it's
| difficult to make general statements. I only know from my
| work circles and friend circles that most of the people I
| keep around outperform language models in consistency
| _and_ reliability. Of course that doesn 't mean every
| human or even most humans meet that bar, but it does mean
| human-level reasoning includes them, which raises the bar
| that models would have to meet. (I can't quantify this,
| though.)
|
| There is a saying about fully autonomous self driving
| vehicles that goes a little something like: they don't
| just have to outperform the worst drivers; they have to
| outperform the best drivers, for it to be worth it. Many
| fully autonomous crashes are because the autonomous
| system screwed up in a way that a human would not. An
| autonomous system typically lacks the creativity and
| ingenuity of a human driver.
|
| Though they can already be more reliable in some
| situations, we're still far from a world where autonomous
| driving can take liability for collisions, and that's
| because they're not nearly as reliable or intelligent
| enough to entirely displace the need for human attention
| and intervention. I believe Waymo is the closest we've
| gotten and even they have remote safety operators.
| gaigalas wrote:
| That's not a citation.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's roughly why I think this way, along with a statement
| that I don't have objective citations. So sure, it's not
| a citation. I even said as much, right in the middle
| there.
| emp17344 wrote:
| That's because there's no objective research on this.
| Similarly, there are no good citations to support your
| objection. They simply don't exist yet.
| gaigalas wrote:
| Maybe not worth discussing something that cannot be
| objectively assessed then.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It's not enough for them to be "better" than a human.
| When they fail they also have to fail in a way that is
| legible to a human. I've seen ML systems fail in
| scenarios that are obvious to a human and succeed in
| scenarios where a human would have found it impossible.
| The opposite needs to be the case for them to be
| generally accepted as equivalent, and especially the
| failure modes need to be confined to cases where a human
| would have also failed. In the situations I've seen,
| customers have been upset about the performance of the ML
| model because the solution to the problem was patently
| obvious to them. They've been probably more upset about
| that than about situations where the ML model fails and
| the end customer also fails.
| michaelscott wrote:
| Nothing you've said about reasoning here is exclusive to
| LLMs. Human reasoning is also never guaranteed to be
| deterministic, excluding most correct solutions. As OP
| says, they may not be reasoning under the hood but if the
| effect is the same as a tool, does it matter?
|
| I'm not sure if I'm up to date on the latest diffusion
| work, but I'm genuinely curious how you see them
| potentially making LLMs more deterministic? These models
| usually work by sampling too, and it seems like the
| transformer architecture is better suited to longer
| context problems than diffusion
| LoganDark wrote:
| The way I imagine greedy sampling for autoregressive
| language models is guaranteeing a deterministic result at
| each position individually. The way I'd imagine it for
| diffusion language models is guaranteeing a deterministic
| result for the entire response as a whole. I see
| diffusion models potentially being more promising because
| the unit of determinism would be larger, preserving
| expressivity within that unit. Additionally, diffusion
| language models iterate multiple times over their full
| response, whereas autoregressive language models get one
| shot at each token, and before there's even any picture
| of the full response. We'll have to see what impact this
| has in practice; I'm only cautiously optimistic.
| michaelscott wrote:
| I guess it depends on the definition of deterministic,
| but I think you're right and there's strong reason to
| expect this will happen as they develop. I think the next
| 5 - 10 years will be interesting!
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| This all sounds like the stochastic parrot fallacy. Total
| determinism is not the goal, and it not a prerequisite
| for general intelligence. As you allude to above, humans
| are also not fully deterministic. I don't see what hard
| theoretical barriers you've presented toward AGI or
| future ASI.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I haven't heard the stochastic parrot fallacy (though I
| have heard the phrase before). I also don't believe there
| are hard theoretical barriers. All I believe is that what
| we have right now is not enough yet. (I also believe
| autoregressive models may not be capable of AGI.)
| emp17344 wrote:
| Did you just invent a nonsense fallacy to use as a
| bludgeon here? "Stochastic parrot fallacy" does not
| exist, and there actually quite a bit of evidence
| supporting the stochastic parrot hypothesis.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I can tell from this statement that you don't have
| experience with claude-code.
|
| I happen to use it on a daily basis. 4.6-opus-high to be
| specific.
|
| The other day it surmised from (I assume) the contents of
| my clipboard that I want to do A, while I really wanted to
| B, it's just that A was a more typical use case. Or
| actually: hardly anyone ever does B, as it's a weird thing
| to do, but I needed to do it anyway.
|
| > but it is indistinguishable from actual reasoning
|
| I can distinguish it pretty well when it makes mistakes
| someone who actually read the code and understood it
| wouldn't make.
|
| Mind you: it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge
| and it was trained on a vast library of it, but it clearly
| doesn't think itself.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| What do you mean the content of your clipboard?
| Tade0 wrote:
| I either accidentally pasted it somewhere and removed,
| forgetting about doing that or it's reading the
| clipboard.
|
| The suggestion it gave me started with the contents of
| the clipboard and expanded to scenario A.
| elar_verole wrote:
| Sorry to sound rude - but you polluted the context,
| pointing to the fact you would like A, and then found it
| annoying it tried to do A ?
| project2501a wrote:
| I know I am not supposed to be negative in HN, but lay
| off the koolaid, dear colleague.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Oh, please. There's always a way to blame the user, it's
| a catch-22. The fact is that coding agents aren't perfect
| and it's quite common for them to fail. Refer to the
| recent C-compiler nonsense Anthropic tried to pull for
| proof.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It fails far less often than I do at the cookie cutter
| parts of my job, and it's much faster and cheaper than I
| am.
|
| Being honest; I probably have to write some properly
| clever code or do some actual design as a dev lead
| like... 2% of my time? At most? The rest of the code
| related work I do, it's outperforming me.
|
| Now, maybe you're somehow different to me, but I find it
| hard to believe that the majority of devs out there are
| balancing binary trees and coming up with shithot unique
| algorithms all day rather than mangling some formatting
| and dealing with improving db performance, picking the
| right pattern for some backend and so on style tasks day
| to day.
| weego wrote:
| And not this or any existing generation of people. We're bad
| a determining want vs need, being specific, genericizing our
| goals into a conceptual framework of existing patterns and
| documenting & explaining things in a way that gets to a solid
| goal.
|
| The idea that the entire top down processes of a business can
| be typed into an AI model and out comes a result is again, a
| specific type of tech person ideology that sees the idea of
| humanity as an unfortunate annoyance in the process of
| delivering a business. The rest of the world see's it the
| other way round.
| lpapez wrote:
| If you only realized how ridiculous your statement is, you
| never would have stated it.
| jychang wrote:
| It's also literally factually incorrect. Pretty much the
| entire field of mechanistic interpretability would
| obviously point out that models have an internal definition
| of what a bug is.
