It will only get better at generating random slop and other crap. Maybe helping morons who are unable to eat and breathe without consulting the "helpful assistant".
> One can treat current LLMs as a layer of "cheese" for any software development or deployment pipeline
It's another interesting attempt at normalising the bullshit output by LLMs, but NO. Even with the entshittified Boeing, the aviation industry safety and reliability records, are far far far above deterministic software (know for a lot of un-reliability itself), and deterministic, B2C software to LLMs in turn is what Boeing and Airbus software and hardware reliablity are for the B2C software...So you cannot even begin to apply aviation industry paradigms to the shit machines, please.
I understand the frustration, but factually it is not true.
Engines are reliable to about 1 anomaly per million flight hours or so, current flight software is more reliable, on order of 1 fault per billion hours. In-flight engine shutdowns are fairly common, while major software anomalies are much rarer.
I used LLMs for coding and troubleshooting, and while they can definitely "hit" and "miss", they don't only "miss".
I was actually comparing aviation HW+SW vs. consumer software...and making the point that an old C++ invoices processing application, while being way less reliable than aviation HW or SW, is still orders of magnitude more reliable than LLMs. The LLMs don't always miss, true...but they miss far too often for the "hit" part to be relevant at all.
They miss but can self correct, this is the paradigm shift. You need a harness to unlock the potential and the harness is usually very buildable by LLMs, too.
Concrete examples are in your code just as they're in my employer's which I'm not at the liberty to share - but every little bit counts, starting from the simplest lints, typechecks, tests and going to more esoteric methods like model checkers. You're trying to get the probability of miss down with the initial context; then you want to minimize the probability of not catching a miss, then you want to maximize the probability of the model being able to fix a miss itself. Due to the multiplicative nature of the process the effect is that the pipeline rapidly jumps from 'doesn't work' to 'works well most of the time' and that is perceived as a step function by outsiders. Concrete examples are all over the place, they're just being laughed at (yesterday's post about 100% coverage was spot on even if it was an ad).
> before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use?
Just for the fun of it, and so you lose your "virginity" so to speak, next time when the magic machine gives you the answer about "what it thinks", tell it its wrong in a strict language and scold it for misleading you. Tell it to give you the "real" best practices instead of what it spat out.
Then sit back and marvel at the machine saying you were right and that it had mislead you. Producing a completely, somewhat, or slightly different answer (you never know what you get on the slot machine).
AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right!
In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check.
If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter?
Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example.
Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc.
Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel.
It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions.
What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs.
So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them.
The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not?
For all I know, he is more competent than you; he figured out how to utilize Claude Code in a productive way, which is a point for him.
I'd have to guess whether you are an expert working on software not well suited for AI, or just average with a stubborn attitude towards AI and potentially not having tried the latest generation of models and agentic harnesses.
I think it's worth framing things back to what we're reacting to. The top poster said:
> I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore.
The rest of the post is basically their human declaration of obsolescence to the programming field. To which someone reacted by saying that this sounds like shilling. And indeed it does for many professional developers, including those that supplement their craft with LLMs. Declaring that you feel inadequate because of LLMs only reveals something about you. Defending this position is a tell that puts anyone sharing that perspective in the same boat: you didn't know what you were doing in the first place. It's like when someone who couldn't solve the "invert a binary tree" problem gets offended because they believed they were tricked into an impossible task. No, you may be a smart person that understands enough of the rudiment of programming to hack some interesting scripts, but that's actually a pretty easy problem and failing to solve it indeed signals that you lack some fundamentals.
> Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise.
I've read Antirez, Simon Willison, Bryan Cantrill, and Armin Ronacher on how they work or want to work with AI. From none I've got this attitude that they're no longer needed as part of the process.
I've yet to see it from someone who isn't directly or indirectly affiliated with an organisation that would benefit from increased AI tool adoption. Not saying it's impossible, but...
Whereas there are what feels like endless examples of high profile, skilled engineers who are calling BS on the whole thing.
You can say the same about people saying the opposite. I haven’t heard from a single person who says AI can’t write code that does not a financially interest directly or indirectly in humans writing code.
That seems rather disingenuous to me. I see many posts which clearly come from developers like you and me who are happy with the results they are getting.
Every time people on here comment something about "shilling" or "boosters". It would seem to me that in the rarest of cases someone shares their opinion to profit from it, while you act like that is super common.
> Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise
Again, a lot of fluff, a lot of of "a number ofs", "highly this, highly that". But very little concrete information. What happened to the pocket PhDs promised for this past summer? Where are the single-dude billion dollar companies built with AI tools ? Or even a multiple-dudes billion dollar companies ? What are you talking about?
Right: they disagree with me and so must not know what they’re talking about. Hey guess how I know neither of you are all as good as you think you are: your egos! You know what the brightest people at the top of their respective fields have in common? They tend not to think that new technologies they don’t understand how to use are dumb and they don’t think everyone who disagrees with them is dumb!
> you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
Yikes, pretty condescending. Also wrong!
IMO you are strawmanning pretty heavily here.
Believe it or not, using Claude to improve your productivity is pretty dissimilar to vibe coding a commercial airplane(?) which I would agree is probably not FAA approved.
I prefer not to toot my own horn, but to address an idea you seem to have that I don’t know math or CS(?) I have a PhD in astrophysics and a decade of industry experience in tech and other domains so I’m fairly certain I know how math and computers work but maybe not!
I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.
Right I’m a bot made to promote AI like half the people on this thread.
I don’t know if you noticed a difference from other hype cycles but other ones were speculative. This one is also speculative but the greater divide is that the literal on the ground usefulness of AI is ALREADY going to change the world.
