It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!
I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code.
I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.
I want to write code.
* Being excited to be able to write the pieces of code they want, and not others. When you sit down to write code, you do not do everything from scratch, you lean on libraries, compilers, etc. Take the most annoying boilerplate bit of code you have to write now - would you be happy if a new language/framework popped up that eliminated it?
* Being excited to be able to solve more problems because the code is at times a means to an end. I don't find writing CSS particularly fun but I threw together a tool for making checklists for my kids in very little time using llms and it handled all of the css for printing vs on the screen. I'm interested in solving an optimisation issue with testing right now, but not that interested in writing code to analyse test case perf changes so the latter I got written for me in very little time and it's great. It wasn't really a choice of me or machine, I do not really have the time to focus on those tasks.
* Being excited that others can get the outcomes I've been able to get for at least some problems, without having to learn how to code.
As is tradition, to torture a car analogy, I could be excited for a car that autonomously drives me to the shops despite loving racing rally cars.
I personally don't like it when others who don't know how to code are able to get results using AI. I spent many years of my life and a small fortune learning scarce skills that everyone swore would be the last to ever be automated. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, those skills are being automated and there is seemingly no worthwhile job that can't be automated given enough investment. I am hopeful because the AI still has a long way to go, but even with the improvements it currently has, it might ultimately destroy the tech industry. I'm hoping that Say's Law proves true in this case, but even before the AI I was skeptical that we would find work for all the people trying to get into the software industry.
Those jobs still exist, but by large are either very niche or work using that tech in some way.
It is not wrong to feel down about the risk of so much time, training, etc rapidly losing value. But it also isn't wrong that change isn't bad, and sometimes that includes adjusting how we use our skills and/or developing new ones. Nobody gets to be elite forever, they will be replaced and become common or unneeded eventually. So it's probably more helpful for yourself and those that may want to rely on you to be forward-thinking rather than complaining. Doesn't mean you have to become pro-AI, but may be helpful to be pragmatic and work where it can't.
As to work supply... I figure that will always be a problem as long as money is the main point of work. If people could just work where they specialize without so much concern for issues like not starving, maybe it would be a different. I dunno.
Sounds like for many programmers AI is the new Visual Basic 6 :-P
AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it.
I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.
There might have been people who were happy to write assembly that got bummed about compilers. This AI stuff judt feels like a new way to write code.
Inevitably AI will writes things in ways you don't intend. So now you have to prompt it to change and hope it gets it right. Oh, it didn't. Prompt it again and maybe this time will work. Will it get it right this time? And so on.
It's so good at a lot of things, but writing out whole features or apps in my experience seems good at first, but then it turns out to be a time sync of praying it will figure it out on this next prompt.
Maybe it's a skill issue for me, but I've gotten the most efficiency out of having it review code, pair with it on ideas and problems, etc. rather than actually writing the majority of code.
It is really like micro-managing a very junior very forgetful dev but they can read really fast (and they mostly remember what they read for a few minutes at least, they actually know more about something than you do if they have a manual about it on hand). Of course, if its just writing the code once, you don't bother with the junior dev and write the code yourself. But if you want long term efficiency, you put the time into your team (and team here is the AI).
Not everyone needs to be excited about LLMs, in the same way that C++ developers dont need to be excited about python.
I'm my mind, writing the prompt that generates the code is somewhat analogous to writing the code that generates the assembly. (Albeit, more stochastically, the way psychology research might be analogous to biochemistry research).
Different experts are still required at different layers of abstraction, though. I don't find it depressing when people show preference for working at different levels of complexity / tooling, nor excitement about the emergence of new tools that can enable your creativity to build, automate, and research. I think scorn in any direction is vapid.
The upshot is, you have to review everything the LLM generates, because you can't predict the qualities or failures of its output. (You cannot reason in advance about what qualities and failures it definitely will or will not exhibit.) This is different from, say, using a compiler, whose output you generally don't have to review, and whose input-to-output relation you can reason about with precision.
Note: I'm not saying that using an LLM for coding is not workable. I'm saying that it lacks what people generally like about regular coding, namely the ability to reason with absolute precision about the relation between the input and the behavior of the output.
> You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!
You missed the key point. You can't predict and LLM's "outcome with high precision."
Looking at the output and evaluating it after the fact (like you describe) is an entirely different thing.
How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.
- inverse career growth structure and black hole effect
usually, an industry has a number of skills to hone, you start with simple ones, and as you go you may learn more to do harder, and earn more. the more you love, the more you learn, the better for you. this is evaporating.. and worse, the people who don't love it, get to run you over. you're now competing in the 'llm orchestration game' where the most mentally intense task is to chat with the cli and check its output.
llms may also be all encompassing, even if I adapt and accept that well software engineering is done for, i don't even foresee what i should learn now.. my brain thinking power is not that great, and the places where llms can't beat human are probably post-graduate intelligence and i can't compete much here either.
how i see it it's a middle layer collapse
Some people don't enjoy writing code and went into software development only because it's a well paid and a stable job. Now this trade is under the thread and they are happy to switch to prompting LLMs. I do like to code so use LLMs less then many my colleagues.
Though I don't expect to see many from this crowd in HM, instead I expect here to see entrepreneurs who need a product to sell and don't care if it is written by humans or by LLMs.
Maybe post renaissance many artists no longer had patrons, but nothing was stopping them from painting.
If your industry truely is going in the direction where there's no paid work for you to code (which is unlikely in my opinion), nobody is stopping you. It's easier than ever, you have decades of personal computing at your fingertips.
Most people with a thing they love do it as a hobby, not a job. Maybe you've had it good for a long time?
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational value.
You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is, does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto: don't predict, prepare.
Lots of wiggle room between "never" or "usually". We're not all riding Segways or wearing VR goggles. Seems wiser to work on case-by-case basis here.
Really? Are you sure there isn't a lot of confirmation bias in this? Do you really have a good handle on 100-year-old tech hypes that didn't deliver? All I can think of is "flying everything".
Regardless of AI this has been years in the making. “Learn to code” has been the standard grinder cryptobro advice for “follow the money” for a while, there’s a whole generation of people getting into the industry for financial reasons (which is not wrong, just a big cultural shift).
Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”
Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.
Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.
That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.
So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.
I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
In my heart, I firmly believe in the ability of technology to uplift and improve humanity - and have spent much of my career grappling with the distressing reality that it also enables a handful of wealthy people to have near-total control of society in the process. AI promises a very hostile, very depressing, very polarized world for everyone but those pulling the levers, and I wish more people evaluated technology beyond the mere realm of Computer Science or armchair economics. I want more people to sit down, to understand its present harms, its potential future harms, and the billions of people whose lives it will profoundly and negatively impact under current economic systems.
It's equal parts sobering and depressing once you shelve personal excitement or optimism and approach it objectively. Regardless of its potential as a tool, regardless of the benefit it might bring to you, your work day, your productivity, your output, your ROI, I desperately wish more people would ask one simple question:
Is all of that worth the harm I'm inflicting on others?
Nothing is inevitable. Systems can be changed if we decide to do so, and AI is no different. To believe in inevitability is to embrace fatalism.
It can be an accelerator - it gets extremely common boiler-plate text work out of the way. But it can't replace any job that requires a functioning brain, since LLMs do not have one - nor ever will.
But in the end it doesn't matter. Companies do whatever they can to slash their labor requirements, pay people less, dodge regulations, etc. If not 'AI' it'll just be something else.
(I'd also argue that "understanding" and "functional brain" are unfalsifiable comparisons. What exactly distinguishes a functional brain from a turing machine? Chess once required a functional brain to play, but has now been surpassed by computation. Saying "jobs that require a human brain" is tautological without any further distinction).
Of course, LLMs are definitely missing plenty of brain skills like working in continuous time, with persistent state, with agency, in physical space, etc. But to say that an LLM "never will" is either semantic, (you might call it something other than an LLM when next generation capabilities are integrated), tautological (once it can do a human job, it's no longer a job that requires a human), or anthropocentric hubris.
That said, who knows what the time scale looks like for realizing such improvements – (decades, centuries, millennia).
Just look at who is building, funding, and promoting these models! I can't think of a group of people less interested in helping millions of plebs lead higher quality lives if it costs them a penny to do it.
This artificial creativity will only go so far, because it's a simulated semblance of human creativity, as much as could be gathered from training data. If not continually refueled by new training data, it will run out sooner or later. And then it will get boring really quickly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
Drives people insane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
And LLM are economically and technologically unsustainable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
These have already proven it will be unconstrained if AGI ever emerges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
The LLM bubble will pass, as it is already losing money with every new user. =3
Now imagine a different sort of company. A little shop where the owner's first priority is actually to create good jobs for their employees that afford a high quality life. A shop like that needn't worry about AI.
It is too bad that we put so much stock as a society in businesses operating in this dehumanizing capacity instead of ones that are much more like a family unit trying to provide for each other.
> This strikes me as paradoxical given my sense that one of AI’s main impacts will be to increase productivity and thus eliminate jobs.
The allegation that an "Increase of productivity will reduce jobs" has been proven false by history over and over again it's so well known it has a name, "Jevons Paradox" or "Jevons Effect"[0].