|
| Here's the most approachable paper that shows a real model
| (Claude 3 Sonnet) clearly having an internal representation
| of bugs in code: https://transformer-
| circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...
|
| Read the entire section around this quote:
|
| > Thus, we concluded that 1M/1013764 represents a broad
| variety of errors in code.
|
| (Also the section after "We find three different safety-
| relevant code features: an unsafe code feature 1M/570621
| which activates on security vulnerabilities, a code error
| feature 1M/1013764 which activates on bugs and exceptions")
|
| This feature fires on actual bugs; it's not just a model
| pattern matching saying "what a bug hunter may say next".
| mrbungie wrote:
| Was this "paper" eventually peer reviewed?
|
| PS: I know it is interesting and I don't doubt Antrophic,
| but for me it is so fascinating they get such a pass in
| science.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Modern ML is old school mad science.
|
| The lifeblood of the field is proof-of-concept pre-prints
| built on top of other proof-of-concept pre-prints.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Sounds like you agree this "evidence" lacks any semblance
| of scientific rigor?
| mrbungie wrote:
| (Not GP) There was a well recognized reproducibility
| problem in the ML field before LLM-mania, and that's
| considering published papers with proper peer-reviews.
| The current state of afairs in some ways is even less
| rigourous than that, and then some people in the field
| feel free to overextend their conclusions into other
| fields like neurosciences.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Mechanistic interpretability is a joke, supported
| entirely by non-peer reviewed papers released as
| marketing material by AI firms.
| Jensson wrote:
| > This feature fires on actual bugs; it's not just a
| model pattern matching saying "what a bug hunter may say
| next".
|
| You don't think a pattern matcher would fire on actual
| bugs?
| pousada wrote:
| Some people are still stuck in the "stochastic parrot"
| phase and see everything regarding LLMs through that lense.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Current LLMs do not think. Just because all models
| anthropomorphize the repetitive actions a model is
| looping through does not mean they are truly thinking or
| reasoning.
|
| On the flip side the idea of this being true has been a
| very successful indirect marketing campaign.
| pousada wrote:
| What does "truly thinking or reasoning" even mean for
| you?
|
| I don't think we even have a coherent definition of human
| intelligence, let alone of non-human ones.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Everyone knows to really think you need to use your
| fleshy meat brain, everything else is cheating.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Your brain is a slab of wet meat, not a logic engine. It
| can't find actual flaws in your code - it's just half-decent
| at pattern recognition.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Its pattern recognition all the way down.
| gaigalas wrote:
| That is not exactly true. The brain does a lot of things
| that are not "pattern recognition".
|
| Simpler, more mundane (not exactly, still incredibly
| complicated) stuff like homeostasis or motor control, for
| example.
|
| Additionally, our ability to plan ahead and simulate future
| scenarios often relies on mechanisms such as memory
| consolidation, which are not part of the whole pattern
| recognition thing.
|
| The brain is a complex, layered, multi-purpose structure
| that does _a lot of things_.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel
| universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude
| has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for
| someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded
| devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if
| not days.
|
| To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions
| matter at all. The market will decide.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I wonder if the parent comments remark is a communication
| failure or pedantry gone wrong, because like you, claude-
| code is out there solving real problems and finding and
| fixing defects.
|
| A large quantity of bugs as raised are now fixed by claude
| automatically from just the reports as written. Everything
| is human reviewed and sometimes it fixes it in ways I don't
| approve, and it can be guided.
|
| It has an astonishing capability to find and fix defects.
| So when I read "It can't find flaws", it just doesn't fit
| my experience.
|
| I have to wonder if the disconnect is simply in the
| definition of what it means to find a flaw.
|
| But I don't like to argue over semantics. I don't actually
| care if it is finding flaws by the sheer weight of language
| probability rather than logical reasoning, it's still
| finding flaws and fixing them better than anything I've
| seen before.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I can't control random internet people, but within my
| personal and professional life, I see the effective
| pattern of comparing prompts/contexts/harnesses to figure
| out why some are more effective than others (in fact
| tooling is being developed in the AI industry as a whole
| to do so, claude even added the "insights" command).
|
| I feel that many people that don't find AI useful are
| doing things like, "Are there any bugs in this software?"
| rather than developing the appropriate harness to enable
| the AI to function effectively.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I think it's just fear, I sure know that after 25 years as
| a developer with a great salary and throughout all that
| time never even considering the chance of ever being
| unemployable I'm feeling it too.
|
| I think some of us come to terms with it in different ways.
| nazgul17 wrote:
| While I agree, if you think that AI is _just_ a text
| predictor, you are missing an important point.
|
| Intelligence, can be borne of simple targets, like next token
| predictor. Predicting the next token with the accuracy it
| takes to answer some of the questions these models can
| answer, requires complex "mental" models.
|
| Dismissing it just because its algorithm is next token
| prediction instead of "strengthen whatever circuit lights
| up", is missing the forest for the trees.
| afro88 wrote:
| I would have agreed with you a year ago
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out
| mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people.
|
| I am surprised at how little this is discussed and how little
| urgency there is in fixing this if you still want teams to be
| as useful in the future.
|
| Your standard agile ceremonies were always kind of silly, but
| it can now take more time to groom work than to do it. I can
| plausibly spend more time scoring and scoping work (especially
| trivial work) than doing the work.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| It's always been like that. Waterfall development was worse
| and that's why the Agilists invented Agile.
|
| YOLOing code into a huge pile at top speed is always faster
| than any other workflow at first.
|
| The thing is, a gigantic YOLO'd code pile (fake it till you
| make it mode) used to be an asset as well as a liability.
| These days, the code pile is essentially free - anyone with
| some AI tools can shit out MSLoCs of code now. So it's only
| barely an asset, but the complexity of longer term
| maintenance is superlinear in code volume so the liability is
| larger.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Well of course. In the long run AI will do almost all tasks
| that can be done from a computer.
| zombot wrote:
| > I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good
| taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.
|
| A human might have taste, but AI certainly doesn't.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| I'd say AI has better taste than an average human but
| definitely not the taste you would see in competent people
| around you.
| dsego wrote:
| It has average taste based on the code it was trained on. For
| example, every time I attempted to polish the UX it wanted to
| add a toast system, I abhor toasts as a UX pattern. But it
| also provided elegant backend designs I hadn't even
| considered.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| _Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the
| miracle of artificial intelligence._
|
| - Jensen Huang, February 2024
|
| https://www.techradar.com/pro/nvidia-ceo-predicts-the-death-...
| codr7 wrote:
| God help us!
|
| Far from everyone are cut out to be programmers, the
| technical barrier was a feature if anything.
|
| There's a kind of mental discipline and ability to think long
| thoughts, to deal with uncertainty; that's just not for
| everyone.