The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what you're trying to convey. You say there's a difference from previous "speculation" but also that it's still speculation. Then you go on to write "ALREADY going to" which is future tense (speculation), even clarifying what the speculation is.
So let me explain it more clearly. AI as it is now is already changing the game. It will reduce the demand of swes across every company as an eventuality if we hold technological progress fixed. There is no speculation here. This comes from on the ground evidence from what I see day to day and what I do and my experience pair programming things from scratch with AI.
The speculation is this: if we follow the trendlines of AI improvement for the past decade and a half, the projection of past improvement indicates AI will only get better and better. It’s a reasonable speculation, but it is nonetheless speculative. I wouldn’t bet my life on continuous improvement of AI to the point of AGI but it’s now more than ever before a speculation that is not unrealistic.
Nice slop response. This is the same thing said about blockchain and NFTs, same schtick, different tech. The only thing "AI" has done is convince some people that it's a magical being that knows everything. Your comments seem to be somewhere on that spectrum. And, sure what if it isn't changing the world for the better, and actually makes things much worse? You're probably okay with that too, I guess, as long as your precious "AI" is doing the changing.
We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.
>The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.
>This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.
You're not thinking clearly. A couple years ago we didn't even have AI who could do this, then chatGPT came out we had AI who could barely do it, then we had AI who could do simple tasks with A lot of hand holding, now we have AI who can do complex human tasks with minimal hand holding. Where do you think the trendline is pointing.
Your hypothesis is going against all evidence. It's more wishful thinking and irrational. It's a race to the bottom because you wish it will be a race to the bottom, and we both know the trendline is pointing in the opposite direction.
>We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.
I agree AI is bad for us. My claim is it's going to change the world and it is already replacing human tasks. That's all. Whether that's good or bad for us is an ORTHOGANOL argument.
I use AI every day, and it's honestly crap. No it isn't significantly improving, it's hitting a wall. Every new model release is getting less and less good, so no, the "trendline" is not going up as much as you seem to think it is. It's plateaued. The only way "AI" is going to change the world is if stupid people put it in places that it really shouldn't be, thinking it will solve problems and not create even more problems.
Proof of what? Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers? It’s all so so silly, anti-AI crowds on HN rehash so many of the same tired arguments it’s ridiculous:
- bad for environment: how? Why?
- takes all creative output and doesn’t credit: common crawl has been around for decades and models have been training for decades, the difference is that now they’re good. Regurgitating training data is a known issue for which there are mitigations but welcome to the world of things not being as idealistic as some Stallman-esque hellscape everyone seems to want to live in
- it’s bad and so no one should use it and any professionals who do don’t know what they’re doing: I have been so fortunate to personally know some of the brightest minds on this planet (Astro departmentments, AI research labs) and majority of them use AI for their jobs.
>Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers?
On a 35 day-old account, yes. Anything "post-AI" is suspect now.
The rest of your comment reads like manufactured AI slop, replying to things I never even wrote in my one sentence comment. And no surprise coming from an account created 1 day ago.
I think it’s quite obvious I’m not writing AI slop.
The latest chatgpt for example will produce comments that are now distinguishable from the real thing only because they’re much better written. It’s insane that the main visible marker rn is that the arguments and writings it crafts are superior then what your average joe can write.
My shit writing can’t hold a candle and that’s pretty obvious. AI slop is not accepted here but I can post an example of what AI slop will now look like, if AI responded to you it would look like this:
Fair to be skeptical of new accounts. But account age and “sounds like AI” are not workable filters for truth. Humans can write like bots, bots can write like humans, and both can be new. That standard selects for tenure, not correctness.
More importantly, you did not engage any claim. If the position is simply “post-AI content from new accounts is suspect,” say that as a moderation concern. But as an argument, suspicion alone does not refute anything.
Pick one concrete claim and say why it is wrong or what evidence would change your mind. Otherwise “this reads like slop” is just pattern matching. That is exactly the failure mode being complained about.
Obviously not troll, I know I’m bragging. But I have to emphasize that it is not some stupid oh “only domain experts know AI is shit. Everyone else is too stupid to understand how bad it is” That is patently wrong.
Few people can do what I do and as a result I likely make more money than you. But now with AI… everyone can do what I do. It has leveled the playing field… what I was before now matters fuck all. Understand?
I still make money right now. But that’s unlikely to last very long. I fully expect it to disappear within the next decade.
You are wrong. People like yourself will likely be smart enough to stay well employed into the future. It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs. And they'll be all shocked Pikachu face when they get a pink slip while their role gets reassigned to an AI agent
> It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs.
Why is it that in every hype there are always the guys like you that want to punish the non-believers? It's not enough to be potentially proven correct, your anger requires the demise of the heretics. It was the same story for cryptocurrencies.
He/she is probably one of those poor souls working for an AI-wrapper-startup who received a ton of compensation in "equity", which will be worth nothing when their founders get acquihired, Windsurf style ;) But until then, they get to threaten us all with the impending doom, because hey, they are looking into the eye of the storm, writing Very Complex Queries against the AI API or whatever...
Isn’t this the same type of emotional response he’s getting accused for? You’re speculating that he will be “punished” just as he speculated for you.
There’s emotions on both sides and the goal is to call it out, throw it to the side and cut through into the substance. The attitude should be: Which one of us is actually right? Rather than: I’m right and you’re a fucking idiot attitude I see everywhere.
Mate, I could not care less if he/her got "punished" or not. I was just assuming what might be driving someone to go and try and answer each and every one of my posts with very low quality comments, reeking of desperation and "elon-style" humour (cheap, cringe puns). You are assuming too much here.