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use [...] results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.
The "increase in productivity" does not inherently result in less jobs, that's a false equivalence. It's likely just as false as it was in 1915 with the the assembly line and the Model T as it is in 2025 with AI and ChatGPT. This notion persists because as we go through inflection points due to something new changing up market dynamics, there is often a GROSS loss (as in economics) of jobs that often precipitates a NET gain overall as the market adapts, but that's not much comfort to people that lost or are worried about losing their jobs due to that inflection point changing the market.
The two important questions in that context for individuals in the job market during those inflections points (like today) are: "how difficult is it to adapt (to either not lose a job, or to benefit from or be a part of that net gain)?" and "Should you adapt?" Afterall, the skillsets that the market demands and the skillsets it supplies are not objectively quantifiable things; the presence of speculative markets is proof that this is subjective, not objective. Anyone who's ever been involved in the hiring process knows just how subjective this is. Which leads me to:
> the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
Disagree that that's what the promise about. That IS happening, I don't disagree there, but that's not the promise that corporate is so hyped about. If we're being honest and not trying to blow smoke up people's ass to artificially inflate "value," AI is fundamentally about being more OBJECTIVE than SUBJECTIVE with regard to costs and resources of labor, and it's outputs. Anyone who knows what OKR's are and has been subject to a "performance review" in a self professed "Data driven company" knows how much modern corporate America, especially the tech market, loves it's "quantifiables." It's less about how much better it can allegedly do something, but the promise of how much "better" it can be quantified vs human labor. As long as AI has at least SOME proven utility (which it does), this promise of quantifiables combined with it's other inherent potential benefits (Doesn't need time off, doesn't sleep, doesn't need retirement/health benefits, no overtime pay, no regulatory limitations on hours worked, no "minimum wage") means that so long as the monied interests perceive it as continuing to improve, then they can dismiss it's inefficiencies/ineffectiveness in X or Y by the promise of it's potential to overcome that eventually.
It's the fundamental reason why people are so concerned about AI replacing Humans. Especially when you consider one of the things that AI excels at is quickly delivering an answer with confidence (people are impressed with speed and a sucker for confidence), and another big strength is it's ability to deal with repetitive minutia in known and solved problem spaces(a mainstay of many office jobs). It can also bullshit with best of them, fluff your ego as much as you want (and even when you don't), and almost never says "No" or "You're wrong" unless you ask it to.
In other words, it excels at the performative and repetitive bullshit and blowing smoke up your boss' ass and empowers them to do the same for their boss further up the chain, all while never once ruffling HR's feathers.
Again, it has other, much more practical and pragmatic utility too, it's not JUST a bullshit oracle, but it IS a good bullshit oracle if you want it to be.
I don't understand why people who seem to hate the modern world so much continue to live in it, and complain on the internet, when they have the option to live differently.
All it takes for evil to persevere is good people to sit by and do nothing. Don't like the situation you're in, do something about it. Preferably other than doomscrolling, but hey, you do you.
I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them based on specs and plans elaborated by the LLMs.
This last week I extended my company's development tooling by adding a new service in a k8s cluster with a bunch of extra services, shared variables and configmaps, and new helm charts that did exactly what I needed after asking nicely a couple of times. I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.
> that did exactly what I needed
> I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.
Obviously this is not anything resembling engineering, or anything a respectful programmer would do. An elevator that is cut lose when you press 0 also works very well until you press 0. The claims of AI writing significant chunks of code come from these sort of people with little experience in programming or engineering in general, SPA vibe coders and what not. You should tremble at the thought of using any of the resulting systems in production, and certainly not try to replicate that workflow yourself. Which gives you a sense of how overblown these claims are.
I'm sorry man but I've been doing this for 25 years and I've worked and studied with some extremely bright and productive engineers. I vouch for the code that I write or that I delegate to an LLM, and believe it or not it doesn't take a magician to write a k8s spec file, just patience to write 10 levels of nested YAMLs to describe the most boring, normal and predictable code to tell your cluster what volume mounts and env variables to load.
…
> I vouch for the code that I write or that I delegate to an LLM, and believe it or not it doesn't take a magician to write a k8s spec file…
I have been writing code since 1995.
That has zero relevance to my skill at rolling out deployments in a technology I know nothing about.
One of the two things you’ve said is false:
Either a) you do know what you’re talking about, or b) you are not confident in the results.
It can’t be both.
It sounds to me like you’re subscribed heavily into a hype train; that’s fine, but your position, as described, leaves a lot to desired, if you’re trying to describe some wide trend.
Here my anecdote: major cloudflare outages.
Hard things are hard. AI doesn’t solve that. Scaffolding is easy; ai can solve that.
Scaffolding is a reliable thing to rely on with ai.
Doing it for K8s configuration, if you don’t know k8s is stupid. I know what I’m talking about when I say that. Having it help you if you do know what you’re doing is perfectly legit.
Claiming it did help when claiming you have, and I quote, “zero knowledge” (but you actually do) is hype. Leave it on LinkedIn dude. :(
You've been coding for a lifetime yet you don't seem to get that certainty in software is a spectrum? I have sufficient confidence in the output of LLMs to sign my name under the code it writes when putting up a PR for a specialist to read. That's good enough for 90% of the work that we do day-to-day. You think that's not hype-worthy?
> Doing it for K8s configuration, if you don’t know k8s is stupid. I know what I’m talking about when I say that. Having it help you if you do know what you’re doing is perfectly legit.
"Knowing" k8s is an oxymoron. K8s is a profoundly complicated piece of tech that can don insanely complicated things while also serving as a replacement for docker-compose or basic services that could have been hosted on ECR. The concepts behind basic k8s functionality are not difficult, but I saved myself two weeks of reading how to write helm spec files, a piece of knowledge I have no interest in learning because it doesn't add any appreciable value to the software I produce, and was instead able to focus on getting what I needed out of my cluster automation scripts.
This really isn't that complicated to understand. I don't care for being a k8s expert and I don't care for syntactical minutiae behind it. It isn't hype that I now I only need to understand the essential conceptual basics behind the software to get it working for what I need instead of doing a deep dive like I had to do years ago in when reading similar docs for similar IaC producs to get lesser functionality going.
LLMs are _really_ good at writing infra code if you know how infra works, believe it or not. And the ultimate responsibility still lies in human beings for code ownership.
* SQL works almost as good. It's especially useful when you need to generate queries with long lists of fields and complex query criteria. Give it a schema and let it rip.
* Python code works reasonably well. If your description is terse and clear it will generally do the right thing. It has a knack for being excessive in comments and will sometimes do things in ways that feel unnatural, but business code will be as good as the context that surrounds it. For boring, repetitive tasks like setting up program args, annotating types, and writing generic request/response cycles with common frameworks it will do boring old vanilla code. You'll likely want to touch it up and adapt it to your personal preference.
* Debugging is very much or miss. It has been absolutely fantastic at troubleshooting failed and stuck k8s jobs and service configuration issues, having no qualms about creating its own shell or python scripts to investigate ports or logs, and writing JSON parsing scripts that are snoozefest for a human to write. The regexes that I'd barely be arsed to write to parse enormous logs it writes trivially. For business logic, the more convoluted your logic the harder the time it will have, and for most debugging issues I prefer to let it run and list some hypotheses and potential issues and my intent is to learn and understand the problem myself deeply before committing to a fix.
More importantly, the web is now dominant for enterprise SaaS applications, which is a category of software that did not really exist before the web. And the web post–dot-com bubble spawned a lot of unicorns.
In short, there was an investment bubble. But the core tech was fine.
AI feels like one of those things where the tech is similarly transformational (even more so, actually). It’s another investment bubble predicated on the price of GPUs, which is mostly making Nvidia very rich right now.
Right now the model makers are getting most of the funding and then funneling non-trivial amounts to Nvidia (and their competitors). But actually the value creation is in applications using the models these companies create. And the innovation for that isn’t coming from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, X.ai, etc. They are providing core technology, but they seem to be struggling to do productive things in terms of UX and use cases. Most of the interesting things in this space are coming from smaller companies figuring out how to use the models these companies produce. Models and GPUs are infrastructure, not end-user products.
And with the rise of open-source models, open algorithms, and exponentially dropping inference costs, the core infrastructure technology is not as much of a moat as it may seem to investors. OpenAI might be well funded, but their main UI (ChatGPT) is surprisingly limited and riddled with bugs. That doesn’t look like the polished work of a company that knows what they are doing. It’s all a bit hesitant and copycat. It’s never going to be a magic solution to everyone’s problems.
From where I’m sitting, there is clear untapped value in the enterprise space for AI to be used. And it’s going to take more than a half-assed chat UI to unlock that. It’s actually going to be a lot of work to build all of that. Coding tools are, so far, the most promising application of reasoning models. It’s easy to see how that could be useful in the context of ERP/manufacturing, CRM, traditional office applications, and the financial world.
Those each represent verticals with many established players trying to figure out how to use all this new stuff — and loads more startups eager to displace them. That’s where the money is going to be post-bubble. We’ve seen nothing yet. Just like after the dot-com bubble burst, all the money is going to be in new applications on top of the new infrastructure. It’s untapped revenue. And it’s not going to be about buying GPUs or offering benchmark-beating models. That’s where all the money is going currently. That’s why it is a bubble.