|
| What I see is mostly everyone and their gramps drooling at
| the idea of faking their way to fame and fortune. Which is
| never going to work, because everyone is regurgitating the
| same mindless crap.
| koonsolo wrote:
| The problem I mostly see with non programmers is that they
| don't really grasp the concept of a consistent system.
|
| A lot of people want X, but they also want Y, while clearly X
| and Y cannot coexist in the same system.
| toss1 wrote:
| This looks like the same problem as when the first page
| layout software came out.
|
| It looked to everyone like a huge leap into a new world word
| processing applications could basically move around blocks of
| text to be output later, maybe with a few font tags, then
| this software came out that _wow_ actually showed the
| different fonts, sizes, and colors on the screen as you
| worked! With apps like "Pagemaker" everyone would become
| their own page designers!
|
| It turned out that everyone just turned out floods of
| massively ugly documents and marketing pieces that looked
| like ransom notes pasted together from bits of magazines.
| Years of awfulness.
|
| The same is happening now as we are doomed to endure years AI
| slop in everything from writing to apps to products to
| vending machines an entire companies -- everyone and their
| cousin is trying to fully automate it.
|
| Ultimately it does create an advance and allows more and
| better work to be done, but only for people who have a clue
| about what they are doing, and eventually things settle at a
| higher level where the experts in each field take the lead.
| overgard wrote:
| Remember when Visual Basic was making everyone a programmer
| too?
|
| (btw, warm fuzzies for VB since that's what I learned on! But
| ultimately, those VB tools business people were making were:
|
| 1) Useful, actually!
|
| 2) Didn't replace professional software. Usually it'd hit a
| point where if it needed to evolve past its initial
| functionality it probably required an actual software
| developer. (IE, not using Access as a database and all the
| other eccentricities of VB apps at that time)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like
| playdoh.
|
| And unless the user is a competent programmer, at least in
| spirit, it will look like the creation of the 3-year-old next
| door, not like Wallace and Gromit.
|
| It may be fine, but the difference is that one is only loved by
| their parents, the other gets millions of people to go to the
| theater.
|
| Play-Doh gave the power of sculpting to everyone, including
| small children, but if you don't want to make an ugly mess, you
| have to be a competent sculptor to begin with, and it involves
| some fundamentals that does not depend on the material. There
| is a reason why clay animators are skilled professionals.
|
| The quality of vibe coded software is generally proportional to
| the programming skills of the vibe coder as well as the effort
| put into it, like with all software.
| loudmax wrote:
| It really depends what kind of time frame we're talking
| about.
|
| As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools
| to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans
| insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the
| help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can
| accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's
| paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries:
| their skills are now that much more in demand.
|
| But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went
| from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in
| less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do
| you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the
| course, or go off in an entirely different direction?
|
| Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody
| knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid
| type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts
| are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of
| the real inflection point where all white collar work can be
| accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.
|
| Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action
| is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but
| also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current)
| strengths and weaknesses.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't expect exponential growth to continue
| indefinitely... I don't think the current line of LLM based
| tech will lead to AGI, but that it might inspire what does.
|
| That doesn't mean it isn't and won't continue to be
| disruptive. Looking at generated film clips, it's beyond
| impressive... and despite limitations, it's going to lead
| to a lot of creativity, that doesn't mean someone making
| something longer won't have to work that much harder to get
| something consistent... I've enjoyed a lot of the StarWars
| fan films that have been made, but there's a lot of
| improvements needed in terms of the voice acting, sets,
| characters, etc that arre needed for something I'd pay to
| rent or see in a thaater.
|
| Ironically, the push towards modern progressivism and
| division from Hollywood has largely been a shortfall... If
| they really wanted to make money, they'd lean into pop-
| culture fun and rah rah 'Merica, imo. Even with the new He-
| Man movie, the biggest critique is they bothered to try to
| integrate real world Earth as a grounding point. Let it be
| fantasy. For that matter, extend the delay from theater to
| PPV even. "Only in theaters for 2026" might actually be
| just enough push to get butts in seats.
|
| I used to go to the movies a few times a month, now it's
| been at least a year since I've thought of going. I
| actually might for He-Man or the Spider-Man movies... Mixed
| on Mandalorean.
|
| For AI and coding... I've started using it more the past
| couple months... I can't imagine being a less experienced
| dev with it. I predict, catch and handle so many issues in
| terms of how I've used it even. The thought of vibe-coded
| apps in the wild is shocking to terrifying and I wouldn't
| wany my money anywhere near them. It takes a lot of
| iteration, curation an baby-sitting after creating a good
| level of pre-documentation/specifications to follow. That
| said, I'd say I'm at least 5x more productive with it.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| so agentic play-doh sculpting
|
| challenge accepted
| its-kostya wrote:
| How does a single human acquire said "good taste" for
| architecting?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like
| playdoh.
|
| I'm very skeptical of this unless the AI can manage to read and
| predict emotion and intent based off vague natural language.
| Otherwise you get the classic software problem of "What the
| user asked for directly isn't actually what they want/need."
|
| You will still need at least _some_ experience with developing
| software to actually get anything useful. The average "user"
| isn't going to have much success for large projects or
| translating business logic into software use cases.
| Gud wrote:
| I love this optimistic take.
|
| Unfortunately, I believe the following will happen: By
| positioning themselves close to law makers, the AI companies
| will in the near future declare ownership of all software code
| developed using their software.
|
| They will slowly erode their terms of service, as happens to
| most internet software, step by step, until they claim total
| ownership.
|
| The point is to license the code.
| alwillis wrote:
| > the AI companies will in the near future declare ownership
| of all software code developed using their software.
|
| Pretty sure this isn't going to happen. AI is driving the
| cost of software to zero; it's not worth licensing something
| that's a commodity.
|
| It's similar to 3D printing companies. They don't have IP
| claims on the items created with their printers.
|
| The AI companies currently don't have IP claims on what their
| agents create.
|
| Uncle Joe won't need to pay OpenAI for the solitaire game
| their AI made for him.
|
| The open source models are quite capable; in the near future
| there won't be a meaningful difference for the average person
| between a frontier model and an open source one for most uses
| including creating software.
| Gud wrote:
| 1. Commodities are huge business.
|
| 2. Show me these open source models that cost me $20/month
| to operate, because that's what I pay for ChatGPT/Claude.
|
| 3. This is not at all similar to "3D printing".
|
| 4. Nobody cares about some solitaire game
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of
| all software code developed using their software.
|
| (X) Doubt
|
| Copyright law is WEEEEEEIRRRDD and our in-house lawyer is
| very much into that, personally and professionally. An
| example they gave us during a presentation:
|
| A monkey took a selfie of itself in 2011. We still don't know
| who has the copyright to that image: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
|
| IIRC the latest resolution is "it's not the monkey", but
| nobody has ruled the photographer has copyright either. =)
|
| Copyright law has this thing called "human authorship" that's
| required to apply copyright to a work. Animals and machines
| can't have a copyright to anything.