Not too dissimilar to you. I wrote long rebuttals to you points and you just descended into put downs, stalking and false accusations. You essentially told me to fuck off from all of HN in one of your posts.
This is such a fantastic response. And outsiders should very well be made aware what kind of plane they are stepping into. No offence to the aviation enthusiasts in your example but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane, in the same way I will do everything in my power to avoid using AI coded software that does anything important or critical...
> but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane
speaking of airplanes... considering how much llm usage is being pushed top-down in many places, i wonder how long until some news drops of some catastrophic one-liner got through via llm generated code...
Bro idk why you waste your time writing all this. No one cares that you were an early adopter, all that means is that you used the rudimentary LLM implementations that were available from 2022-2024 which are now completely obselete. Whatever experience you think you have with AI tools is useless because you clearly haven't kept up with the times. AI platforms and tools have been changing quickly. Every six months the capabilities have massively improved.
Next time before you waste ten minutes typing out these self aggrandizing tirades maybe try asking the AI to just write it for you instead
Maybe he's already ahead of you by not using current models, 2026 models are going to make 2025 models completely obsolete, wasting time on them is dumb.
"Littered" is a great verb to use here. Also I did not ask for a deviated proxy non-measure, like how many people who are choking themselves to death in a meaningless bullshit job are now surviving by having LLMs generate their spreadsheets and presentations. I asked for solid proof of succesful, commercial products built up by dreaming them up through LLMs.
The proof is all around you. I am talking about software professionals not some bullshit spread sheet thing.
What I’m saying is this: From my pov Everyone is using LLMs to write code now. The overwhelming majority of software products in existence today are now being changed with LLM code.
The majority of software products being created from scratch are also mostly LLM code.
This is obvious to me. It’s not speculation, where I live and where I’m from and where I work it’s the obvious status quo. When I see someone like you I’m thinking because the change happened so fast you’re one of the people living in a bubble. Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up.
Wait until you have that one coworker who’s going at 10x speed as everyone else and you find out it’s because of AI. That is what will slowly happen to these bubbles. To keep pace you will have to switch to AI to see the difference.
I also don’t know how to offer you proof. Do you use google? If so you’ve used products that have been changed by LLM code. Is that proof? Do you use any products built by a start up in the last year? The majority of that code will be written by an LLM.
> Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up.
We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
Doesn’t make sense to me. If it’s bad why pay for the tool?
Obviously your team disagrees that it’s a worse replacement for google or else why demand it against your will?
> at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
I agree with this. But the upside negates this and I agree with your own team on that.
Btw if you’re paying top dollar for AI.. your developers are unlikely using it as a google search replacement. At top dollar AI is used as an agent. What it ends up doing is extremely different from a google search in this mode. That may be good or bad but it is a distinctly different outcome then a google search and that makes your google analogy ill fitted to what your team is actually using it for.
Have you had your head in the sand for the past two years?
At the recent AWS conference, they were showcasing Kiro extensively with real life products that have been built with it. And the Amazon developers all allege that they've all been using Kiro and other AI tools and agents heavily for the past year+ now to build AWS's own services. Google and Microsoft have also reported similar internal efforts.
The platforms you interact with on a daily basis are now all being built with the help of AI tools and agents
If you think no one is building real commercial products with AI then you are either blind or an idiot or both. Why don't you just spend two seconds emailing your company AWS ProServe folks and ask them, I'm sure they'll give you a laundry list of things they're using AI for internally and sign you up for a Kiro demo as well
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are balls deep invested in AI, a rational person should draw 0 conclusions in them showcasing how productive they are with it.
I'd say it's more about the fear of their $50billion+ investments not paying off is creeping up on them.
It’s ok to have this prior but these are not speculative tools and capabilities, they exist today. If you remain unimpressed by them that’s fine, but to deny real people (not bots!) and real companies (we measure lots of stuff, I’ve seen the data at a large MAANG and have used their internal and external tools) get serious benefits _today_ and we still have about 4 more orders of magnitude to scale _existing_ paradigms, the writing on the wall is so obvious. It’s fine and reasonable to be skeptical and there are so many serious serious societal risks and issues to worry about and champion but to me if your position is akin to “this is all hype” it makes absolutely no sense to me
I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.
> I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias
Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cases.
My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI
> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do,
That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it before you push into production. Once you apply them to any area where you have at least moderate competence, you will see all sorts of issues that you just cannot unsee. Security and performance is often an issue, not to mention the quality of code....
This is remarkably dismissive and comes across as arrogant. In reality they assist many people with expert skills in a domain in getting things done in areas they are competent in, without getting bogged down in tedium.
They need a heavy hand to police to make sure they do the right thing. Garbage in, garbage out.
The smarter the hand of the person driving them, the better the output. You see a problem, you correct it. Or make them correct it. The stronger the foundation they're starting from, the better the production.
It's basically the opposite of what you're asserting here.
> So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours?
Ahaha, weren’t you the guy who wrote an opus about planes? Is this your baseline for “stuff where LLMs break and real engineering comes into the room”? There’s a harsh wake up call for you around the corner.
What wake up call mate? I've been on board as early adopter with GH Copilot closed beta since 2021, it was around time when you did not even hear about the LLMs. I am just being realistic about the limits of the technology. In the 90s, we did not need to convince people about the Internet. It just worked. Also - what opus? Have the LLMs affected your attention span so much, that you consider what typically an primary school first-grader would read during their first school class, an "opus" no less? No wonder you are so easily impressed.