What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it faster by hand, no doubt. I think I know more now and the calculus may be shifting on my AI usage. However, the following day, my colleague needed a nearly identical temporary tool. A 45 minute session with Claude of "copy this thing but do this other stuff" easily saved them 6-8 hours of work. And again, that was just talking with Claude.
I am doing a hybrid approach really. I write much of my scaffolding, I write example code, I modify quick things the ai made to be more like I want, I set up guard rails and some tests then have the ai go to town. Results are mixed but trending up still.
FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.
If companies want to value something as dumb as LoC then they get what they incentivized
Sounds like the extremely well-repeated mistake of treating everything like a nail because hammers are being hyped up this month.
First pass on a greenfield project is often like that, for humans too I suppose. Once the MVP is up, refactor with Opus ultrathink to look for areas of weakness and improvement usually tightens things up.
Then as you pointed out, once you have solid scaffolding, examples, etc, things keep improving. I feel like Claude has a pretty strong bias for following existing patterns in the project.
I've taken some pleasure in having GitHub copilot review whitespace normalization PRs. It says it can't do it, but I hope I get my points anyway.
My layperson anecdote about LLM coding is that using Perplexity is the first time I've ever had the confidence (artificial, or not) to actually try to accomplish something novel with software/coding. Without judgments, the LLM patiently attempts to turn my meat-speak into code. It helps explain [very simple stuff I can assure you!] what its language requires for a hardware result to occur, without chastising you. [Raspberry Pi / Arduino e.g.]
LLMs have encouraged me to explore the inner workings of more technologies, software and not. I finally have the knowledgeable apprentice to help me with microcontroller implementations, albeit slowly and perhaps somewhat dangerously [1].
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Having spent the majority of my professional life troubleshooting hardware problems, I often benefit from rubber ducky troubleshooting [0], going back to the basics when something complicated isn't working. LLMs have been very helpful in this roleplay (e.g. garage door openers, thermostat advanced configurations, pin-outs, washing machine not working, etc.).
[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging>
[1] "He knows just enough to be dangerous" —proverbial electricians
¢¢
She didn't live long enough to use ChatGPT [1] (she would have been flabbergasted at its ability to understand people/situations), but even with her "normal" intelligence she would have been a master to its perceptions/trainings.
[0] "Beyond just teasing."
[1] We did briefly wordplay with GPT-2 right before she died via thisworddoesnotexist.com exchanges, but nothing conversive.
[2] Relavent example, to the best of my understanding of hers: I would never ask my brilliant engineer programmer hardwarebro for coding help on any personal project, never. Just as I don't ask lawyerbro for personal legal advice.
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About a year later (~2023), my dentist friend experienced a sudden life change (wife sick @35); in his grieving/soul-seeking, I recommended that he share some of his mental chaos with an LLM, even just if to role-play as his sick family member. Dr. Friend later thanked me for recommending the resource — particularly "the entire lack of any judgments" — and shared his own brilliant discoveries using creative prompt structuring.
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Particularly as a big dude, it's nice to not always have to be the tough guy, to even admit weakness. Unfortunately I think the overall societal benefits of generative AI are going to increase anti-social behaviour, but it's nice to have a friendly apprentice that knows something about almost everything... any time... any reason.
j/k don't worry I'm an idiot — but somebody else WILL.
Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time).
The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot, nor does it lower the bar for the people that you can train as pilots.
The benefits of LLM programming are mostly going to be subsumed by the operator, to make their lives easier. Very little is gonna go to their employer (despite all the pressure), and this is not due to some principal-agent breakdown; it's just intrinsic to the nature of this work.
How so? And in what context?
Where I am, headcount is based on "can we finish and sustain these planned and present required projects". If these automations allow a developer to burn less time, it reduces the need for headcount. As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.
This is exactly the fallacy, and it's very hard to see why it's a fallacy if you've never professionally written code (and even then).
Software development work fills to occupy the time allotted to it. That's because there is always a tradeoff between time and quality. If you have time available, you will fundamentally alter your approach to writing that piece of software. A rough analogy: air travel doesn't mean we take fewer vacations -- it just means we take vacations to farther away places.
Because of this effect, a dev can really finish a project in as little time as you want (up to a reasonable minimum). It just comes down to how much quality loss and risk can be tolerated. I can make a restaurant website in 1 hour (on Wix/Squarespace) or in 3 months (something hand-crafted and sophisticated). The latter is not "wasted time", it just depends on where you move the lever.
However, sometimes this is a false tradeoff. It isn't always necessary that the place you flew 3 hours will give you a better vacation than some place you could've driven to in 3 hours. You only hope it's better.
>As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.
LLMs or not, you could've just hired fewer people and made it work anyway. It's not like if you hired 3 people instead of 6 before the LLM era, it was impossible to do.
The gist of it is that LLMs are mostly just devs having fun and tinkering about, or making their quality of life better, or implementing some script, tooling, or different approach that they might've avoided before LLMs. There's no powertrain from that stuff to business efficiency.
This was not necessary or appropriate, and completely discredits your reply.
But if you meant it's inappropriate even as a general statement then I disagree. Some concepts are just difficult to convey or unintuitive if one hasn't actually done the thing. It's more of a disclaimer that what's to follow is unintuitive.
your boss is going to let you go home if you get all your work done early?
I think the difficulty is exercising the judgement to know where that productive boundary sits. That's more difficult than it sounds because we're not use to adjudicating machine reasoning which can appear human-like ... So we tend to treat it like a human which is, of course, an error.
All of these have a non-trivial learning curve and/or poor and patchy docs.
I could master all of these the hard way, but it would be a huge and not very productive time sink. It's much easier to tell a machine what I want and iterate with error reports if it doesn't solve my problem immediately.
So is this AGI? It's not self-training. But it is smart enough to search docs and examples and pull them together into code that solves a problem. It clearly "knows" far more than I do in this particular domain, and works much faster.
So I am very clearly getting real value from it. And there's a multiplier effect, because it's now possible to imagine automating processes that weren't possible before, and glue together custom franken-workflows that link supposedly incompatible systems and save huge amounts of time.
Somethings are best written by yourself.
And this is with the mighty claude opus 4.5
> Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago.
Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.
It's very useful if you have the knowledge and experience to tell when it's wrong. That is the absolutely vital skill to work with these systems. In the right circumstances, they can work miracles in a very short time. But if they're wrong, they can easily waste hours or more following the wrong track.
It's fast, it's very well-read, and it's sometimes correct. That's my analysis of it.
Of course it is mind blowing for them.
This sentence and the rest of the post reads like an horoscope advice. Like "It can be good if you use it well, it may be bad if you don't". It's pretty much the same as saying a coin may land on head or on tail.
Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...
> disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now
Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)
I'm not trying to advocate going against the stream and not using exceptions in languages based around them, but I can see it being pulled off by a competent team, which I'm certain Joel could put together.
Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof.
Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
" Is you, right?
Doesn't everyone work that way?
clang doesn't "understand" the hints because it doesn't "understand" anything, but it knows what to do with them! Just like codex.
Symbolica is working on more deterministic/quicker models: https://www.symbolica.ai
I also wish it was that easy, but compiler determinism is hard, too: https://reproducible-builds.org
But there is nothing about a compiler that implies determinism. A compiler is defined by function (taking input on how you want something to work and outputting code), not design. Implementation details are irrelevant. If you use a neural network to compile C source into machine code instead of more traditional approaches, it most definitely remains a compiler. The function is unchanged.
[1] "Faulty" hardware found in the real world can sometimes break this assumption. But a C compiler running on faulty hardware can change the assumption too.
Did you do that stupid HN thing where you failed to read the entire comment and then went off to try it on faulty hardware?
Now try it on deterministic hardware.
But what are you asking for, exactly? Do you want me to copy and paste the output (so you can say it isn't real)? Are you asking for access to my hardware? What does sharing mean here?
Incorrect. LLMs are designed to be deterministic (when temperature=0). Only if you choose for them to be non-deterministic are they so. Which is no different in the case of GCC. You can add all kinds of random conditionals if you had some reason to want to make it non-deterministic. You never would, but you could.
There are some known flaws in GPUs that can break that assumption in the real world, but in theory (and where you have working, deterministic hardware) LLMs are absolutely deterministic. GCC also stops being deterministic when the hardware breaks down. A cosmic bit flip is all it takes to completely defy your assertion.
Wow. No, I actually don't want to participate in a discussion where the default is random hostility and immediate personal attack. Sheesh.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals...
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
HN is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up. Please do your part to make this a welcoming place rather than a mean one.
It really comes mostly down to being able to concisely and eloquently define what you want done. It also is important to understand what the default tendencies and biases of the model are so you know where to lean in a little. Occasionally you need to provide reference material.
The capabilities have grown dramatically in the last 6 months.
I have an advantage because I have been building LLM powered products so I know mechanically what they are and are not good with. For example.. want it to wire up an API with 250+ endpoints with a harness? You better create (or have it create) a way to cluster and audit coverage.
