[HN Gopher] The AI Great Leap Forward
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The AI Great Leap Forward
Author : jodah
Score : 67 points
Date : 2026-04-08 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (leehanchung.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (leehanchung.github.io)
| supliminal wrote:
| What's the story with Klarna? Any details around it?
| madrox wrote:
| It's the punchline at the very end of the article. They ended
| up with a different SaaS vendor.
| supliminal wrote:
| Yeah I read through it but all of that is surface level. Any
| real insider info?
|
| Not sure why I was downvoted. I read the post and the linked
| articles.
| mholm wrote:
| Decent sentiment and analogy, but writing this with AI with
| hackneyed examples undercuts the point
| turtletontine wrote:
| I'm noticing one hallmark of blog posts made by people who talk
| to LLMs all day: they have 1-3 interesting points hidden in
| paragraphs upon paragraphs beating the horse dead. Your
| favorite LLM might tell you every thought is brilliant and all
| your words are beautiful, but please... edit it down. At the
| very least, out of respect for other people's time.
| sph wrote:
| Haven't you heard? Putting in effort is not cool any more.
| The best they can do is ask an LLM to edit it down.
| justherefornews wrote:
| It's called body text or even "bread text" in some languages.
| It was historically meant to pad the pay for bread (writers
| got paid per word). Americans still do to this day and
| writing and blogs reflect it as well.
| IanCal wrote:
| > Today's backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI.
|
| Getting real tired of people new to AI thinking only recent LLMs
| are AI somehow. BoW was a pretty solid technique and that only
| requires you to learn how to count to one.
| mrbungie wrote:
| We can thank our AI overlords like sama and damodei for that.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| The outputs were wrong 2 years ago maybe.
| 348asGaq7 wrote:
| This is a great comparison. The US dominated software industry is
| centrally planned and in many ways run like a communist country,
| taking into account the whims of the current chairman in
| Washington.
|
| If the chairman dictates DEI, DEI it is. Most software developers
| put up the proper flags in their Twitter "bios" and purged
| opponents. The same developers now queue to work for Zuckerberg's
| "male energy" company.
|
| If the chairman and the industry dictate AI, AI it is. The same
| people who said girls and coal miners have to code now talk about
| efficiency, products and rationalize layoffs.
|
| This is the product of an industry that has been dominated by
| bullshitters for at least two decades.
| skybrian wrote:
| If you want to show that that there's a risk of disaster you need
| to do better than making a silly analogy. Companies will often
| start expensive projects that fail and then they pick themselves
| up and move on. Big, profitable companies can afford bigger
| failures. Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's
| metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford
| to experiment.
|
| So which companies are betting so big that it might actually
| threaten them? Oracle maybe?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Seems clear to me that OpenAI at this point is a Ponzi scheme
| waiting to collapse. This is why they are trying to IPO and
| dump their shares on the public market before they go bankrupt.
| skybrian wrote:
| Suppose they do somehow collapse. How does that cause wider
| problems? Their competitors will pick up customers.
| layer8 wrote:
| If they collapse, then because their value proposition
| doesn't add up. It's unclear why that should be different
| with their competitors then.
| e3df wrote:
| "Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse
| stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to
| experiment."
|
| Only with the blessing of shareholders. Frankly Google's search
| box and ad-tech has been carrying all of its failed bets but at
| some point people will start questioning if Google is returning
| enough cash given the results of new investments. Google's
| management does not own the cash - it holds the cash on behalf
| of the owners.
| vingilot wrote:
| Note that the author of this blog post is also the author of a
| soon-to-be-published Manning book on safely implementing AI
| systems.
| gbnwl wrote:
| Liked the article in general, but
|
| > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years
| they'll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and
| rewrites from scratch.
|
| Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong.
| There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never
| justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and
| will forever be, impossible for AI to address, and will for some
| reason require humans to fix. Working at pace with agents I
| accrue tech debt every day, then go through the code nightly,
| again with agents, to clean and tidy everything up.