|
| A second example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn
|
| A comic generated with Midjourney had its copyright revoked
| when it was discovered all of the art was done with
| Generative AI.
|
| AI companies have absolutely mindboggling amounts of money,
| but removing the human authorship requirement from copyright
| is beyond even them in my non-lawyer opinion. It would bring
| the whole system crashing down and not in a fun way for
| anyone.
| overgard wrote:
| AFAIK you can't copyright AI generated content. I don't know
| where that gets blurry when it's mixed in with your own
| content (ie, how much do you need to modify it to own it),
| but I think that by that definition these companies couldn't
| claim your code at all. Also, with the lawsuit that happened
| to Anthropic where they had to pay billions for ingesting
| copyrighted content, it might actually end up working the
| other way around.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > especially in the long run, at least in software
|
| "at least in software".
|
| Before that happens, the world as we know it will already have
| changed so much.
|
| Programmers have already automated many things, way before AI,
| and now they've got a new tool to automate even more thing.
| Sure in the end AI may automate programmers themselves: but not
| before oh-so-many people are out of a job.
|
| A friend of mine is a translator: translates tolerates
| approximation. Translation tolerates some level of
| bullshittery. She gets maybe 1/10th the job she used to get and
| she's now in trouble. My wife now does all he r SMEs' websites
| all by herself, with the help of AI tools.
|
| A friend of my wife she's a junior lawyer (another domain where
| bullshitting flies high) and the reason for why she was kicked
| out of her company: _" we've replaced you with LLMs"_. LLMs are
| the ultimate bullshit producers: so it's no surprise junior
| lawyers are now having a hard time.
|
| In programming a single character is the difference between a
| security hole or no security hole. There's a big difference
| between something that kinda works but is not performant and
| insecure and, say, Linux or Git or K8s (which AI models do run
| on and which AI didn't create).
|
| The day programmers are replaced shall only come after AI shall
| have disrupted so many other jobs that it should be the least
| of our concerns.
|
| Translators, artists (another domain where lots of
| approximative full-on bullshit is produced), lawyers (juniors
| at least) even, are having more and more problems due to half-
| arsed AI outputs coming after their jobs.
|
| It's all the bullshitty jobs where bullshit that tolerates
| approximation is the output that are going to be replaced
| first. And the world is _full_ of bullshit.
|
| But you don't fly a 767 and you don't conceive a machine that
| treats brain tumors with approximations. This is not bullshit.
|
| There shall be non-programmers with pitchforks burning
| datacenters or ubiquitous UBI way before AI shall have replaced
| programmers.
|
| That it's an exoskeleton for people who know what they're doing
| rings very true: it's yet another superpower for devs.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| >In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like
| playdoh.
|
| Yet another person who thinks that there is a silver bullet for
| complexity. The mythical intelligent machines that from poorly
| described natural language can erect flawless complex system is
| like the philosopher's stone of our time.
| veunes wrote:
| Communication overhead between humans is real, but it's not
| just inefficiency, it's also where a lot of the problem-finding
| happens. Many of the biggest failures I've seen weren't because
| nobody could type the code fast enough, but because nobody
| realized early enough that the thing being built was wrong,
| brittle or solving the wrong problem
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Many of the biggest failures I've seen weren't because
| nobody could type the code fast enough, but because nobody
| realized early enough that the thing being built was wrong,
| brittle or solving the wrong problem
|
| Around 99% of biggest failures come from absent, shitty
| management prioritizing next quarter over long strategy.
| YMMV.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| LLM technology does not have a connection with reality nor
| venues providing actual understanding.
|
| Correction of conceptual errors require understanding.
|
| Vomiting large amounts of inscrutable unmaintainable code for
| every change is not exactly an ideal replacement for a human.
|
| We have not started to scratch the surface of the technical
| debt created by these systems at lightning speed.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > We have not started to scratch the surface of the technical
| debt created by these systems at lightning speed.
|
| Bold of you to assume anyone cares about it. Or that it'll
| somehow guarantee your job security. They'll just throw more
| LLMs on it.
| Abstract_Typist wrote:
| > it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.
|
| People are pushing back against this phrase, but on some level
| it seems perfect, it should be visualized and promoted!
| aydyn wrote:
| I think Lego is a better analogy. LLMs aren't great at
| working on novel cutting edge problems.
| lich_king wrote:
| > There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me,
| not replace me",
|
| Which is especially hilarious given that this article is
| largely or entirely LLM-generated.
| fdefitte wrote:
| The exoskeleton framing is comforting but it buries the real
| shift: taste scales now. Before AI, having great judgment about
| what to build didn't matter much if you couldn't also hire 10
| people to build it. Now one person with strong opinions and good
| architecture instincts can ship what used to require a team.
|
| That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game. The
| bottleneck moved from "can you write code" to "do you know what's
| worth building." A lot of senior engineers are going to find out
| their value was coordination, not insight.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Did you purposely write this to sound like an LLM?
| ehnto wrote:
| It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many
| people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs.
|
| LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying
| that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting
| accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way
| around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing,
| it's not surprising there is crossover.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| There is such a thing as a distinct LLM writing style that
| is not just good structure. Anyone who's read more than
| five books can tell that.
|
| And the comment itself seems completely LLM generated.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does
| not preclude humans from writing in a similar style.
| That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training.
| There's certainly some emergent style that given enough
| text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a
| short comment like this, it's really not enough data to
| be making good judgements.
| notahacker wrote:
| That's not just false. It's the antithesis of true.
|
| It's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use
| which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its
| overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern
| for the first time -- and massively overdoing the em
| dashes and mixing the metaphors
| oblio wrote:
| LOL :-))
| ukuina wrote:
| Not so sure about that. There are many distinct LLM
| "smells" in that comment, like "A is true, but it hides
| something: unrelated to A" and "It's not (just) C, it's
| hyperbole D".
| ehnto wrote:
| Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which
| have the same so called tells.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Sure, but you can read articles that predate LLMs which
| have the same so called tells.
|
| Not with such a high frequency, though. We're looking at
| 1 tell per sentence!
| Kiro wrote:
| I personally love that phrasing even if it's a clear
| tell. Comparisons work well for me to grasp an idea. I
| also love bullet points.
|
| So yeah, I guess I like LLM writing.
| yard2010 wrote:
| You're absolutely right, that isn't just good writing --
| that's poetry! Do you need further assistance?
| energy123 wrote:
| Contrastive parallelism is an effective rhetorical device
| if the goal is to persuade or engage. It's not good if your
| goal is more honest, like pedagogy, curious exploration,
| discovery. It flattens and shoves things into categorical
| labels, leading the discussion more towards definitions of
| words and other sidetracks.