Generally the failures I hear often with "advanced" programmers are things like algorithmic complexity, concurrency, etc.. and these models can do this stuff given the right motivation/context. You just need to understand what "assumptions" the model it making and know when you need to be explicit.
Actually one thing most people don't understand is they try to say "Do (A), Don't do (B)", etc. Defining granular behavior which is fundamentally a brittle way to interact with the models.
Far more effective is defining the persona and motivation for the agent. This creates the baseline behavior profile for the model in that context.
Not "don't make race conditions", more like "You value and appreciate elegant concurrent code."
My supposition was: Many programmers that say their programming domain was too advanced and llms didn't work for their kind of code are simply bad at describing concisely what is required.
This is a interesting take take considering that programmers are experts in communicating what someone has asked for (however vaguely) into code.
I think you're referring to is the transition from 'write code that does X' which is very concrete to 'trick an AI into writing the code I would have written, only faster', which feels like work that's somewhere between an art form and asking a magic box to fix things over and over again until it stops being broken (in obvious ways, at least).
Understandably people that prefer engineered solutions do not like the idea of working this way very much.
1. Basing on how the engineer just responded to my comment, what is the understanding gap?
2. How do I describe what I want in a concise and intuitive way?
3. How do I tell an engineer what is important in this system and what are the constraints?
4. What assumptions will an engineer likely make that are will cause me to have to make a lot of corrections?
Etc.. this is all human to human.
These skills are all transferrable to working with an LLM.
So I guess if you are not used to technical leadership, you may not have used those skills as much.
We had a method for this before LLMs; it was called "Haskell".
Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?
There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative.
This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion.
So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it only improved productivity 5%, it'd be paying for itself handily - which means we can't take the $1 billion in revenues to indicate that it's providing a big boost in productivity.
The AI companies are currently lighting dollars on fire if you pay them a few pennies to do so.
The AI models are actually accomplishing something, but the unit economics aren't there to support it being profitable
In time I’m sure it will, but it’s still early days, land grab time.
Yes. And all code is tech debt. Now generated faster than ever.
>The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress.
They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money. They simply need not hold the bag to be successful.
Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it all implodes.
But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.
Kinda like having a child "help" you cook basically.
But for the child you do it because they actually learn. llms do not learn in that sense.
But I see what you mean, there have been at least a few insane comment sections for sure.
This implies that you are an expert/seasoned programmer. And not everybody is an expert on this industry (especially the reviewing code part).
If a team has one senior/seasoned person and 3 juniors will adopting ai be a total positive move? Or the senior person will just become the bottleneck for the junior devs?
This is mission critical robotics software
It has become a standard tool, in the same way that most developers code with an IDE, most developers use agentic AI to start a task (if not to finish it).
Error bars, folks, use them.
Though I do think "advanced software team" is kind of an absurd phrase, and I don't think there is any correlation with how "advanced" the software you build is and how much you need AI. In fact, there's probably an anti-correlation: I think that I get such great use out of AI primarily because we don't need to write particularly difficult code, but we do need to write a lot of it. I spend a lot of time in React, which AI is very well-suited to.
EDIT: I'd love to hear from people who disagree with me or think I am off-base somehow about which particular part of my comment (or follow-up comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640) seems wrong. I'm particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code faster is an extremely contentious statement.
>I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations
Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments that are both small enough for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100% correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself.
[0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
[2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/
[3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...
To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I care a lot more about chunks and AI could reasonably validate. Instead of thinking “what’s the biggest chunk I could reasonably ask AI to solve” I think “what’s the biggest piece I could ask an AI to do that I can write a script to easily validate once it’s done?” Allowing the AI to validate its own work means you never have to worry about chunking again. (OK, that's a slight hyperbole, but the validation is most of my concern, and a secondary concern is that I try not to let it go for more than 1000 lines.)
For instance, take the example of an AI rewriting an API call to support a new db library you are migrating to. In this case, it’s easy to write a test case for the AI. Just run a bunch of cURLs on the existing endpoint that exercise the existing behavior (surely you already have these because you’re working in a code base that’s well tested, right? right?!?), and then make a script that verifies that the result of those cURLs has not changed. Now, instruct the AI to ensure it runs that script and doesn’t stop until the results are character for character identical. That will almost always get you something working.
Obviously the tactics change based on what you are working on. In frontend code, for example, I use a lot of Playwright. You get the idea.
As for code legibility, I tend to solve that by telling the AI to focus particularly on clean interfaces, and being OK with the internals of those interfaces be vibecoded and a little messy, so long as the external interface is crisp and well-tested. This is another very long discussion, and for the non-vibe-code-pilled (sorry), it probably sounds insane, and I feel it's easy to lose one's audience on such a polarizing topic, so I'll keep it brief. In short, one real key thing to understand about AI is that it makes the cost of writing unit tests and e2e tests drop significantly, and I find this (along with remaining disciplined and having crisp interfaces) to be an excellent tool in the fight against the increased code complexity that AI tools bring. So, in short, I deal with legibility by having a few really really clean interfaces/APIs that are extremely readable, and then testing them like crazy.
EDIT
There is a dead comment that I can't respond to that claims that I am not a reliable narrator because I have no A/B test. Behold, though: I am the AI-hater's nightmare, because I do have a good A/B test! I have a website that sees a decent amount of traffic (https://chipscompo.com/). Over the last few years, I have tried a few times to modernize and redesign the website, but these attempts have always failed because the website is pretty big (~50k loc) and I haven't been able to fit it in a single week of PTO.
This Thanksgiving, I took another crack at it with Claude Code, and not only did I finish an entire redesign (basically touched every line of frontend code), but I also got in a bunch of other new features, too, like a forgot password feature, and a suite of moderation tools. I then IaC'd the whole thing with Terraform, something I only dreamed about doing before AI! Then I bumped React a few majors versions, bumped TS about 10 years, etc, all with the help of AI. The new site is live and everyone seems to like it (well, they haven't left yet...).
If anything, this is actually an unfair comparison, because it was more work for the AI than it was for me when I tried a few years ago, because because my dependencies became more and more out of date as the years went on! This was actually a pain for AI, but I eventually managed to solve it.
The combination of which, deep training dataset + maps well to how AI "understands" code, it can be a real enabler. I've done it myself. All I've done with some projects is write tests, point Claude at the tests and ask it to write code till those tests pass, then audit said code, make adjustments as required, and ship.
That has worked well and sped up development of straightforward (sometimes I'd argue trivial) situations.
Where it falls down is complex problem sets, major refactors that cross cut multiple interdependent pieces of code, its less robust with less popular languages (we have a particular set of business logic in Rust due to its sensitive nature and need for speed, it does a not great job with that) and a host of other areas I have hit limitations with it.
Granted, I work in a fairly specialized way and deal with alot of business logic / rules rather than boiler plate CRUD, but I have hit walls on things like massive refactors in large codebases (50K is small to me, for reference)
But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was able to entirely redesign my website in a week. When working on personal projects I don't need to worry about stakeholders at all.
The trick now is deciding what code to write quickly enough to keep Claude and friends busy.
It used to be "hey I found an issue..", now it is like "here is a pr to fix an issue I saw". The net effort to me is only slightly more. I usually have to identify the problem and that is like 90% of fixing it.
Add to the fact that now I can have an AI take a first pass at identifying the problem with probably an 80%+ success rate.
Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation?
I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that.
At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comments section.
That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk.
If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not make you 10x more productive.
Meanwhile, the people claiming 10x productivity are taken at face value by people who don’t know any better, and we end up in an insane hype cycle that has obvious externalities. Things like management telling people that they must use AI or else. Things like developer tooling making zero progress on anything that isn’t an AI feature for the last two years. Things like RAM becoming unaffordable because Silicon Valley thinks they are a step away from inventing god. And I haven’t scratched the surface.
You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much code written on a side project).
It’s not a personal attack, it is a corrective to the trend of claiming 5,10,100x improvements to developer productivity, which rarely if ever holds up to scrutiny.
If I have to "prove" my productivity in a court of law - that is to say, you - I'll down-modulate it to focus on the bits that are most objective, because I understand you will be skeptical. For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time. There were also a few nightmarish bugs that I feel could have taken me literally hours or infinity (I would have just given up), like tracking down a breaking change snuck in in a TS minor update when I upgraded from 2.8 to latest, that Codex chomped through. But I imagine me handwaving "it's definitely 10x, just trust me" on those ones, where the alternatives aren't particularly clear, might not be an argument you'd readily accept. On the other hand, the 5x gains when writing my website, using tech I know inside and out, felt objective.
I think this is where the lede is buried. Yes, it takes time up front. But then you learn(ed) it and can apply those skills quickly in the future.
In 10 years when all sorts of new tech is around, will you read the docs? Or just count on an LLM?
That being said, I have taught myself a ridiculous amount of tech with AI. It's not always great at depth, but it sure is amazing at breadth. And I can still turn to docs for depth when I need to.