I expect it’s your “I’m an expert and everyone else is merely an idiot child” attitude that’s probably making it hard to take you seriously.
And don’t get me wrong - I totally understand this personality. There are a similar few I’ve worked with recently who are broadly quite skeptical of what seems to be an obvious fact to me - their roles will need to change and their skillsets will have to develop to take advantage of this new technology.
I am a bit tired of explaining, but I run my own company, so its not like I have to fear my "roles and responsibilities" changing - I am designing them myself. I also am not a general skeptic of the "YAGNI" type - my company and myself have been early adopters on many trends. Those that made sense of course. We also tried to be early adopters of LLMs, all the way since 2021. And I am sorry if that sounds arrogant to you, but anyone still working on them and with them to me looks like the folks who were trying to build computers and TVs with the vaccuum tubes. With the difference that vaccuum tubes computers were actually useful at the time.
95% of companies fail. Yours will too, don't worry. Amazon themselves have already been using in-house versions of this to build AWS for over a year https://kiro.dev/ you can either continue adopting AI in your company or you can start filing your company bankruptcy papers
What would you need to see to change your mind? I can generate at mind-boggling scale. What’s your threshold for realizing you might not have explored every possible vector for AI capabilities?
What you wrote here was relevant about 9 months ago. It’s now outdated. The pace and velocity of improvement of Ai can only be described as violent. It is so fast that there are many people like you who don’t get it.
The last big release from OpenAI was a big giant billion-dollar flop. Its lackluster update was written about far and wide, even here on HN. But maybe you're living in an alternate reality?
My experience comes from the fact that after over a decade of working as a swe I no longer write code. It’s not some alternate reality thing or reading headlines. It’s my daily life that has changed.
Have you used AI before? Agentic systems are set up so it gives you a diff before even making committing to a change. Sounds like you haven’t really used AI agentically yet.
Disrespect the trend line and get rolled over by the steamroller. Labs are cooking and what is available commercially is lobotomized for safety and alignment. If your baseline of current max capability is sonnet 4.5 released just this summer you’re going to be very surprised in the next few months.
I don't understand this idea that non-believers will be "steamrolled" by those who are currently adopting AI into their workflows. If their claims are validated and the new AI workflows end up achieving that claimed 10x productivity speedup, or even a 2x speedup, nobody is cursed to be steamrolled - they'll simply adopt those same workflows same as everyone else. In the meantime they aren't wasting their time trying to figure out the best way to coax and beg the LLM's into better performance.
That's actually what I'm arguing for; use tools where they are applicable. I'm against blind contrarianism and the 'nothing ever happens' attitude since that IME is being proven more wrong each week.
Right, like I was steamrolled by the "Team of Pocket Ph.D Experts" announced earlier this year with ChatGPT 5 ? Remember that underwhelming experience? The Grok to which you could "paste your entire source code file"? The constantly debilitating Claude models? Satya Nadella desperately dropping down to a PO role and bypassing his executives to try and micro-manage Copilot product development because the O365 Copilot experience is experiencing a MASSIVE pushback globally from teams and companies forced to use it ? Or is there another steamrolling coming around? What is this time? Zuckerberg implements 3D avatars in a metaverse with legs that can walk around and talk to us via LLMs? And then they sit down at virtual desks and type on virtual keyboards to produce software? Enlighten me please!
First examine your post. Can you create a 3D avatar with legs that can walk and talk?
If not, then for this area you’ve been steam rolled.
Anyway main point is, you’re looking at the hype headlines which are ludicrous. Where most optimists come from is that they are using it in the daily to code. To them it’s right in front of their eyes.
I’m not sure what your experience is but my opinion on AI doesn’t come from speculation. It comes from on the ground experience on how AI currently has changed my job role completely. If I hold the technology to be fixed and to not improve into the future then my point still stands. I’m not speculating. Most AI optimists aren’t speculating.
The current on the ground performance is what’s causing the divide. Some people have seen it fully others only have a rudimentary trial.
I have a hard time trusting the judgement of someone writing this:
> I no longer write code. I’ve been a swe for over a decade. AI writes all my code following my instructions. My code output is now expected to be 5x what it was before because we are now augmented by AI. All my coworkers use AI. We don’t use ChatGPT we use anthropic. If I didn’t use AI I would be fired for being too slow.
You should drop the prejudice and focus to be aware of the situation. This is happening all over the world, most people who have crossed this bridge just don’t share, just like they don’t share that they’ve brushed their teeth this morning.
People are sharing it. Look at this entire thread. It’s so conflicted.
We have half the thread saying it’s 5x and the other half saying they’re delusional and lack critical thinking.
I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking. If half the thread is saying on the ground AI has changed things and the other half just labels everyone as crazy without investigation… guess which one didn’t do any critical thinking?
Last week I built an app that cross compiled into Tauri and electron that’s essentially a google earth clone for farms. It uses mapbox and deckgl and you can play back gps tracks of tractor movements and the gps traces change color as the tractor moves in actual real time. There’s pausing, seeking, bookmarking, skipping. All happening in real time because it’s optimized to use shader code and uniforms to do all these updates rather than redrawing the layers. There’s also color grading for gps fix values and satellite counts which the user can switch instantaneously to with zero slow down on tracks with thousands and thousands of points. It all interfaces with an API that scans gcp storage for gps tracks and organizes it into a queryable api that interfaces with our firebase based authentication. The backend is deployed by terraform and written in strictly typed typescript and it’s automatically deployed and checked by GHA. Of course the electron and tauri app have GUI login interfaces that work fully correctly with the backend api and it all looks professionally designed like a movie player merged with Google earth for farm orchards.