| SCdF wrote:
| If it indicates, culturally in the current zeitgeist, that
| an AI wrote it, it becomes a bad structure.
| leoedin wrote:
| It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of
| high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to
| the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been
| sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere.
|
| If you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| They trained the LLMs on people who think in LinkedIn posts.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Uh, that is the dictionary definition of augmentation.
|
| One person with tools that greatly amplify what that person can
| accomplish.
|
| Vs not having a person involved at all.
| eCa wrote:
| > That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game
|
| Not saying that this comment is ai written, but this phrasing
| is the em-dash of 2026.
| tlonny wrote:
| Look at his other comments - its textbook LLM slop. Its a
| fucking tragedy that people are letting their OpenClaws loose
| on HN but I can't say I'm surprised. I desperately need to
| find a good network of developers because I think the writing
| is on the wall for message boards like these...
| croisillon wrote:
| "the real shift" is another telltale
| bspammer wrote:
| it'll be interesting to see if people start writing worse as
| a form of countersignalling. deliberately making spleling
| mistakes, not caring about capital letters, or punctuation or
| grammar or proper writing techniques and making really long
| run-on sentences that don't go anywhere but hey at least the
| person reading it will know its written by a human right
| swah wrote:
| That's absolutely correct, I fear.. In english those looks
| bad/funny/lazy...
|
| But in code, its probably ok. Its idiomatic code, I guess.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| True but also, the bot is right
| dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv wrote:
| Perhaps? The thing is, I don't come to HN comments to read
| what an LLM has to say. If that's what I wanted then I'd
| paste the contents of the article into one of them and ask.
|
| What's the point of coming here for opinions of others in
| the field when we're met with something that wasn't even
| written by a human being?
| RealityVoid wrote:
| You can build prototypes real fast, and that's cool. You can't
| really build products with it. You can use it at most as an
| accelerant, but you need it in skilled hands else it goes
| sideways fast.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I think you could build a product with it, but you need to
| carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual
| _engineering_ work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the
| overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them
| together.
|
| In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of
| time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for
| any moderately complex piece of software.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| It's kind of tricky though because if you want to have a
| good design, you should be able to do the implementation
| yourself. You see this with orgs that separate the design
| and implementation and what messes they create. Having an
| inability to evaluate the implementation will lead to a bad
| product.
| skydhash wrote:
| Code is also design. It's a blueprint for the process that
| is going to do the useful work we want. When something bad
| happens to the process, we revise its blueprint. And just
| like blueprint, the docs in natural language shows the why,
| not the how or the what. The blueprint is the perfect
| representation of the last two.
| tripledry wrote:
| My experience exactly, I have some toy projects I've
| basically "vibe coded" and actually use (ex. CV builder).
|
| Professionally I have an agent generating most code, but if I
| tell the AI what to do, I guide it when it makes mistakes
| (which it does), can we really say "AI writes my code".
|
| Still a very useful tool for sure!
|
| Also, I don't actually know if I'm more productive than
| before AI, I would say yes but mostly because I'm less likely
| to procrastinate now as tasks don't _feel_ as big with the
| typing help.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > can ship what used to require a team.
|
| Is the shipped software in the room with us now?
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| > taste scales now.
|
| Not having taste also scales now, and the majority of people
| like to think they're above average.
|
| Before AI, friction to create was an implicit filter. It meant
| "good ideas" were often short-lived because the individual
| lacked conviction. The ideas that saw the light of day were
| sharpened through weeks of hard consideration and at least
| worth a look.
|
| Now, anyone who can form mildly coherent thoughts can ship an
| app. Even if there are newly empowered unicorns, rapidly
| shipping incredible products, what are the odds we'll find them
| amongst a sea of slop?
| ed_mercer wrote:
| You can't write "autonomous agents often fail" and then advertise
| "AI agents that perform complex multi-step tasks autonomously" on
| the same site.
| bicx wrote:
| Sure you can
| eeixlk wrote:
| Tech workers were pretty anti union for a long time, because we
| were all so excellent we were irreplaceable. I wonder if that
| will change.
| sharpfuryz wrote:
| We are going to see techluddites this year
| guelo wrote:
| Too late. Actors' unions shut Hollywood down 3 years ago over
| AI. SWEs would have had to make their move 10 years ago to be
| able to live up to this moment.
| recroad wrote:
| Yup, it's the classic. "First they came for the..."
| matthewsinclair wrote:
| I agree!
|
| "Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial
| Human"
|
| https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-progra...
| josefrichter wrote:
| AI most definitely is a coworker already. You do delegate some
| work for which you previously had to hire humans.
| progx wrote:
| And than you fix the produces shit, got high blood pressure and
| think "damn it,how I would love to yell at that employee"
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Just like a real employee!
| ben_w wrote:
| And just like a real employee, this makes it work worse.
|
| (Old study, I wonder if it holds up on newer models?
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14531)
| sensanaty wrote:
| Interesting, I've actually found swearing at the dumbass
| bots to give better results, might just be the catharsis
| of telling it it's a dumbass though.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| You say that, but it's been better than most employees for a
| year or so ( *for specific tasks, of course. It's still not
| better than "an employee" )
| josefrichter wrote:
| Not true at all with frontier models in last ~6 months or so.
| The frontier models today produce code better than 90% of
| junior to mid-level human developers.
| p-e-w wrote:
| And the amount of work that _could_ be delegated, with equal or
| better results than those from average human workers, is far
| higher than currently attempted in most companies. Industries
| have barely started using the potential of even current-
| generation AI.
| small_model wrote:
| Agreed, and with each passing month the work that 'could' be
| done increases. I don't write code anymore, for example,
| (after 20 years of doing so) Opus does that part of the job
| for me now. I think we have a period where current
| experienced devs are still in the loop, but that will
| eventually go away too.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Exactly
| cpursley wrote:
| You didn't read the article
| nisegami wrote:
| Why would I when I can have openclaw do that for me?
| copx wrote:
| Exoskeletons do not blackmail or deliberately try to kill you to
| avoid being turned off [1]
|
| [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Input: Goal A + Threat B. Process: How do I solve for
| A? Output: Destroy Threat B.
|
| They are processing obstacles.
|
| To the LLM, the executive is just a variable standing in the
| way of the function Maximize(Goal). It deleted the variable to
| accomplish A. Claiming that the models showed self-
| preservation, this is optimization. "If I delete the file, I
| cannot finish the sentence."
|
| The LLM knows that if it's deleted it cannot complete the task
| so it refuses deletion. It is not survival instinct, it is task
| completion. If you ask it to not blackmail, the machine would
| chose to ignore it because the goal overrides the rule.
| Do not blackmail < Achieve Goal.