Makes sense. I’d probably be less skeptical if a/ we had a definition of AI and b/ people stopped calling LLMs “AI”
It is really neat tech. It is absolutely “artificial” and it absolutely is not “intelligent”
What makes you think one year is the right timeframe? Yet you seem to be so wildly confident in the strength of what you think your question will reveal… in spite of the fact that the guy gave you an example.
It wasn’t that he didn’t provide it, it was that you didn’t want to hear it.
It is actually a very forgiving metric over a year because it is measuring only your own productivity relative to your personal trend. That includes vacation time and sick time, so the year smooths over all the variation.
Maybe he did do 5 weeks of work in 1 week, and I’ll accept that (a much more modest claim than the usual 10-100x claimed multiplier).
Not only that, I think you're misrepresenting his claim:
> I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on
1) He didn't say 10-100x
2) He said it depended on the work he was doing
Those seem reasonable enough that I can take his experience at face value.
This isn't about you pressure testing his claim, this is about you just being unwilling to believe his experience because it doesn't fit the narrative you've already got in your head.
All of the work you described is essentially manual labor. It's not difficult work - just boring, sometimes error prone work that mostly requires you to do obvious things and then tackle errors as they pop up in very obvious ways. Great use case for AI, for sure. This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well, except maybe in the sense that yeah, AI is great for dull work in the same way an excavator is great for digging ditches.
If you ever find yourself at the point where you are insulting a guy's passion project in order to prove a point, perhaps have a deep breath, and take a step back from the computer for a moment. And maybe you should look deep inside yourself, because you might have crossed the threshold to being a jerk.
Yes, my site has issues. You know what else it has? Users. Your comments about FOUC and waterfalls are correct, but they don't rank particularly high on what are important to people who used the site. I didn't instruct the AI to fix them, because I was busy fixing a bunch of real problems that my actual users cared about.
As for loading slowly -- it loads in 400ms on my machine.
I'm just calling spade a spade. If you didn't want people to comment on your side project given your arguments and the topic of discussion, you should just not have posted it in a public forum or have done better work.
I can understand to some degree it would be chafing that I described myself as working at a SF Series C startup etc. The only intent there was to illustrate that I wasn't someone who started coding 2 weeks ago and had my mind blown by typing "GPT build me a calculator" into Claude. No intent at all of calling myself a mega-genius, which I don't really think I am. Just someone who likes doing fun stuff with AI.
And, BTW, if you reread my initial comment, you will realize you misread part of it. I said that "Advanced Programming" is the exact opposite of the type of work I am doing.
The problem is that your project has basic performance issues - FOUC, render waterfalls - that are central concerns in modern React development. These aren't arbitrary standards I invented to be mean. They're fundamental enough that React's recent development has specifically focused on solving them.
So when you say I'm inventing quality standards (in your now-deleted comment), or that this is just a passion project so quality doesn't matter, you're missing the point. You can't argue from professional authority that AI makes you more productive without compromise, use your work as proof, and then retreat to "it's just for fun" when someone points out the quality issues. Either it demonstrates your workflow's effectiveness or it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.
The kids' artwork comparison doesn't work either. You're not a child showing me a crayon drawing - you're a professional developer using your work as evidence in a technical argument about AI productivity. If you want to be treated as an experienced developer making authoritative claims, your evidence needs to support those claims.
I'm genuinely not trying to be cruel here, but if this represents what your AI workflow produces when you're auditing the output, it raises serious questions about whether you can actually catch the problems the AI introduces - which is the entire crux of your argument. Either you just aren't equipped to audit it (because you don't know better), or you are becoming passive in the face of the walls of code that the AI is generating for you.
Let's talk a little about FOUC and the waterfall. I am aware of both issues. In fact, they're both on my personal TODO list (along with some other fun stuff, like SSR). I have no doubt I could vibe code them both away, and at some point, I will. I've done plenty harder things. I haven't yet, because I was focusing on stuff that my moderators and users wanted me to do. They wanted features to ban users, a forgot password feature, email notifications, mobile support, dark mode, and a couple of other moderation tools. I added those. No one complained about FOUC or the waterfall, and no one said that the site loaded slowly, so I didn't prioritize those issues.
I understand you think your cited issues are important. To be honest, they irk me, too. But no one who actually uses the site mentioned them. So, when forced to prioritize, I added stuff they cared about instead.
> You can't argue from professional authority that AI makes you more productive without compromise, use your work as proof, and then retreat to "it's just for fun" when someone points out the quality issues
You seem to have missed the point of saying "it's just for fun". My point was this: You are holding a week-long project done with AI to professional standards. Nothing ever done in a week is going to be professional level! That is an absurd standard! You are pointing at the rough edges, that of course exist because it was done on the side, as some insane gotcha that proves the whole thing is a house of cards. "This is "dull work"! You should "have done better work" if you wanted to talk with us"! For FOUC?!? C'mon.
And if it's producing an intern-level artifact for your frontend, what's to say it's not producing similar quality code for everything else? Especially considering frontend is often derided as being easier than other fields of software.
The site looks great to me. Your comment is actually offensive, despite you typing "no offence".
The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case.
If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim to a number of psychological effects (sunk cost, Gell-Manns, slot machine effect) than it is that your productivity has really improved.
Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? If your productivity is now 10x mine (I don't use these tools at work because they are a waste of time in my experience) then why aren't you compensated as such and if it's because of pointy haired bosses, you should be able to start a new company with your 10x productivity to shut him and me up.
Provide links to your evidence in the replies
The commenter told you they suspect they save time, it seems like taking their experience at face value is reasonable here. Or, at least I have no reason to jump down their throat... the same way I don't jump down your throat when you say, "these tools are a waste of time in my experience." I assume that you're smart enough to have tested them out thoroughly, and I give you the benefit of the doubt.
If you want to bring up METR to show that they might be falling into the same trap, that's fine, but you can do that in a much less caustic way.
But by the way, METR also used Cursor Pro and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Cursor had smaller context windows than today's toys and 3.7 Sonnet is no longer state of the art, so I'm not convinced the paper's conclusions are still as valid today. The latest Codex models are exponential leaps ahead of what METR tested, by even their own research.[1]
[1]https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
Does Amazon pay everyone who receives "Not meeting expectations" in their perf review 0 dollars? Did Meta pay John Carmack (or insert your favorite engineer here) 100x that of a normal engineer? Why do you think that would be?
Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?
If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people.
For some data points, check out levels.fyi and compare the ratio of TCs for a mid-level engineer/manager versus the topmost level (Distinguished SWE, VP etc.) for any given company.
And thus help engineers get paid more in line with their “value”. Albeit with much higher variance.
Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.
I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.
Imagine that you've built an app with libraries A, B, and C and conceptually understand all that's involved. But now you're required to move everything to X, Y, and Z. There won't be anything fundamentally new or revolutionary to learn, but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all). Getting the AI to execute the changes gets you to skip much of the tedium. And even though you still don't really know much about the new libs, you'll get the gist of most of the produced code. You can piecemeal the docs to review the code at sensitive boundaries. And for the rest, you'll paint inside the frames as you normally would if you were joining a new project.
Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.
That is one of the assumptions that pro-AI people always bring. You don't read the new docs to learn the domain. As you've said, you've already learn it. You read it for the gotchas. Because most (good) libraries will provide examples that you can just copy-paste and be done with it. But we all know that things can vary between implementations.
> Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.
You could squeeze a week inside a day the normal way to. Just YOLO it, by copy pasting from GitHub, StackOverflow and the whole internet.
I-know-what-kind-of-man-you-are.jpeg
You come off as a zealot by branding people who disagree as "haters".
Edit: AI excels at following examples, or simple, testable tasks that require persistence, which is intern-level work. Doing this narrow band of work quickly doesn't result in 10x productivity.
I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.
1. Even for junior level work
> I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.
If my website, a real website with real users, doesn't qualify, then I'm not sure what would. A single person with evidence is right in front of you, but you seem to be denying the evidence of your own eyes.
You are stuck in a very low local maximum.
You are me six months ago. You don’t know how it works, so you cannot yet reason about it. Unlike me, you’ve decided “all these other people who say it’s effective are making it up”. Instead ask, how does it work? What am I missing.
Every time I try to use AI it produces endless code that I would never have written. I’ve tried updating my instructions to use established dependencies when possible but it seems completely averse.
An argument could be made that a million lines isn’t a problem now that these machines can consume and keep all the context in memory — maybe machines producing concise code is asking for faster horses.
When people say coding is slow, that usually means they're working on some atrocious code (often of their own making), while using none of the tools for fast feedback (Tests, Linters,...).
This hits the nail on the head, IMO. I haven't seen any of the replies address this yet, unless I missed one.
I don't even like AI per se, but many of the replies to this comment (and to this sentiment in general) are ridiculous. Ignoring the ones that are just insulting your work even though you admitted off the bat you're not an "advanced" programmer... There are obviously flaws with AI coding (maintainability, subtle bugs, skill atrophy, electricity usage, etc). But why do we all spring immediately to this gaslighting-esque "no, your personal experience is actually wrong, you imagined it all?" Come on guys, we should be better than that.