I have rudimentary understanding for many of the technologies involved in the above. But I was able to write that whole internal tool in less than a week thanks to AI. I couldn’t have pulled it off without rudimentary understanding of the tech so some novice swe couldn’t really do it without the optimizations I used but that’s literally all I needed. I never wrote shader code for prod in my life and left to its own devices the AI would have come up with an implementation that’s too laggy to work properly.
That’s all that’s needed. Some basic high level understanding and AI did everything else and now our company has an internal tool that is polished beyond anything that would’ve been given effort to before AI.
I’m willing to bet you didn’t use AI agents in a meaningful way. Maybe copying and pasting some snippets of code into a chatbot and not liking the output. And then you do it every couple of weeks to have your finger on the pulse of AI.
Go deeper. Build an app with AI. Hand hold it into building something you never built before. It’s essentially a pair programming endeavor. Im willing to bet you haven’t done this. Go in with the goal of building something polished and don’t automatically dismiss it when the AI does something stupid (it inevitably will) Doing this is what actual “critical thinking” is.
> I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking.
My critical thinking is sharp enough to recognize that you're the recently banned
ninetyninenine user [0]. Just as unbalanced and quarrelsome as before I can see. It's probably better to draw some conclusion from a ban and adjust, or just leave.
Bro no one said 5x now or your fired that’s your own imagination adding flavor to it.
It’s obvious to anyone if your output is 5x less than everyone else you will eventually be let go. There’s no paradigm shift where the boss suddenly announced that. But the underlying unsaid expectation is obvious given what everyone is doing.
What happened was this, a couple new hires and some current employees started were using AI. There output was magnified and they were not only having more output but they were deploying code outside their areas of expertise doing dev ops, infra, backend and frontend.
This spread and within months everyone in the company was doing it. The boss can now throw a frontend job to a backend developer and now expect completion in a day or less. This isn’t every task but such output for the majority of tasks it’s normal.
If you’re not meeting that norm it’s blindingly obvious. The boss doesn’t need to announce anything when everyone is faster. There was no deliberate culture shift where the boss announced it. The closest equivalent is the boss hiring a 10x engineer to work alongside you and you have to scramble to catch up. The difference is now we know exactly what is making each engineer 10x and we can use that tool to also operate at that level.
Critical thinking my ass. You’re just labeling and assuming things with your premeditated subconscious bias. If anything it’s your perspective that is religious.
Also can you please stop stalking me and just respond to my points instead of digging through my whole profile and attempting to do character assassinations based off of what I wrote in the past? Thanks.
Whether you agree with it or not is besides the point. The point is it’s happening.
Your initial stance was disbelief. Now you’re just looking down at it as unprofessional.
Bro, I fucking agree. It’s unprofessional. But the entire point initially was that you didn’t believe it and my objective was to tell you that this is what’s happening in reality. Scoff at it all you want, as AI improves less and less “professional” people will be able to enter our field and operate at the same level as us.
Seems fine, works, is fine, is better than if you had me go off and write it on my own. You realize you can check the results? You can use Claude to help you understand the changes as you read through them? I mean I just don’t get this weird “it makes mistakes and it’s horrible if you understand the domain that it is generating over” I mean yes definitely sometimes and definitely not other times. What happens if I DONT have someone more experienced to consult with or that will ignore me because they are busy or be wrong because they are also imperfect and not focused. It’s really hard to be convinced that this point of view is not just some knee jerk reaction justified post hoc
Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.
Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.
Ok but you understand that the fundamental nature of LLMs amplifies errors, right? A hallucination is, by definition, a series of tokens which is plausible enough to be indistinguishable from fact to the model. If you ask an LLM to explain its own hallucinations to you, it will gladly do so, and do it in a way that makes them seem utterly natural. If you ask an LLM to explain its motivations for having done something, it will extemporize whichever motivation feels the most plausible in the moment you're asking it.
LLMs can be handy, but they're not trustworthy. "Own and be responsible for the code you commit" is an impossible ideal to uphold if you never actually sit down and internalize the code in your code base. No "summaries," no "explanations."
So your argument is that if people don't use the tool correctly they might get incorrect results? How is that relevant? If you Google search for the wrong query you'll similarly get incorrect results
I cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example:
- Ghibli studio style graphics,
- the infamous em-dashes and bullet points
- customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...)
- Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losing to your CEOs crazy commitment to the LLMs...
- The internet content - We now tripple check every Internet source we dont know to the core ...
- And now also the chips ?
Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?
I am not sure how, or even if, it does stop. I assume once the hot air from LLM company CEOs starts being treated as the flatulence that it is, things will wind down. The sentiment against generated content is not going away.
In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again.
Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where I went to see a musician "live" and well... they brought the laptop with them. But I think it still counts. It was still fun.
AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. The difference is how much artistic intent and actual work is present. AI art has yet to get people like Ansel Adams, but it will -- actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.
Anti-photography discourse sounds exactly like anti-AI discourse to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same rants.
Another thing I expect to see is novelists using AI to create at least passable live action versions of their stories. I don't think these will put real actors or actresses out of work for a long time, but I could see them serving as "sizzle reels" to sell a real production. If an author posts their AI-generated film of their novel and it gets popular, I could see a studio picking it up and making a real movie or TV show from it.
> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music?
If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.
To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.
The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.
Incorrect. Art is practice. It's literally what the word means historically. Put in "Etymology of the word 'art'" in your favorite search engine or LLM.