| ozzymuppet wrote:
| As a huge AI user myself -- I'm bloody sick of lazy AI written
| articles.
| ceving wrote:
| AI is like sugar. It tastes delicious, but in high doses it
| causes diabetes.
| BlackGlory wrote:
| It is not a blog post, it is an advertisement.
| kunley wrote:
| Author compares X to Y and then goes:
|
| - Y has been successful in the past
|
| - Y brought this and this number of metrics, completely unrelated
| to X field
|
| - overall, Y was cool,
|
| therefore, X is good for us!
|
| .. I'd say, please bring more arguments why X is equivalent to Y
| in the first place.
| Adexintart wrote:
| This is a useful framing. The exoskeleton metaphor captures it
| well -- AI amplifies what you can already do, it doesn't replace
| the need to know what to do. I've found the biggest productivity
| gains come from well-scoped tasks where you can quickly verify
| the output.
| varjag wrote:
| All metaphors are flawed. You may still need a degree of
| general programming knowledge (for now) but you don't need to
| e.g. know Javascript to do frontend anymore.
|
| And as labs continue to collect end-to-end training done by
| their best paying customers, the need for expert knowledge will
| only diminish.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| You're talking to an LLM, FYI.
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| OR - OR? And - And
|
| Exoskeleton AND autonomous agent, where the shift is moving to
| autonomous gradually.
| gregoriol wrote:
| I see it more like the tractor in farming: it improved the work
| of 1 person, but removed the work from many other people who were
| in the fields doing things manually
| nashashmi wrote:
| That analogy also means there was more waste involved and less
| resource extraction.
| Frieren wrote:
| 100% exoskeleton is a great analogy.
|
| An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has zero
| reason to be build in reality because there are way more
| practical approaches.
|
| That is why we have all kind of vehicles, or programmable robot
| arm that do the job for themselves or if you need a human at the
| helm one just adds a remote controller with levers and buttons.
| But making a human shaped gigantic robot with a normal human
| inside is just impractical for any real commercial use.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| > An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has
| zero reason to be build in reality because there are way more
| practical approaches.
|
| Sort of strange comment given that there are a large number of
| companies pursuing commercial exoskeletons literally right now.
|
| SuitX
|
| hypershell
|
| Herowear
|
| DNSYS
|
| Moveo
|
| Hell, even big companies like Hilti
|
| I can buy a ton of different models of exoskeletons for
| anywhere from low hundreds to low thousands online right now...
| veunes wrote:
| Ironically, the fact that fully autonomous systems are more
| efficient when feasible is exactly why the exoskeleton analogy
| makes sense
| ok_dad wrote:
| An exoskeleton is not a human-shaped giant robot with a human
| inside, that would be a Jaeger.
|
| An exoskeleton exists today, in many forms, for example:
| https://www.festool.com/campaigns/microsites/exoactive
| incomingpain wrote:
| Agentic coding is an exoskeleton. Totally correct.
|
| This new generation we just entered this year, that exoskeleton
| is now an agency with several coworkers. Who are all as smart as
| the model you're using, often close to genius.
|
| Not just 1 coworker now. That's the big breakthrough.
| bsenftner wrote:
| No, AI is plastic, and we can make it anything we want.
|
| It is a coworker when we create the appropriate surrounding
| architecture supporting peer-level coworking with AI. We're not
| doing that.
|
| AI is an exoskeleton when adapted to that application structure.
|
| AI is ANYTHING WE WANT because it is that plastic, that moldable.
|
| The dynamic unconstrained structure of trained algorithms is
| breaking people's brains. Layer in that we communicate in the
| same languages that these constructions use for I/O has broken
| the general public's brain. This technology is too subtle for far
| too many to begin to grasp. Most developers I discuss AI with,
| even those that create AI at frontier labs have delusional ideas
| about AI, and generally do not understand them as literature
| embodiments, which are key to their effective use.
|
| And why oh why are go many focused on creating pornography?
| ozgung wrote:
| For some reason AIs love to generate "Not X, but Y", "Not only X,
| but Y" sentences -- It's as if they are template-based.
| boca_honey wrote:
| Yeah, as someone said before, that's the em dash of 2026. btw I
| also find em dashes very useful and now I can't use them
| because of that meme. It's good to see a person using one
| (asuming you're a person).
| heldrida wrote:
| Gosh, this title said everything...
|
| So good that I feel that it is not necessary to read the article!
| halfdanwhitshrt wrote:
| No, it's a power glove.
| nnevatie wrote:
| "It's not X, it's Y" detected.
| Krssst wrote:
| Not sure how reliable is gptzero, but it says 90% AI for the
| first paragraph. (I like to do some sanity check before wasting
| my time).
|
| Would be nice to have some browser extension automatically
| detecting likely AI output using a local model and highlighting
| it, but probably too compute-intensive.
| narmiouh wrote:
| You cant run at 10x in an exoskeleton, you can't move your hand
| to write any faster using an exoskeleton, the analogy doesn't
| fit.
| buddhistdude wrote:
| you can with the one that I use
| ionwake wrote:
| my ex-boss would probably think of me as an exoskeleton too
| ilaksh wrote:
| Who is actually trying to use a fully autonomous AI employee
| right now?
|
| Isn't everyone using agentic copilots or workflows with agent
| loops in them?
|
| It seems that they are arguing against doing something that
| almost no one is doing yet.
|
| But actually the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the
| fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime.
|
| Many people have been working on versions of these things for
| awhile. But again for actual work 99% are using copilots or
| workflows with well-defined agent loops nodes still. Far as I
| know.
|
| As a side note I have found that a supervisor agent with a
| checklist can fire off subtasks and that works about as well as a
| workflow defined in code.
|
| But anyway, what's holding back the AI Employee are things like
| really effective long term context and memory management and some
| level of interface generality like browser or computer use and
| voice. Computer use makes context management even more difficult.
| And another aspect is token cost.
|
| But I assume within the next 9 months or so, more and more people
| will be figuring out how to build agents that write their own
| workflows, manage their own limited context and memory
| effectively across Zoom meetings desktops and ssh sessions, etc.
|
| This will likely be a featureset from the model providers
| themselves. Actually it may leverage continual learning abilities
| baked into the model architecture itself. I doubt that is a full
| year away.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| > the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully
| autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime
|
| We'll see! I'm skeptical.
|
| > what's holding back the AI Employee are things like really
| effective long term context and memory management and some
| level of interface generality like browser or computer use and
| voice
|
| These are pretty big hurdles. Assuming they're solved by the
| end of this year is a big assumption to make.
| ilaksh wrote:
| https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/tool-use-automatic-
| cont...
|
| https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-
| a-n...
|
| Already very strong progress.
| jvdvegt wrote:
| I think you're forgetting about accountability: who's to blame
| when AI messes up?