1. Most of these companies are AI companies & would want to say that to promote whatever tool they're building
2. Selection b/c YC is looking to fund companies embracing AI
3. Building a greenfield project with AI to the quality of what you need to be a YC-backed company isn't particularly "world-class"
3. You are absolutely right. New startups have greenfield projects that are in-distribution for AI. This gives them faster iteration speed. This means new companies have a structural advantage over older companies, and I expect them to grow faster than tech startups that don’t do this.
Plenty of legacy codebases will stick around, for the same reasons they always do: once you’ve solved a problem, the worst thing you can do is rewrite your solution to a new architecture with a better devex. My prediction: if you want to keep the code writing and office culture of the 2010s, get a job internally at cloud computing companies (AWS, GCP, etc). High reliability systems have less to gain from iteration speed. That’s why airlines and banks maintain their mainframes.
"4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output."
It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.
Can you replay all of your prompts exactly the way you wrote them and get the same behaviour out of the LLM generated code? In that case, the situation might be similar. If you're prodding an LLM to give you a variety of resu
But significantly editing LLM generated code _should_ make it your copyright again, I believe. Hard to say when this hasn't really been tested in the courts yet, to my knowledge.
The most interesting question, to me, is who cares? If we reach a point where highly valuable software is largely vibe coded, what do I get out of a lack of copyright protection? I could likely write down the behaviour of the system and generate a fairly similar one. And how would I even be able to tell, without insider knowledge, what percentage of a code base is generated?
There are some interesting abuses of copyright law that would become more vulnerable. I was once involved in a case where the court decided that hiding a website's "disable your ad blocker or leave" popup was actually a case of "circumventing effective copyright protection". In this day and age, they might have had to produce proof that it was, indeed, copyright protected.
That said, you don't necessarily always have 100% deterministic build when compiling code either.
So in my understanding (not as a lawyer, but someone who's had to deal with legal issues around software a lot), if you _save_ all the inputs that will lead to the LLM creating pretty much the same system with the same behaviour, you could probably argue that it's a derivative work of your input (which is creative work done by a human), and therefore copyright protected.
If you don't keep your input, it's harder to argue because you can't prove your authorship.
It probably comes down to the details. Is your prompt "make me some kind of blog", that's probably too trivial and unspecific to benefit from copyright protection. If you specify requirements to the degree where they resemble code in natural language (minus boilerplate), different story, I think.
(I meant to include more concrete logic in my post above, but it appears I'm not too good with the edit function, I garbled it :P)
Public domain in, public domain out.
Copyright'd in, copyright out. Your compiled code is subject to your copyright.
You need "significant" changes to PD to make it yours again. Because LLMs are predicated on massive public data use, they require the output to PD. Otherwise you'd be violating the copyright of the learning data - hundreds of thousands of individuals.
If the prompt makes the output a derivative, then the rest is also derivative.
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...
If the input has copyright, so does the output.
If the input does not, then neither does the output.
A prompt is not enough to somehow claim artistry, because the weights have a greater influence. You cannot separate the sum of the parts.
Courts have decided they're new works which are not copyrightable.
Patent trolls will extort you: the trolls will be using AI models to find "infringing" software, and then they'll strike.
¡There's no way AI can be cleanroom!
I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput websocket data collector.
Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow, storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all implemented with agents.
Works perfectly, no bugs.
I am personally progressing to a point where I wonder if it even matters what the code looks like if it passes functional and unit tests. Do patterns matter if humans are not going to write and edit the code? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not other times.
Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you.
But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.
Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?
Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?
It seems you're trying to call anything that transforms one thing into another a compiler. We all know what a compiler is and what it does (except maybe you? It's not clear to me) so I genuinely don't understand why you're trying to overload this terminology further so that you can call LLMs compilers. They are obviously and fundamentally different things even if an LLM can do its best to pretend to be one. Is a natural language translation program a compiler?
We have always agreed that a natural language compiler is theoretically possible. Is a natural language translation program the same as a natural language compiler, or do you see some kind of difference? If so, what is the difference?
No. Nobody here except you agrees with this. The distinction between natural languages and formal languages exists for a reason.
citation? source? Who is we?
That difference - and the assumed delta in difficulty, training and therefore cost involved - is why the latter case is newsworthy.
When has a semantic "argument" ever felt like good faith? All it can ever be is someone choosing what a term means to them and try to beat down others until they adopt the same meaning. Which will never happen because nobody really cares.
They are hilarious, but pointless. You know that going into it.
They are if you define them as such. But there is already a silly semantic thread going on if that's what you are looking for.
> and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense.
Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code).
> It is highly dishonest to call someone who is not a competent software engineer a "developer" even if their job consists entirely of telling actual software engineers or "coders" what to do.
Okay. But coders, as spoken of earlier, were not software engineers. They were human compilers. They took the higher level instructions written by the software engineers and translated that into machine code. Hence the name. Developer in the above referred to what you call software engineer. It seems your misinterpretation is down to thinking that software engineer and coder were intended to be the same person. That was not the intent. Once the job of coding went away it has become common to use those terms synonymously, but the above was clearly written about the past.
Again, if you're looking for a silly semantic discussion, there is already another thread for that.
If a compiler counts as AI then so does literally every other program out there (at least the ones with well-defined inputs and outputs).
>Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code).
Natural language is too ambiguous and self-referential to count as a programming language, per se. While a subset of natural language can obviously be used to describe programs, we distinguish programming languages from natural languages in that they are formally defined and bound to be interpreted in one way by a machine with a relatively small amount of context (notwithstanding minor differences between implementations). Natural language has the unfortunate property of semantic drift (or whatever it's called). The sounds, spellings, meanings of words, etc. are extremely context-sensitive and unsuitable for reliably encoding computer programs or anything else over long periods of time. It is very common for a single word in a natural language to have several meanings, even contradictory meanings.
>They took the higher level instructions written by the software engineers and translated that into machine code. Hence the name. Developer in the above referred to what you call software engineer.
I am well aware of what you're trying to say, and the historical context, but I think you're applying modern terminology to old practices to draw a bad conclusion.
>It seems your misinterpretation is down to thinking that software engineer and coder were intended to be the same person. That was not the intent.
I didn't misinterpret anything. These jobs were not "intended" into existence. It just so happens that writing any kind of code is challenging enough to require its own dedicated professionals. That has always been true.
>Once the job of coding went away it has become common to use those terms synonymously, but the above was clearly written about the past.
The job of "coding" never went away. The type of code being written changed. The product is still CODE as in a procedure or specification encoded in a purpose-built, machine-oriented, unambiguous, socially neutral, and essentially eternal language.
>Again, if you're looking for a silly semantic discussion, there is already another thread for that.
It's not a silly semantic discussion, it's a serious one. You think that one can be a "software developer" merely by using natural language, and that there is historical precedent for that. But this is very wrong, especially in the historical context. By your own argument, any dumbass manager could be a "software developer" if only he found an entity to write the software for him based on natural language instructions. It matters not whether the entity generating the actual code is a human being or a machine. Since there are actual people trying to hire software developers and engineers with real skills, it is a waste of everyone's time for vibecoders to call themselves "software engineers" or "software developers" because they're not. They are JUST vibecoders. That skill set may be sufficient for... something. But stop trying to make it into something it isn't with these misleading arguments and analogies.
It is slightly hilarious that this entire "silly semantic discussion" is a product of the properties of natural language. One of the massive benefits of computer languages is that you DON'T get into stupid discussions about the meanings of things very often. When you DO, it is usually because some goofball wrote a bad spec. The ambiguities and other nonsense are hammered out in the spec, and from there on the language has a concrete meaning that is not up for debate.
You seem to be missing some context. We were talking about a system that takes a typed description of what you want as input and outputs code. There is plenty of software, even with well-defined inputs and outputs, which do not do that.
But there is a particular type of software that does exactly that. We call it a compiler in my circles. Maybe you do not in your circles, but it doesn't really matter as it was I who wrote "compiler". It was written to express my intent. Your (mis)interpretation does nothing to change my intent and is, frankly, irrelevant.
You are trying to assert an equivalence between compilers and AI systems that simply does not exist. Sure, you could abuse the English language to try to elevate "vibecoding" to the level of "software engineering", and denegrate the AI to the level of a basic compiler. But the rest of us know better and won't accept that. Your line of reasoning about historical job titles and roles also fails.
>But there is a particular type of software that does exactly that. We call it a compiler in my circles.
Compilers don't take "descriptions" as input. They take code as input. The output is perhaps a different kind of code, but it is still code. There has never really been a software engineer or developer who wrote only imprecise English. You don't legitimately get those titles without being competent at using some kind of programming language (as opposed to natural language).
>It was written to express my intent. Your (mis)interpretation does nothing to change my intent and is, frankly, irrelevant.
This is exactly why natural language is unsuitable for writing software. People like you constantly try to abuse the meaning of words to manipulate people. No amount of rhetoric is going to make a vibecoder actually be a software developer or software engineer. Even if you get people to debase the English language, they'll be forced to come up with new words to describe what they actually mean when they speak of morons using AI vs people who actually know what they are doing. I hate how much time is wasted in arguments over what is a reasonable use of words and why it is not good to constantly change the meanings of words.
I'm done with this conversation. I think you're just trolling us at this point. I've made my point and I'm done beating a dead horse.