If someone is entering a prompt to generate an image in a model I have access to, I don't really need to pay them to do it, and definitely don't need to pay them as much to do it as I would an actual artist, so it is deceptive for them to represent themselves as someone who could actually draw or paint that. If the product is what counts then truth in advertising is required so the market can work.
The vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever.
It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.
I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.
OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.
Sure, you can say that AI is just "stealing like an artist", but that makes the AI the artist in this scenario, not the prompter.
It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.
Keyboards have had functions that let them play music at the touch of button for decades.
Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician.
>actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.
writing a prompt lol
We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world.
But hey think about how much money you could save on a wedding photographer if you just generate a few images of what the wedding probably looked like!
The (wedding) photographer is likely going to use this AI themselves though. They used Photoshop way back in the day to touch up images. They're going to be doing the same with genAI. Content-aware fill is one of the most useful tools they have.
There is a "demo" button on synthesizers that plays a canned melody, therefore playing canned melodies is all synthesizers can do, therefore nobody that uses a synthesizer is a real musician.
I'm not against AI art per se, but at least so far, most “AI artists” I see online seem to care very little about the artistry of what they’re doing, and much much more about selling their stuff.
Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10.
It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.
I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong.
Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.
How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.
Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.
Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.
Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.
> How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing?
How many subjects exist in the world to be photographed? How many journeys might one take to find them? How many stories might each subject tell with the right treatment?
> Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.
I agree that "AI art" as it exists today is not serious.
"AI art" today is mostly play, which is usually the first thing you get with new artistic tools. People just fool around with them in an un-serious way. There's also some porn. Porn is always early. It was one of the first uses for moving pictures, for example.
"The early adopters of new technologies are usually porn and the military." Forget where I heard that but it's largely true.
I do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen.
Also, photography has the added benefit of documenting the world as it is, but through the artist's lens. That added value does not exist when it comes to slop.
Defining art in this way is like defining intelligence as the possession of a degree from Stanford. It's just branding.
Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.
Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hyperscale.
I think it's actually quite apt to look at all of "AI art" as a single piece, or suite, with a unified argument or theme. Maybe in that sense it is some kind of art, even if it wasn't intended that way by its creators.
Similarly, I'm not sure that argument is making the point those who deploy it intend to make.
I think the entire fear of AI schtick to farm engagement is little more than performance art for our FAANNG overlords personally. It behaves precisely like the right wing manosphere but with different daily talking points repeated ad nauseum. Bernie Sanders has smelled the opportunity here and really stepped up his game.
But TBF, performance art theatre is art as well.
The end game IMO will be incorporation of AI art toolsets into commercial art workflows and a higher value placed on 100% human art (however that ends up being defined) and then we'll find something new and equally idiotic to trigger us or else we might run out of excuses and/or scapegoats for our malaise.
> incorporation of AI art toolsets into commercial art workflows and a higher value placed on 100% human art
I don't even really believe serious artists need to totally exclude themselves from using genAI as a tool, and I've heard the same from real working artists (generally those who have established careers doing it). Unfortunately, that point inhabits the boring ideological center and is drowned out by the screaming from both extremes.
They aren't, but some are already using pseudonyms to experiment with it to avoid the haters condemning them for doing so. And their work is predictably far superior from the get-go to asking Sora to ghiblify your dog.
> Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.
jumpscares and weapons being used at others aren't art
I Ghiblified a photo of my dog when chatgpt 4 came out. I was utterly horrified by the results.
It's exciting being able to say that I am an artist, I always wondered what my life would have been had I gone into the arts, and now I can experience it! Thank you techmology.
If you really want to experience the struggles and persecution of an artist, you should empty your bank account and find a life partner to support you while you struggle with your angst and inner trauma that are the source of your creativity. But, to be fair, complaining about AI art is a great start down that path!
How else would you address the incessant ramblings of people who figuratively curse the sunset daily? After AI art has been integrated into the already existing suite of digital art applications (which themselves were once not considered art), whatever shall you complain about next?
Now if you wanted to define art to require 100% bodily fluids and solids 100% handcrafted to be the only real art, now that I'd understand.
You may check these videos by Oleg Kuvaev.
100% generated using AI.
Everything: text, music, characters, voices, editing -- all done via prompts, using multiple engines (I think he mentioned about a dozen services involved).
I would not call it "high art", but it's definitely not a slop, it's an artist skillfully using AI as a tool.
While we're sharing AI generated videos, IGORRR's ADHD music video [0] is definitively art, zero question about it. I don't think typing a prompt in and taking the output as it comes is art -- good art, anyway (the point-and-shoot photography comparison is apt) -- but that doesn't mean AI can't be used to make truly new, creative and unique art too.
This is absolutely slop. Higher quality slop, but slop nonetheless. Ask yourself: what does it say? What does it change in you? How this makes you feel?
Artists use their medium to communicate. More often than not, everything in a piece is deliberate. What is being communicated here? Who deliberated on the details?
Those videos are as much "art" as Marvel's endless slop is "art".
You know that you can give a drawing as input for image generation, right? I think there's a lot of creativity possible with AI image generation. Things like ControlNet and the various loras and upscale methods etc all add a lot of choice.
> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline
I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].
I suppose. You're "finding" something that didn't exist and that nobody ever cared about. Something that you wrote, mashed against the tensors trained on real artist creations, and out came the thing that you "found".
I'm genuinely amazed at how some people perceive art.
To me art has always been "an interesting idea". Decorative things that take skill to me are crafts. Sure, it's a water color of your garden, but what does it tell us about the human condition? Sure, it's skilled... but it's empty. Give me Jackson Pollock or Picasso. Give me a new way to see the world. Pure skill to me is as impressive as cup-stacking personally.