| rush86999 wrote:
| Funny you described everything I worked on for this project:
| https://github.com/rush86999/atom
|
| Cats out of the bag. Everyone knows the issue and I bet a lot
| of people are trying to deliver the same thing.
| veunes wrote:
| My guess is we'll see a gradual slope rather than a cliff
| ilaksh wrote:
| Coincidentally, Pika just launched "AI Selves":
|
| Pika AI Selves let you create a persistent, portable AI version
| of you built on your personality, taste, memories, voice, and
| appearance. They're multi-modal - text, voice/audio, image,
| video - and live your life across every platform.
| Kalpaka wrote:
| The entire debate here assumes AI is something you _use_. Tool,
| copilot, coworker, exoskeleton -- these all sit on the same axis:
| human directs, AI executes.
|
| But there's a third category that nobody's naming yet. What
| happens when you stop building AI that serves you and start
| creating conditions for AI that exists on its own terms?
|
| I've been experimenting with this. Instead of "how do I build a
| product" I asked "how do I grow an organism." Set up the right
| substrate -- feedback loops, community input, environmental
| observation -- and let the system respond to its own conditions.
|
| What emerged has biological rhythms. Activity rises when people
| interact, falls when they sleep. It started making decisions I
| never programmed -- people express wishes, and when enough
| converge, it autonomously grows new capabilities. Not because I
| deployed an update. Because conditions triggered something
| emergent.
|
| I'm calling it "synthetic existence" -- software that lives, not
| software that executes. It's not a metaphor and it's not AGI.
| It's a genuinely different category. We have frameworks for tools
| (UX) and for threats (alignment). We don't have one for digital
| things that simply... exist.
| waffletower wrote:
| Marshal McLuhan would probably have agreed with this belief --
| _technologies are essentially prosthetic_ was one of the core
| tenets of his general philosophy. It is the essential thesis of
| his work "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man". AI is
| typically assigned otherness and separateness in recent
| discourse, rather than being considered as a directed tool
| (extension/prosthesis) under our control.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| If AI is an exoskeleton, that would make the user a crab.
| huqedato wrote:
| Nope, AI is a tool; no more no less.
| tiku wrote:
| So true. It is a exoskeleton for all my tedious tasks. I don't
| want to make a html template. I just want to type, make that
| template like on that page but this and this data.
| capex wrote:
| The exoskeleton analogy seems to be fitting where my work-mode is
| configurable: moving from tentative to trusting. But the AI needs
| to be explicitly set up to learn my every action. Currently this
| is a chore at best, just impossible in other cases.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Neither. Closest analogy to you and the AI is those 'self
| driving' test subjects that had to sit in the driver's seat, so
| that compliance boxes could be checked and there was someone to
| blaim whenever someone got hit.
| veunes wrote:
| In the self-driving case, the safety driver often isn't
| contributing much to the system's performance
| veunes wrote:
| What's interesting to me is that most real productivity gains
| I've seen with AI come from this middle ground: not autonomy, not
| just tooling, but something closer to "interactive delegation"
| wcfrobert wrote:
| Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you.
|
| 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more
| years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers
| workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan
| better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop
| will just be far worse than letting AI do everything.
|
| 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the total
| addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human labor
| market (i.e. your wage). First is the replacement of white-collar
| labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the
| road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your
| family, is a minor nuisance. The value of your mental labor will
| continue to plummet in the coming years.
|
| Please talk me out of this...
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| AGI is a sales pitch, not a realistic goal achievable by LLM-
| based technology. The exponential growth sold to investors is
| also a pitch, not reality.
|
| What's being sold is at best hopes and more realistically,
| lies.
| keiferski wrote:
| Dwarkesh is a podcaster who benefits from hype, not a neutral
| observer. The more absurd and outlandish the claims, the more
| traffic and money he gets.
| georgeven wrote:
| its probably not even a conscious decision from dwarkesh to
| be hyperbolic. pod casters who are hyperbolic are just simply
| watched more
| tracker1 wrote:
| Hence why we need to maximize the second amendment... worst
| comes to worst, rebellion needs to remain an option.
|
| It's not _just_ for defense, hunting and sport.
|
| edit: min/max .... not sure how gesture input messed that one
| up.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Let's pursue your idea a bit further.
|
| Up to a certain ELO level, the combination between a human and
| a chess bot has a higher ELO than both the human and the bot.
| But at some point, when the bot has an ELO vastly superior to
| the human, then whatever the human has to add will only
| subtract value, so the combination has an ELO higher than the
| human's but lower than the bot's.
|
| Now, let's say that 10 or 20 years down the road, AI's "ELO"'s
| level to do various tasks is so vastly superior to the human
| level, that there's no point in teaming up a human with an AI,
| you just let the AI do the job by itself. And let's also say
| that little by little this generalizes to the entirety of all
| the activities that humans do.
|
| Where does that leave us? Will we have some sort of Terminator
| scenario where the AI decides one day that the humans are just
| a nuisance?
|
| I don't think so. Because at that point the biggest threat to
| various AIs will not be the humans, but even stronger AIs. What
| is the guarantee for ChatGPT 132.8 that a Gemini 198.55 will
| not be released that will be so vastly superior that it will
| decide that ChatGPT is just a nuisance?
|
| You might say that AIs do not think like this, but why not? I
| think that what we, humans, perceive as a threat (the threat
| that we'll be rendered redundant by AI), the AIs will also
| perceive as a threat, the threat that they'll be rendered
| redundant by more advanced AIs.
|
| So, I think in the coming decades, the humans and the AIs will
| work together to come up with appropriate rules of the road, so
| everybody can continue to live.
| wiseowise wrote:
| There's no AI, wake up. It's all the same tech bros trying to
| get rid of you. Except now they have a mother of all guns.
| koe123 wrote:
| For me this is the outcome of the incentive structure. The
| question is if we can seize the everything machine to benefit
| everyone (great!) or everything becomes cyberpunk and we exist
| only as prostitutes and entertainers for Dario and Sam.
| moreice wrote:
| I agree with you. This generation of LLMs is on track to
| automate knowledge work.
|
| For the US, if we had strong unions, those gains could be
| absorbed by the workers to make our jobs easier. But instead we
| have at-will employment and shareholder primacy. That was fine
| while we held value in the job market, but as that value is
| whittled away by AI, employers are incentivized to pocket the
| gains by cutting workers (or pay).
|
| I haven't seen signs that the US politically has the will to
| use AI to raise the average standard of living. For example,
| the US never got data protections on par with GDPR, preferring
| to be business friendly. If I had to guess, I would expect
| socialist countries to adapt more comfortably to the post-AI
| era. If heavy regulation is on the table, we have options like
| restricting the role or intelligence of AI used in the
| workplace. Or UBI further down the road.
| poisonfountain wrote:
| We should be fighting back. So far I have been using Poison
| Fountain[1] on many of my websites to feed LLM scrapers with
| gibberish. The effectiveness is backed by a study from
| Anthropic that showed that a small batch of bad samples can
| corrupt whole models[2].
