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IMHO anyone who started using AI seriously: 1) Wouldn't want to go back 2) Wouldn't believe that it's about to replace human intellectual work In other words

• righthand 2y ago
  What is using AI seriously? I’ve tried to use it as a web search replacement and often the information is generic or tells me what I already know or wrong. I’ve used a code suggestions variant long before OpenAI hype started and while sometimes useful, rarely is it correct or helpful on getting over the next hurdle. Any code from my coworkers is now just AI slop they glanced over once. Then I spend a long time reviewing and fixing their code. I really don’t find spending time writing long form questions so a bot can pretend to be human all that time saving, especially if I have to clarify or reword it to a specific “prompt-engineer” quality sentence. I can usually find the results faster typing in a few keywords and glancing at a list of articles. My built in human speed reading can determine if what I need is probably in an article. LLM seriousness has made my job more difficult. I would prefer if people did go back.
  • mrtksn 2y ago
    In my case its coding real world apps that people use and pay money for. I no longer personally type most of my code, Instead I describe stuff or write pseudo code that LLMs end up converting into the real thing. It's very good at handling the BS part of coding but also its very good at knowing things that I don't know. I recently used it to hack a small bluetooth printer which requires its own iOS app to print, using DeepSeek and ChatGPT I was able to reverse engineer the printer communication and then create an app that will print whatever I want from my macOS laptop. Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now I don't have to. Instead, I use my general knowledge of protocols and communications and describe it to the machine and I'm asking for ideas. Then I try things and ask the stuff that I noticed but I don't understand, then I figure out how this particular device works and then describe it to the machine and ask it to generate me code that will do the thing that I discovered. LLMs are amazing at filling the gaps in a patchy knowledge, like my knowledge of Bluetooth. Because I don't know much about Bluetooth, I ended up creating a CRUD for Bluetooth because that's what I needed when trying to communicate and control my bluetooth devices(it's also what I'm used to from Web tech). I'm bit embarrassed about it but I think I will release it commercially anyway. If I have a good LLM under my hand, I don't have to know specialised knowledge on frameworks or tools. General understanding of how things works and building up from there is all I need. It's like a CNC machine but for coding.
    • righthand 2y ago
      I see, for single operator, no customers products it works nicely. You may find you use it less and less and will actually require that Bluetooth knowledge eventually as you grow a product. LLMs so far seem to be good at developing prototype apps. But most of my projects already have codegen and scaffolding tools so I guess I don’t get that use out of them. I predict that once you release your embarrassing app, you will find all the corner cases and domain secrets come rearing out with little ability of the LLM to help you (especially with Bluetooth).
      • mrtksn 2y ago
        The Bluetooth app thing is just an example of LLMs helping me build something I don't have beyond-basics knowledge of. For other stuff, I still find it very useful because why would I bother to code something non-novel when I can just tell the LLM what I need? For example, if I need a code that finds the device that given characteristics belongs(bluetooth stuff, again) to I can just tell the LLM to write it for me. It doesn't take a genius to write such a code, its elemental stuff and I would rather not spend my working memory on remembering the structures and names of variables. I copy+paste the current class that handles the bluetooth comms, tell it that I need a function for sending data to the printer and it gives me back the result. There's no art in writing such a code, its standard code for an API and I would prefer not to bother with it.
      • eitally 2y ago
        You seem to be overestimating the quality of a many production software products.
        • righthand 2y ago
          Don’t worry I am not. I understand that most prod deployed softwares are prototypes before LLMs came around.
    • kamranjon 2y ago
      “Before AI I would have to study how Bluetooth works now I don't have to.” And “It's very good at handling the BS part of coding…” This is the part that I think is difficult in a team situation. Learning and understanding is the important part, and certainly isn’t BS. I understand that it really can make it seem like velocity has increased when you really are shipping things that more or less “work”, but it’s really a good practice to understand your code. I’ve had to spend a significant amount of time fixing work that was admittedly generated using AI by other engineers, and I really fear engineers are beginning to trade deep understanding for the high of getting something that “works” with little effort. It might “work” but you might be ignoring the work everyone around you is doing to clean up your brittle code that doesn’t scale and wasn’t thought through at inception.