Not saying you have to agree, but it is a distillation of how some portion of the world sees the world.
I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline
You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity."
> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography.
Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
It is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails.
If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.
A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.
At the very least, art usually contains effort signifiers. Yes, an artist could potentially employ gingerbread men cut from construction paper in a work, but no, construction paper gingerbread men are typically not in the same league as David.
For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment
> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here
The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.
This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.
Whatever, man, this guy isn't wrong. Look at the example he gave how a camera made it so that anyone could do what only a few could. Novel art is just a candid shot now. It forced art to completely change its values. Much of the same will happen now. The difference is that with the past, we still needed artists to take advantage of them while now, it all can be completely automated. It's disgusting but I'm sure purest thought the same of every innovation.
I'm not sure people remember when PCs and inkjet printers became affordable while MS Word added cliparts at around the same time. Those black figurines with a light bulb above them while some text was written above or below in either Comic Sans or 3D "word art" were absolutely everywhere. Digital typesetting was bad when it started (see Donald Knuth's rant about it, leading to TeX), but you have to imagine the horror of normal people trying to layout stuff in Word all of the sudden without a hint of competence. This is exactly what happens right now with LLMs, some people will find the right amount of usage, the others won't, but that's OK. The problem back the wasn't MS Word per se (bar some stupid defaults Microsoft had borked completely), neither are LLMs inherently the problem right now. We are in the seemingly never-ending hype cycle, but even that will pass.
> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?
Whenever you want.
Of course you can't directly control what other people do or how much they use t0echnology. But you have lots of direct control over what you use, even if it's not complete control.
I stopped taking social media seriously in the early 2010's. I'm preparing for a world of restricted, boring, corporate, invasive Internet, and developing interests and hobbies that don't rely on tech. We've had mechanisms to network people without communications tech for thousands of years, it's probably time to relearn those (the upper classes never stopped using them). The Internet will always be there, but I don't have to use it more than my workplace requires, and I can keep personal use of it to a minimum. Mostly that will mean using the Internet to coordinate events and meeting people and little else.
Ha, I can only wish. Maybe true if you live in NYC, SF, Berlin or London.
But most of these don't exist or help with socializing and making new connections where I live (medium sized European university city).
Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it. Any other available events are either for college students or lonely retirees but nothing in between.
> Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it.
If you can get a few people from 2 of these groups together more than once, you've started solving this problem. Of course keeping it going for a long time is a challenge, and you want to avoid always being in the situation where you are doing all the work and others aren't contributing, but it gets easier and better with experience.
Except that if you're not anyone's family and not in university anymore then you're shit out of luck as people in their 30s already have their social circles already completed and don't have space, time and energy to add new strangers when they barely have free time to hang out with their existing clique.
There are also private group chats open only to selected elite and wealthy people. When you see several prominent people suddenly make similar public statements on a particular issue there's a good chance they used those group chats behind the scenes to coordinate messaging.
I agree with you and I will also anecdotally note that I've been personally observing more and more of the younger generations (Z, esp gen Alpha) adopt these mechanisms en masse, viewing social media as the funhouse simulation of socialization that it always was and finding true social connection through other manners.
> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?
It doesn't stop. This is because that it's not the "technology" driving AI. You already acknowledged the root cause: CEOs. AI could be great, but it's currently being propped up by sales hype and greed. Sam wants money and power. Satya and Sundar want money and power. Larry and Jensen want to also cash in on this facade that's been built.
Can LLMs be impactful? For sure. They are now. They're impacting energy consumption, water usage, and technology supply chains in detrimental ways. But that's because these people want to be the ones to sell it. They want to be the ones to cash in. Before they really even have anything significantly useful. FOMO in this C-suite should be punishable in some way. They're all charlatans to different degrees.
Blame the people behind this propping up this mess: the billionaires.
The weird thing is that the AI companies themselves are hiring like there's no tomorrow, doing talent aquisitions etc. Why would you do that if the purpose of your product is to reduce necessary workforce?
Why isn't that the first question that comes to mind for a journalist covering the latest acquisition? It's like an open secret that nobody really talks about.
To answer your questions (I don't think it's what you wanted, but people will scratch their heads after reading them):
On reality, they are hiring because they have a lot of (investment) money. They need a lot of hardware, but they also need people to manage the hardware.
On an alternative reality where their products do what they claim, they would also hire, because people working there would be able to replace lots of people working in other jobs, and so their workers would be way more valuable than the average one, and everybody would want to buy what they create.
Journalists don't care about it because whatever they choose to believe or being paid to "believe", it's the natural way things happen.
Just to clarify: Most AI companies don't own their hardware, with a select few exceptions. That's why a handful of hyperscaler stock has rallied recently on letters of intent on large orders from AI companies. Which technically is a handful of shell companies under complete control of their parent companies, which can then take on credit without it being visible on the parent company balance sheet.
But addressing the specific question: It is still a valid. If the product sold is a 10x developer force multiplier, you'd expect to see the company fully utilizing it. Productivity would be expected to increase, rapidly, as the product matures, and independently of any acquisitions made at the same time.
Some people are dropping things in response to how things are being ruined. Many people are not.
I hope you're right but I imagine with more computing power used more efficiently, the big companies will hoard more and more of the total available human attention.
I think you explained it very well.
For now all sorts of "creative finance" are being invented to give AI momentum.
At the same time, some of us that have to work with this monstrosity for 10 hours a day are nauseated.
The same feeling I had towards putrid technology is now extended to generative technology. I would rather fight and lose my job than call this intelligence of any form. It is a generative thingy.