|
| The more I see this view espoused the more bizzare it seems.
| People's assumptions seem to be "if AI couldn't one shot this
| perfectly the first time, then it's useless to try to have it go
| back over the codebase and identify and address issues". This
| doesn't match my personal experience at all, second or third
| passes over code with CC or Codex are almost always helpful and
| weed out critical issues, but I'm open to hearing from the rest
| of the HN crowd on their experiences on this.
| apsurd wrote:
| Tech debt used here is likely a catch-all term, and you're
| disagreeing, reasonably so, with one definition.
|
| I think human understanding of the surface area of a company is
| already very unwieldy. AI balloons the surface area. at some
| point using more AI to solve AI is reasonable! But to whatever
| extent a human needs to interface and manage this world, that's
| the accrued debt.
| hperrin wrote:
| AIs don't produce well organized code. They duplicate effort,
| which is tech debt. Maybe one day they will be able to clear
| their own tech debt. And who knows, maybe they'll still be
| heavily subsidized by VC money then.
| kvirani wrote:
| This is just false.
| deklesen wrote:
| This also seems to implicitly assume that ai models won't get
| better - a bet I am not willing to make currently..
| gbnwl wrote:
| Agreed. The confidence people have to predict what these
| tools will be capable of two years down the line, when it's
| barely been over a year since Claude Code was first released,
| is astounding.
| e3df wrote:
| Models get better with money (reinvestment).
|
| But if there aren't enough returns soon the money will
| eventually dry up for OAI and Anthropic and Google will not
| be trusted with their cash balance.
|
| Its amazing how people here think that money is a play-thing
| and this dance can go on forever. It cant and wont and the
| fear-induced marketing doesnt work forever either.
| gck1 wrote:
| Agreed, but it's a bit nuanced. I'm working on a fairly complex
| project now in a domain where I have no technical experience.
| The first iteration of the project was complete garbage, but it
| was garbage mainly because I asked for things to be done and
| never asked HOW it should be done. Result? Complete, utter
| garbage. It kinda, sorta worked, but again, I would never use
| it in anything important.
|
| Then we went through ~10 complete rewrites based on the
| learnings from previous attempts. As we went through these
| iterations, I became much more knowledgeable of the domain -
| because I saw failure points, I read the resulting code and
| because I asked the right questions.
|
| Without AI, I would likely have given up after iteration 2, and
| certainly would not do 10 iterations.
|
| So the nuance here is that iterating and throwing away the
| entire thing is going to become much cheaper, but not without
| an engineer being in the loop, asking the right questions.
|
| Note: each iteration went through dual reviews of codex and
| opus at each phase with every finding fixed and review saying
| everything is perfect, the best thing on earth.
| deltamidway wrote:
| Great rant! Claw based propaganda posters makes me smile.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Oh god, don't get me started on this. The article goes full
| opera-level tragedy, like we're all marching into some corporate
| gulag where AI eats our souls and the lights go out forever. "The
| famine comes later" my ass. It's peak doomer porn, written to
| make you feel like the sky is falling instead of just another
| round of executive circle jerking.
|
| The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and
| theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital
| transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a
| flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a
| spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your
| undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing
| personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.
|
| Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now.
| But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very
| least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects
| that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the
| future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply
| chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil
| means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My
| child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing
| perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre.
| Been there many times.
|
| Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will
| evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once
| thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge
| siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the
| messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate
| talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I
| would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with
| delegating the project management to someone else below on the
| corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work
| and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always
| need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top
| management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run
| it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many
| times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats.
|
| So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just
| another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll
| be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has
| been.
| tim333 wrote:
| Comparing AI to steel production in the Great Leap Forward seems
| unfair. It's not some communist plan - it's a capitalist free for
| all similar to the industrial revolutions in the UK/US. It won't
| lead to a famine, it'll lead to the chaotic creative destruction
| capitalism usually produces.
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