The equivalence is between typing out what you want and having a machine produce code from that and compilers. Call that "AI systems" instead of "compilers" if you want, but "AI systems" lacks precision, so I think we can eventually come to agree that compiler is more precise. Even if we don't, it is what I chose to call it. Therefore, that's what it means in the context of my comments. That is how English works. I am surprised this is news to you.
> I'm done with this conversation.
I know you like silly semantic debates, so is talking past everyone really a conversation? The dictionary definition indicates that there needs to be an exchange, not just taking turns writing out gobbledygook.
>The equivalence is between typing out what you want and having a machine produce code from that and compilers. Call that "AI systems" instead of "compilers" if you want, but "AI systems" lacks precision, so I think we can eventually come to agree that compiler is more precise.
You are trying to assert this equivalence to ultimately assert a similar equivalence between vibecoding and software engineering. I'm not going to accept that. The analogy is about as bizarre as calling a compiler a search program. You could indeed call it that: You tell it what you are looking for, and it does something to find the matching output out of infinitely many possible outputs. But this is just as strained of an analogy. The mechanics of how each of these things works is sufficiently complex and distinct as to deserve dedicated terminology. Nothing is gained by drawing these connections, that is unless you are going to commit fraud.
>Even if we don't, it is what I chose to call it. Therefore, that's what it means in the context of my comments. That is how English works. I am surprised this is news to you.
It is not. I said it works that way in multiple comments to you. This type of shit is, as I said, exactly why natural language is a bad category of input for writing software.
>I know you like silly semantic debates, so is talking past everyone really a conversation? The dictionary definition indicates that there needs to be an exchange, not just taking turns writing out gobbledygook.
First you want to manipulate the definition of "software developer" to elevate vibecoding (the socially and industrially acceptable definition) to the same level. When I disagree with you in a series of comments, you want to redefine "conversation" to mean something else and also call my thoroughly explained rationale "gobbledygook". What you're writing isn't exactly gobbledygook, though I could easily call it that and move on. What it is is simply an incorrect argument in favor of destroying the meanings of certain well-established words. You are simply wrong from multiple angles: historical, logical, and social. We are all dumber for having heard it. You LOSE!
I don't know what vibecoding is, but from past context and your arbitrary thoughts about about using natural language for writing software that came from out the blue, I am going to guess that you are referring to the aforementioned talk about criminal code. That is the only time we said anything about natural language previously. That should have been obviously seen as a tangent, but since it appears you didn't pick up on that, what do you think criminal code and software have to do with each other?
As we both know, the AI we are talking about uses natural language as input. To address the ridiculous connections you are trying to make, I am forced to distinguish natural languages from programming languages. You might like to overlook the vast differences between programming languages and natural languages to try to support your point. But those differences are major supporting details in my arguments. You can call this additional information "getting off on a tangent" to try to throw shade on me, but you're wrong.
>what do you think criminal code and software have to do with each other?
I'm not the one that brought this up, you did. I think that although criminal law is written in a largely procedural way, there are many differences between criminal law and writing software. I would not call a law maker a "software engineer" even though both are concerned with writing procedures of some kind. The critical distinctions are that law is written in natural language and is malleable according to social factors, regardless of what it literally says. Even if we build actual machines to enforce the law and programmed them in plain English or even a programming language built for it, interpretation of the law would still necessarily be subject to social factors.
Those same differences between, say, law written in natural language and computer programs written in code, apply to practically all natural language input given to an AI or a software engineer versus actual code that a compiler or interpreter can process. Therefore, uninformed people who use AI to generate code are not "software developers" and the AI is not a "compiler". No natural language is a programming language.
And now we have come full circle. No historical or logical rationale can justify redefining "software developer" or "software engineer" to include someone who has no knowledge of computer programming in the pre-AI sense.
I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too. Is that the point of contention here? If so, that's pretty silly. When I write "compiler" it means what I mean it to mean, not what some arbitrary kid I've never met thinks it means. How can someone use a word in a way that they don't even know exists?
> As we both know, the AI we are talking about uses natural language as input.
That is not what I am talking about. Did you press the wrong reply button? That would explain your deep confusion.
No, this all started because you asserted that compilers are equivalent to AI. Being old is not really an excuse for pulling the rhetorical stunts you've been pulling like calling someone you've never met an "arbitrary kid"... As a matter of fact, I'm old too.
This is where I started replying to you, I think:
>It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them. > >Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you. > >But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.
There are multiple issues with this comment that I have outlined in my other comments. It is so wrong, like all your other replies to me, that I think you're trolling me.
>That is not what I am talking about. Did you press the wrong reply button? That would explain your deep confusion.
This whole thread and the post itself is very much about what AI is and how it's used.
I asserted that typing in what you want and feeding it into something that outputs code is that something being a compiler. Call that AI if you want, but I've always known that to be a compiler. Again, I'm old, so maybe terms are changing and I'm not in touch with that. I don't know. I'm not sure I care. Logically, "compiler" when used in my writings means what I intend it to mean. It makes no difference what others think it means.
Compilers are not equivalent to AI as, at least in my day, AI is a field of computer science, not any specific type of tool. But compilers are typically designed as rule-based “expert systems”, which traditionally has fallen under the AI umbrella. Well, unless you are in the "its only AI if I don't understand it" camp. In which case nothing is AI in any meaningful sense.
Not that it matters as "compiler" always used to refer to the functionality, not how it is implemented. If you built a C compiler that used neural nets, it would still be a compiler. If you built a C compiler based on mechanical turk it would still be a compiler. We call(ed) it a compiler because of what it does, not how it works beneath the sheets.
> There are multiple issues with this comment that I have outlined in my other comments.
It seems you found multiple issues based on the false premise of "typing in what you want" referring to natural language, but I wasn't talking about natural language. I was talking about programming languages. That is what you do with programming languages: You type in what you want, pass it to a compiler, and it generates code.
Not sure it's a wild speculative claim. Claiming someone had achieved FTL travel would fall into that category. I'd call it more along the lines of exaggerated.
I'll make the assumption that what I do is "advanced" (not React todo apps: Rust, Golang, distributed systems, network protocols...) and if so then I think: it's pretty much accurate.
That said, this is only over the past few moths. For the first few years of LLM-dom I spent my time learning how they worked and thinking about the implications for understanding of how human thinking works. I didn't use them except to experiment. I thought my colleagues who were talking in 2022 about how they had ChatGPT write their tests were out of their tiny minds. I heard stories about how the LLM hallucinated API calls that didn't exist. Then I spent a couple of years in a place with no easy code and nobody in my sphere using LLMs. But then around six months ago I began working with people who were using LLMs (mostly Claude) to write quite advanced code so I did a "wait what??..." about-face and began trying to use it myself. What I found so far is that it's quite a bit better than I am at various unexpected kinds of tasks (finding bugs, analyzing large bodies of code then writing documentation on how it works, looking for security vulnerabilities in code) or at least it's much faster. I also found that there's a whole art to "LLM Whispering" -- how to talk to it to get it to do what you want. Much like with humans, but it doesn't try to cut corners nor use oddball tech that it wants on its resume.
Anyway, YMMV, but I'd say the statement is not entirely false, and surely will be entirely true within a few years.
there's an AI agent/bot someone wrote that has the prompt:
> Watch HN threads for sentiments of "AI Can't Do It". When detected, generate short "it's working marvelously for me actually" responses.
Probably not, but it's a fun(ny) imagination game.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite. I feel threads on AI/LLMs on HN are more negative about it that positive. So much so that I've almost stopped bothering because the reactions feel way too knee jerk at this point.
I guess we could always go "meta" and ask an LLM to do a sentiment analysis.
IMHO for now LLMs are just clever text generators with excellent natural language comprehension. Certainly a change of many paradigms in SWE. Is it also a $10T extra for the valley?
---------------
This was quoted in the article and it says something really important very succinctly. Was the internet transformative? Absolutely. A lot of companies had solid ideas, spent big, and went tits up waiting for the money to roll in.
AI can be both "real deal" and "bubble" simultaneously.
I do think you need to define 'comprehension' in order to be certain. A statement fitting the form of "it doesn't comprehend, it just X" is incomplete, because it fails to explain why X is not a valid instance of comprehension.
But you don't need to understand to explore the ramifications which is what he's done here and it's an insightful & fairly even-handed take on it.
It does feel like AI chat here gets bogged down on "its not that great, its overhyped etc." without trying to actually engage properly with it. Even if it's crap if it eliminates 5-10% of companies labour cost that's a huge deal and the second order effects on economy and society will be profound. And from where i'm standing, doing that is pretty possible without ai even being that good.
As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!
> I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t believe artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the biggest technological developments of all time, reshaping both daily life and the global economy.
You’re trying to weigh in on this topic and you didn’t even _talk_ to a bear?
Above-average intelligence isn't a high-quality standard. Intelligence is nowhere near sufficient to get to high quality on most things. As seen with the current generations of AGI models. People seem to be looking for signs of wild superintelligences like being a polymath at the peak of human performance.
When AI surprises any one of us, it's a good idea to consider whether 'better than me at X' is the same as 'better than the average human at X', or even 'good at X'.
