Posted by jakelsaunders94 6 hours ago
I am extremely skeptical of AI products anyone builds. It's just using one black box to build scaffolding around another black box and then typically want to charge money for it. I don't see any value there.
Also, depends on who target user is.
AI can be used to build deterministic software
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Personally, I'm still very interested in the topic.
But since the tech is moving very fast, the discussion is just very very unevenly distributed: There's lots of interesting things to say. But a lot of takes that were relevant 6 months ago are still being digested by most.
Never heard this and I like it very much. This is just an off-topic comment to say thanks!
I don't like the hype language applied by the channel host one bit - and so this is not something where I expect someone tired of the hype to be swayed - but I think his perspective is sometimes interesting (if you filter through the BS): He seems to get that the real challenge is not LLM quality but organisational integration: Tooling, harnesses, data access, etc, etc. And so in this department there's sometimes good input.
I think the "can do" part gets boring but now I'm paralleling this to trust relationships and fiduciary responsiblities. What I mean is that we can not only instruct but then put a framework around an agent much like we do a trustee where they are compelled to act in the best interests of the beneficiaries (the human that created them in this case).
Anyway it's got me thinking in a different way.
Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies.
The cycles cycle on.
Like the new frontend frameworks coming every week after 2010 sometime. Not jumping on every single one, and waiting until react was declared the winner and learn that worked well. Sure, someone that used it from day 1 had more experience, but one quickly catch up.
Only thing that stuck thus far is the cloud. Though not for infinite scalability and resiliency, cause that just dumps big invoices in your lap.
The Cloud happened as well, as you've pointed out
AI adoption is well past Quantum and Web 3. Comparing it to those two is nonsensical.
All those listed and more, are part of the cycles that the parent comment mentioned and which I've continued.
Same thing with Agile. Mostly sprint-based waterfall, iterative development is not something I've ever seen in practice. Or people over processes, remember those ideas?
BigData, was another hype cycle where even smaller companies wanted a "piece of the action". I've worked at the time in a sub 50 developers company, and the higher ups where all about big data. When in fact our system was struggling with GBs of data due to frugality in hardware.
For a moment in time you couldn't spit in any direction without hiting a Domain Driven Design talk. And now we disable safeguards and LLMs write a mix of garbled ideas from across all the laundered open source training data.
Too early to tell where AI will land, and if it will bring down the economy with it, but spending rate doesn't deliver equal results for all, and we will have to see after the dust settles.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)
The new HN is full of people filled with anxiety about being replaced by an advanced calculator.
To an outsider, it could almost be funny if it wasn't so sad.
I've been spamming some auto research loops, and it is so addictive. Think about how many of humanity's problems will be solved because of this. Of course, it will also disappoint, like, we are still waiting for flying cars, but man, this is a unique moment in history.
All that said, I've already set up a few of my non tech close friends with Cowork and they are huge fans of it now. It's somewhat shocking how much menial repetitive work the average white collar job entails.
At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's been a big productivity accelerator.
Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the sentiment.
Wow that sounds horrible.
I spent 2024 on Mastodon and I absorbed their groupthink that AI was useless... I wish I could get that year of my life back. I wish I had that extra year headstart on AI compared to where I am now. So much of my coding frustrations that year that might have been solved from using AI. I am reluctantly back on X - I hate what has been done to Twitter, but that's where so much of the useful information on using AI is being shared.
Well, back to it. Claude has been building another local MCP server tool for me in the background.
100% feeling this divide as well.
People that deny the benefit of AI in 2026... I can't even engage with them anymore. I just move on with my life. These people are simply not living in reality, it will catch up to them eventually (unfortunately.)
All they essentially did was tell the LLM to test and verify whether the answer is correct with a prompt like the following:
>"You just edited X. Before moving on, verify the change is correct: write a short inline python -c or a /tmp test script that exercises the changed code path, run it with bash, and confirm the output is as expected."
Now whether this is true, I don't know, but I think talking about this kind of stuff is cool!