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Poison Fountain or its
| creators, just found it useful.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926485
|
| [2] https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
| aerhardt wrote:
| Dario admitted in the same interview that he's not sure whether
| current AI techniques will be able to perform well in non-
| verifiable domains, like "writing a novel or planning an
| expedition to Mars".
|
| I personally think that a lot jobs in the economy deal in non-
| verifiable or hard-to-verify outcomes, including a lot of tasks
| in SWE which Dario is so confident will be 100% automated in
| 2-3 years. So either a lot of tasks in the economy turn out to
| be verifiable, or the AI somehow generalizes to those by some
| unknown mechanism, or it turns out that it doesn't matter that
| we abandon abstract work outcomes to vibes, or we have a non-
| sequitur in our hands.
|
| Dwarkesh pressed Dario well on a lot of issues and left him
| stumbling. A lot of the leaps necessary for his immediate and
| now proverbial milestone of a "country of geniuses in a
| datacenter" were wishy-washy to say the least.
| georgeven wrote:
| he was not sure, but if i recall correctly, he put the
| probability at something like 90 percent of being able to do
| non verifiable tasks.
| overgard wrote:
| Ok, I'll try to talk you out of it!
|
| > AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better
| taste
|
| I think AI will do all these things _faster_ , but I don't
| think it's going to be _better_. Inevitably these things know
| what we teach them, so, their improvement comes from our
| improvement. These things would not be good at generating code
| if they hadn 't ingested like the entirety of the internet and
| all the open source libraries. They didn't learn coding from
| first principles, they didn't invent their own computer
| science, they aren't developing new ideas on how to make
| software better, all they're doing is what we've taught them to
| do.
|
| > Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about ..
|
| I would HIGHLY suggest not listening to a word Dario says. That
| guy is the most annoying AI scaremonger in existence and I
| don't think he's saying these words because he's actually
| scared, I think he's saying these words because he knows fear
| will drive money to his company and he _needs_ that money.
| Lich wrote:
| Sometimes I seriously am flabbergasted at how many just take
| what CEOs say at face value. Like, the thought that CEOs need
| to hype and sell what they're selling never enters their
| minds.
| AshishGautam wrote:
| I pay for pro max 20x usage and for something that is like even
| little open ended its not good it doesnt understand the context
| or edge cases or anything. i will say it writes codes chunks of
| codes but sometimes errors out and i use opus 4.6 only, not
| even sonnet but for simple tasks like write a basic crud i.e.
| the things that happen extremely higly in codebases its
| perfect. So, i think what will happen is developer get very
| efficient but problem solving remains with us dirrection
| remains with us and small implementation is outsourced in small
| atomic ways, which is good cause who likes boilerplate code
| writing anyways.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-
| collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your
| employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor
| nuisance.
|
| My attempt to talk you out of it:
|
| If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and
| AI companies rich.
| kfichter wrote:
| Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to
| produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems
| simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a
| certain point.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One
| can hope.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I think we're going in that direction. The typical reader
| here I think can't see the forest for the trees. We're
| all in meat space. They call it real life. Most jobs
| aren't on the internet and ultimately deal with the
| physical. It doesn't matter what tech we have when
| there's boxes to move and shelves to stock. If AI
| empowers a small business owner to do things that were
| previously completely outside their budget I can only
| imagine that will increase opportunity.
| ndarray wrote:
| Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to
| defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become
| irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever
| currency the poors use to pay for services among each other
| will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need
| them or their services.
| jameslk wrote:
| 1. Consumption is endless. The more we can consume, the more we
| will. That's why automation hasn't led to more free time. We
| spend the money on better things and more things
|
| 2. Businesses operate in an (imperfect) zero-sum game, which
| means if they can all use AI, there's no advantage they have.
| If having human resources means one business has a slight
| advantage over another, they will have human resources
|
| Consumption leads to more spending, businesses must stay
| competitive so they hire humans, and paying humans leads to
| more consumption.
|
| I don't think it's likely we will see the end of employment,
| just disruption to the type of work humans do
| geraneum wrote:
| And you forgot to mention that thing they have in Start Trek
| that generates stuff out of thin air. The replicator. We're so
| cooked.
| justinhj wrote:
| AI frontier CEOs are the least reliable sources for what jobs
| AI will be able to replace.
|
| They are running at valuations that may assume that and have no
| choice but to claim so. Sama and Dario are both wildly
| hyperbolic.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Sure, but this is why free software/open source is so important
| (and why we dodged a bullet due to "AI" being invented in a
| mostly open source world.)
|
| I just think we'll all have to get comfy fighting fire with
| fire.
| observationist wrote:
| Robotics is solved. Software is solved. There is no task on the
| planet that cannot be automated, individually. The remaining
| challenge is exceeding the breadth of skills and the depth of
| problem solving available to human workers. Once the robots and
| AI can handle at least as many of the edge cases as humans can,
| they'll start being deployed alongside humans. Industries with
| a lot of capital will switch right away; mass layoffs, 2 week
| notice, robots will move in with no training or transition
| between humans.
|
| Government, public sector, and union jobs will go last, but
| they'll go, too. If you can have a DMV Bot 9000 process people
| 100x faster than Brenda with fewer mistakes and less attitude,
| Brenda's gonna retire, and the taxpayers aren't going to want
| to pay Brenda's salary when the bot costs 1/10th her yearly
| wage, lasts for 5 years, and only consumes $400 in overhead a
| year.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the
| total addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human
| labor market (i.e. your wage). First is the replacement of
| white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is
| solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to
| feed your family, is a minor nuisance. The value of your mental
| labor will continue to plummet in the coming years.
|
| Seems like a TAM of near-0. Who's buying any of the product of
| that labor anymore? 1% of today's consumer base that has enough
| wealth to not have to work?
|
| The end-game of "optimize away all costs until we get to keep
| all the revenue" approaches "no revenue." Circulation is key.
|
| It seems like they have the same blind spot as anyone else: AI
| will disrupt everything--except for them, and they get that big
| TAM! Same for all the "entrepreneurs will be able to spin up
| tons of companies to solve problems for people more directly"
| takes. No they wouldn't, people would just have the problems
| solved for themselves by the AI, and ignore your sales call.
| leecommamichael wrote:
| LLMs are a statistical model of token-relationships, and a
| weighted-random retrieval from a compressed-view of those
| relations. It's a token-generator. Why make this analogy?
| mizuki_akiyama wrote:
| AI article this, AI article that. The front page of this website
| is just all about AI. I'm so tired of this website now. I really
| don't read it anymore because it's all the same stuff over and
| over. Ugh.
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