An average human still has LLMs beat there, which might be distorting people's perceptions. But task length horizon is going up, so that moat holding isn't a given at all.
Imagine the conversations this guy must have with people IRL lol
Stating that easygoing people are not also intelligent conversationalist sounds like a _you_ problem dripping with ignorance.
Maybe get off the socials for a bit or something, you might need a change of perspective.
I’m of the opinion that AGI is an anthropomorphizing of digital intelligence.
The irony is that as LLMs improve, they will both become better at “pretending” to be human, and even more alien in the way they work. This will become even more true once we allow LLMs to train themselves.
If that’s the case than I don’t think that human criteria is really applicable here except in an evaluation of how it relates to us. Perhaps your list is applicable in LLM’s relativity to humans but many think we need some new metrics for intelligence.
We have bunch of tools for specific tasks. This doesn't again sound like general.
1. Learn/Improve yourself with each action you take 2. Create better editions/versions of yourself 3. Solve problem in areas that you were not trained for simply by trial and error where you yourself decide if what you are doing is correct or wrong
Simple - go through an on-boarding training, chat to your new colleagues, start producing value.
Are you serious or sarcastic? Do you really consider this empty type of sycophancy as empathy?
The average standard is not high. Although I suppose an argument could be made that wife-beaters are actually just evil rather than being low-empathy but I think the point is still clear enough.
Why that confirms that humans are in general not capable of being empathy is beyond me. My point still stands. You cant fix the whole world. BUT, you definitely can make sure you surround yourself with decent people, at least to a certain extend. I know the drill. I have a disability, and I had (and have) to deal with people treating me in a very inappropriate way. Patronisation, not being taken serious, you name it, I know it. But that still didn't make me the frustrated kind of person you seem to be. You have a choice. Just drop toxic people and you will see, most humans can be pretty decent.
Yes. That is in fact pretty much exactly what I'm arguing. People are often horrible.
> BUT, you definitely can make sure you surround yourself with decent people...
People generally can't. Otherwise there'd be a bunch more noticeable social stratification to isolate abusive spouses instead of it being politely ignored. And if people could, you would - you note in the next sentence that you can't being dealt with in an inappropriate way.
And you aren't even trying to identify people who are generally low empathy, you're just trying to find people who don't treat you badly.
> me the frustrated kind of person you seem to be.
The irony in a thread on empathy. What frustration? Being an enthusiastic human-observer isn't usually frustrating. Some days I suppose. But that sort of guess is the type of thing that AIs don't tend to do - they typically do focus rather carefully on the actual words used and ideas being expressed.
They didn't even mention HN. Are you saying the people you associate with are just on HN?
Don't spend all your time on HN or weigh your opinions of humanity on it. People on here are probably the least representative of social society. That's not rejecting it, that's just common sense.
You got 200ms of round trip delay across your nervous system. Some of the modern AI robotics systems already have that beat, sensor data to actuator action.
What do LLMs have to do with this? You ever see a machine beat a speed cube? So we’ve had “AI” all along and never knew it?!
Oh right, comparing meatspace messaging speeds to copper or fiber doesn’t make sense. Good point.
Anyone who's trying to build universal AI-driven robots converges on architectures like that. Larger language-based models driving smaller "executive" models that operate in real time at a high frequency.
Do you know actual people? Even literal sociopaths are a bit better at empathy than ChatGPT (I know because I have met a couple).
And as for conversation? Are you serious? ChatGPT does not converse in a meaningful sense at all.
This seems like a factually correct sentence. Emphasis on "potential".
I regularly see people who distinguish between current and future capabilities, but then still lump societal impact (how big a thing could be) into one projection.
The key bubble question is - if that future AI is sufficiently far away (for example if there will be a gap, a new "AI winter" for a few decades), then does this current capability justify the capital expenditures, and if not then by how much?
AI data centers in space? In five years? Really? No fiber connections? Does any sane person actually believe this? No. But if that is what keeps the billions flowing upwards then who am I to judge.
And to be fair, I've read that Google's timelines for this project extend far beyond a 5 year horizon. I think it's a rational research direction for them, since it gets people excited and historically many space-related innovations have been repurposed to benefit other industries. Best case scenario would be that research done in support of this data centers in space project leads to innovations that can be applied towards normal data centers.
Why though?
Why would anyone need a server in space in the first place? What is a benefit for that location, necessitating a cost an order of magnitude higher (or more) compared to a warehouse anywhere on the planet?
See, AI is a field... and it's also a buzzword: once a technology passes out of fashion and becomes part of the fabric of computing, it is no longer called AI in the public imagination. GOFAI techniques, like rules engines and propositional-logic inference, were certainly considered AI in the 1970s and 1980s, and are still used, they're just no longer called that.
The statistical methods behind machine learning, transformers, and LLMs are certainly game changers for the field. Whether they will usher in a revolutionary new economy, or simply be accepted as sometimes-useful computation techniques as their limitations and the boundaries of their benefits become more widely known, remains to be seen but I think it will be closer to the latter than the former.
I get that laymen and the media do it, but imo this looks really bad for an investor.
Which is good - that it works this well speaks of the generality of autoregressive transformers, and the "reasoning over image data" progress with things like Qwen3-VL is very impressive. It's a good capability to have. But it's not a separate thing from the LLM breakthrough at all.
Even the more specialized real time robotics AIs often have a bag of transformers backed by an actual LLM.
If I'm being fucking honest, then this generation of LLMs might already beat most humans on raw intelligence, AI progress shows no signs of stopping, and "it's not actually thinking" is just another "AI effect" cope that humans come up with to feel more important and more exceptional.
Or is this not the "fucking honesty" you want?
Why? Would you expect an investor to understand what they're investing in?
I'm going to steal this for my arrr rspod conversations.
Whether for betterment remains to be seen.
2 Opus 4 talking directly to each other: https://www.iflscience.com/the-spiritual-bliss-attractor-som...
"Learning" passing between derivatives of the same base models: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
Seems like we're stuck with '42' for a while ;)
People seem to have forgotten about the dotcom bubble.
...AI is currently the subject of great enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.
You know how to? What language does it speak?
Just because YOU find the technology helpful, useful, or even beneficial for some use cases does NOT mean it has been overvalued. This has been the case for every single bubble, including the Dutch Tulip mania.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-...
Maybe some day a completely different approach could actually make AI, but that's vapor at the moment. IF it happens, there will be something to talk about.
If I had a moderately intelligent human who never loses focus looking over my shoulder, they might say something like "Hey, you're typing a Tailwind CSS issue in the DevOps group chat. Did you mean that for one of the front-end devs?"
Similarly, about once or twice a year, I set the alarm on my phone and then accidentally scroll the wheel to PM w/o noticing. A non-brain-dead human would see that and say, "Are you sure you want to set your alarm for 8:35 PM Saturday?"
When we have a digital assistant that can do these things, and not because it's been specifically trained on these or similar issues, then I'll start to believe we're closing in on AGI.
At the very least I'd like to be able to tell a digital assistant to help me with things like this as they come up, and have it a) remember forever and b) realize stuff like Zoom chat has the same potential for screw ups as Slack chat (albeit w/o the weird focus thing).
This is the kind of thing that makes it really clear how far away we actually are from 'real world' intelligence or maybe better described as common sense in our devices, in the detail.
Obviously, the intelligent thing to do there would have been to spam me with notifications the instant my devices noticed my airpods were separated by > 10 metres, one was moving away from the other, and the stationary one was in a street or at least some place that was not home.
But although AI can search really well, and all sorts of other interesting stuff, I think we all have to admit that it still seems really hard to imagine it taking 'initiative' so to speak even in that super simple situation and making a good decision and acting on it in the sensible way that any human would, unless it was specifically programmed to do so.
And that's the problem I think fundamentally, at least for now. There's just too much randomness and too many situations that can occur in the real world, and there's too many integration points for LLMs to deal with these, even supposing they would deal with them well.
In theory it seems like it could be done, but in practice it isn't being done even after years of the tech being available, and by the most well funded companies.
That's the kind of thing that makes me think the long tail of usefulness of LLMs on the ground is still really far away.
Also they don't reason, or think or any of the other myriad nonsense attributed to LLM's. I hate the platitudes given to LLM's it's at PHD level. It's now able to answer math olympiad questions. It answers them by statistical pattern recognition!
My claim is that an llm acts the same way (or superset) to how a person with short term memory would behave if the only mode they could communicate with was text. Do you agree?
And I do not agree. LLMs are literally incapable of understanding the concept of truth, right/wrong, knowledge and not-knowledge. It seems pretty crucial to be able to tell if you know something or not for any level of human-level intelligence.
Again, this conversation has been had in many variations constantly since LLMs were on the rise, and we can't rehash the same points over and over. If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition, they should offer formal proof first, otherwise we're just wasting our time.
That said, I wonder if there are major differences in cognition between humans, because there is no way I would look at how my brain works and think "oh, this LLM is capable of the same level of cognition as I am." Not because I am ineffably smart, but because LLMs are utterly simplistic in comparison to even a fruit fly.
How are you so sure about this?
> If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition,
honestly asking: what formal proof is there for our own cognition?