  • hedora 2y ago
    Either you’re using it wrong, or you are using the wrong tools. For search, try kagi fastgpt (no subscription required): https://kagi.com/fastgpt https://kagi.com/fastgpt For code completion, I’ve found it’s not good at jumping hard hurdles, but it is a bit better than find replace (e.g. it finds things that are syntactically different, but semantically related), and can notice stuff like “you forgot to fix the Nth implementation of the interface you just extended”. It’s also good at “I need to do something simple in a language I do not know”. I’ve definitely encountered ai slop from coworkers. I’m sure they also produce stack overflow copy paste garbage too. Dealing with their newly-found increased “productivity” is an open problem. Insisting on strict static typing helps. The LLMs can’t help with that, and it forces a higher bar before compilation succeeds.
    • righthand 2y ago
      I shut off Kagi search LLM stuff because I don’t need an LLM typing stuff out while I’m literally looking at a list of results.
  • otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    > What is using AI seriously? It's buying into the hype. AI is crypto 2.0, the true believers live in their own bubble and their own fantasy world.
• LaGrange 2y ago
  > 1) Wouldn't want to go back I went back. It sucks pretty bad, actually.
• jdlshore 2y ago
  I went back. It’s fine at solving small problems and jump-starting an investigation, but only a small step better than a search engine. It’s no good for deep work. Any time I’ve used it to research something I know well, it’s got important details wrong, but in a confident way that someone without my knowledge would accept. RLHF trains it to fool humans into thinking it’s authoritative, not to actually be correct.
  • bornfreddy 2y ago
    I use it to get the keywords and ideas, then use the normal search engine to get the facts. Still, even in this limited capacity I find the LLMs very useful.
    • jdlshore 2y ago
      That’s similar to how I use it. Useful, but not game changing. Definitely not at the level of the hype.
  • EspadaV9 2y ago
    This is exactly the experience I've had. Recently started learning OpenTofu(/Terraform) and the company now had Gemini as part of the Workspace subscription. It was great to get some basic going, but very quickly starts suggesting wrong or old or bad practices. Still using it as a starting point and to help known what to start searching for, but like you said, it's only slightly better than a regular search engine.
• sailingparrot 2y ago
  > Wouldn't believe that it's about to replace human intellectual work Yea idk about that one chief. I have been working in ML (specifically scaling of large model training) at FAANG for the past 8 years, and have been using AI for my work since basically the first time this became even slightly usable, and I don’t share your optimism (or pessimism depending on how you see it). Yes it’s still pretty bad, but you have to look at rate of improvement, not just a static picture of where we are today. I might still be wrong though and you may be right, but claiming that anyone using AI believes like you do is flat out false. A lot of my colleagues also working in ML researcher think like me btw.
  • mrtksn 2y ago
    It's a figurative speech, obviously its a spectrum where some believe that AGI is around the corner or that all this is nothing more than some overblown statistics exercise and LLMs have nothing to do with actual intelligence. In my opinion, this generation of AI is amazing but isn't it.
• orange_puff 2y ago
  I have started using AI for all of my side projects, and am now building stuff almost everyday. I did this as a way to ease some of my anxiety related to AI progress and how fast it is moving. It has actually had the opposite effect; it's more amazing than I thought. I think the difficulty in reasoning about 2) is that given what interesting and difficult problems it can already solve, it's hard to reason about where it will be in 3-5 years. But, I am also having more fun building things than perhaps the earliest days of my first code written, which is just over 7 years now. Insofar as 1) goes, yes, I never want to go back. I can learn faster and more deeply than I ever could. It's really exciting!