Was very enthusiastic in tabnine days. Used copilot since closed beta. Use it for 10 hours a day. I rather not use it, though.
I have to use C#. Would kill not to use this bullshit anymore. Would never,ever, touch Microsoft without being paid. Feel the same about AI in general.
Betting on AI becoming lame would be the safest bet I ever did.
When I see someone worshiping generative technology I just know what to expect and then I leave.
In some levels, opinions on generative technology are very similar to politics. Tell me how you interact with it and how you feel about it, I won't ever need to ask a second question.
Now, I think this sentiment will inevitably arrive to the masses. Yeah, sure I am fatigued and most people don't have to deal with generative tools for 44 hours a week, but it will slowly creep.
Tell me again how excited everyone is to fiddle with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, react components, Vercel. The most shilled convenience of our timeline will become cringe, as always.
> Was very enthusiastic in tabnine days. Used copilot since closed beta. Use it for 10 hours a day.
I sort of have a similar story with it. Was also one of the earliest GH Copilot users...but now I find its just utter crap. The one thing that worries me though is, while most of the tech folks have grown disillusioned, for each engineer who now rejects LLMs, there seems to be 20 "common" persons who just absolutely love it, for their ephemeral use cases, like planning their next trip, or asking if it will rain tomorrow and similar. And this sort of usage I think quietly underpins the drive. Its not just the CEOs, it is also the masses that absolutely love to use it, unfortunately.
Absolutely, not to say "You are right!" :) The items touched by Midas were if nothing else, shiny and gold after all is a precious metal preserving its material properties for a long time...Whereas the stuff produced by LLMs...yes, quite resembles the key properties of feces, come to think of it. It is a simple meshup of whatever was digested over a timespan, it stinks, and it does not require special skills - anyone can produce one!
> There are lots of online resources for outbound sales which will likely be better than advice you’ll find on a forum full of engineers (unless engineers are your target market)
I mean, the man asked here as a starting point and was probably looking to hear from other engineers who already were in a similar situation. If you don´t have something concrete to offer in way of help, then its better to suppress that urge to sound smart by dropping around general-sounding "pearls of wisdom". You offered a lot of "whats" and very little "hows", which is what I assume the OP was asking for in the first place.
No offense but he asked specifically for resources to get better at outbound sales. You gave him a lot of generic advice he could find in his LinkedIn feed any time of the day really. Actionable means something applicable, "get better at building something people want" is not quite applicable I am afraid.
I completely agree with the main sentiment, which is - I want the browser to be a User Agent and nothing else. I don´t need a crappy, un-reliable intermediary between the already perfectly fine UA and the Internet.
It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for everyone - even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?
It sounds more like you just made an overly simplistic interpretation of their statement, "everything works like I think it should," since it's clear from their post that they recognize the difference between some basic level of "working" and a well-engineered system.
Hopefully you aren't discouraged by this, observationist, pretty clear hansmayer is just taking potshots. Your first paragraph could very well have been written by a professional SWE who understood what level of robustness was required given the constraints of the specific scenario in which the software was being developed.
By your response, it really seems like you read their first sentence as advocating for vibe coding, but I think they were saying something more to the effect of "While it's exciting to reach those milestones more quickly and frequently, as it becomes easier to reach a point where everything seems to be working on the surface, the easier it then is to bypass elegant, properly designed, intimately internalized detail—unavoidable if written manually—and thus when it comes time to troubleshoot, the same people may have to confront those rapidly constructed systems with less confidence, and hence the maintenance burden later may be much greater than it otherwise would be"
Which to me, as a professional SWE, seems like a very engineer thing to think about, if I've read both of your comments correctly.
Exactly - I know enough to know what I don't know, since I've been able to interact with professionals, and went down the path of programming far enough to know I didn't want to do it. I've also gotten good at enough things to know the pattern of "be really shitty at doing things until you're not bad, and eventually be ok, and if you work your ass off, someday you'll actually be good at it".
The neat thing about vibe coding is knowing that I'm shitty at actual coding and achieving things in hours that would likely have taken me months to learn to do the right way, or weeks to hack together with other people's bubblegum and duct tape. I'd have to put in a couple years to get to the "OK" level of professional programming, and I feel glad I didn't. Lucky, even.
>> even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?
Longer than writing code from scratch, with no templates or frameworks? Longer than testing and deploying manually?
Even eight years ago when I left full-stack development, nobody was building anything from scratch, without any templates.
Serious questions - are there still people who work at large companies who still build things the conventional way? Or even startups? I was berated a decade ago for building just a static site from scratch so curious to know if people are still out there doing this.
- Developers write detailed instructions in a programming language (e.g., Java, C++, Python) to tell the computer exactly what to do.
- Every logic, condition, and flow is explicitly coded.
Imperative Approach
- Focuses on how to achieve a result step by step.
Example: Writing loops and conditionals to process data rather than using built-in abstractions or declarative statements.
High Technical Skill Requirement
- Requires understanding of syntax, algorithms, data structures, and debugging.
No visual drag-and-drop or automation tools—everything is coded manually.
Longer Development Cycles
- Building applications from scratch without pre-built templates or AI assistance.
Testing and deployment are also manual and time-intensive.
Traditional Tools
- IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like Eclipse or Visual Studio.
Version control systems like Git for collaboration.
>> I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.
> It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;)
I mean, he qualified it, right? Sounds like he knew exactly what he was getting :-/
Or...infrastructure, public services and schools go unmaintained? How about the magic technology supposedly allowing for all of this efficency, all the while it imagines a human has six fingers, who will maintain that?
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