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The line: > Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts. Is something I’ve

The line: > Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts. Is something I’ve been wondering about. I haven’t played with this AI stuff much at all, despite thinking it is probably going to be a basically interesting tool at some point. It just seems like it is currently a bit bad, and multiple companies have bet millions of dollars on the idea that it will eventually be quite good. I think that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, they’ll probably get around to making it useful. But, I wonder if it is really worthwhile to learn how to work around the limitations of the currently bad version? Like, I get that we don’t want to become buggywhip manufacturers. But I also don’t want to specialize in hand-cranking cars and making sure the oil is topped off in my headlights…

abletonlive 1y ago
It is worth it and anybody that hasn’t spent the past month using it has nothing useful to say or contribute, their knowledge about what these tools are capable of is already outdated. I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The issue (if you aren’t interested in AI in and of itself, but just in the final version of the tool it will produce) is that the AI companies advertise that they’ve come up with an incredible new version that will obsolete any skills you learned working around the previous version’s limitations, on like a monthly basis. Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
  - abletonlive 1y ago
    if you're someone in tech and can't separate the noise from the practicality i'm not sure what to say at this point. do you drop everything you're doing every time a saas product comes out and change your entire life, or do you go play with it and figure out if it's useful for your life? seems like one should be able to determine this for themself without resorting to taking everything that marketing says at face value
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Is your comment part of the “noise” or the “practicality?”
cjalmeida 1y ago
Definitely don’t dismiss it. While there are limitations, it’s already very capable for a number of tasks. Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself.
- blooalien 1y ago
  > Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself. ^^^ This is actually one of the currently "in-demand" skills in "The Industry" right now... ;)
blooalien 1y ago
If you want to play with "this A.I. stuff" and you have a half-way modern-ish graphic card in your PC or laptop (or even a somewhat modern-ish phone) there's a fair few ways to install and run smaller(ish) models locally on your own hardware, and a host of fancy graphical interfaces to them. I personally use ChatBox and Ollama with the Qwen2.5 models, IBM's Granite series models, and the Gemma models fairly successfully on a reasonably decent (couple years old now) consumer-class gaming rig with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 64 gig of RAM. There's also code editors like Zed or VSCode that can connect to Ollama and other local model runners, and if you wanna get really "nerdy" about it, you can pretty easily interface with all that fun junk from Python and script up your own interfaces and tools.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  This seems like becoming an expert at hand-cranking engines or writing your own Forth compiler back when compilers were just getting started. My point of view, I guess, is that we might want to wait until the field is developed to the point where chauffeurs or C programmers (in this analogy) become a thing.
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Except your toy model or toy version of the model will barely work to talk to you, much less write code. I've done this experiment with a much beefier set of GPUs (3080 10 GB + 3060 12 GB) allowing me to run one step up bigger model. It's not even comparable to free tiers. I have no idea how big the machines or clusters running that are, but they must be huge. I was very unimpressed with the local models I could run.
  - blooalien 1y ago
    I dunno. Maybe you're expecting too much of them? They're obviously not gonna be like those massive data-center LLMs, but I've had some pretty good "brainstorming" sessions about code and documentation with Qwen and Gemma, and the latest vision-capable Qwen models do a really decent job of extracting data and text out of images (often more accurately than typical OCR engines) and even describing or captioning images, and for writing code, I've had good success with asking it to write me docstrings and type hints, and common "boilerplate" code, and even some pretty solid function requests that often come out exactly as I expected it to (as long as it's fed good "context" to work with, like some basic code-style rules, and access to library documentation and existing codebase).
grogenaut 1y ago
It's rapidly evolving, if you were to master just one explicit revision of say cursor then I think your anology would be correct. However to me it's more like keep abreast of the new things, try new stuff, don't settle on a solution, let the wave push you forward, don't be the coder who doesn't turn their camera on during meetings coding away in a corner for another year or 2 berfore trying ai tools because "they're bad". But this is the same for any tech that will span the industry. You have people who want to stay in their ways and those who are curious and moving forward, and at various times in people's careers they may be one or the other. This is one of those changes where I don't think you get the option to defer.

abletonlive 1y ago

It is worth it and anybody that hasn’t spent the past month using it has nothing useful to say or contribute, their knowledge about what these tools are capable of is already outdated. I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.

bee_rider 1y ago
The issue (if you aren’t interested in AI in and of itself, but just in the final version of the tool it will produce) is that the AI companies advertise that they’ve come up with an incredible new version that will obsolete any skills you learned working around the previous version’s limitations, on like a monthly basis. Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
- abletonlive 1y ago
  if you're someone in tech and can't separate the noise from the practicality i'm not sure what to say at this point. do you drop everything you're doing every time a saas product comes out and change your entire life, or do you go play with it and figure out if it's useful for your life? seems like one should be able to determine this for themself without resorting to taking everything that marketing says at face value
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Is your comment part of the “noise” or the “practicality?”

cjalmeida 1y ago

Definitely don’t dismiss it. While there are limitations, it’s already very capable for a number of tasks. Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself.

blooalien 1y ago
> Tweaking it to be more effective is skill itself. ^^^ This is actually one of the currently "in-demand" skills in "The Industry" right now... ;)

blooalien 1y ago

If you want to play with "this A.I. stuff" and you have a half-way modern-ish graphic card in your PC or laptop (or even a somewhat modern-ish phone) there's a fair few ways to install and run smaller(ish) models locally on your own hardware, and a host of fancy graphical interfaces to them. I personally use ChatBox and Ollama with the Qwen2.5 models, IBM's Granite series models, and the Gemma models fairly successfully on a reasonably decent (couple years old now) consumer-class gaming rig with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 64 gig of RAM. There's also code editors like Zed or VSCode that can connect to Ollama and other local model runners, and if you wanna get really "nerdy" about it, you can pretty easily interface with all that fun junk from Python and script up your own interfaces and tools.

bee_rider 1y ago
This seems like becoming an expert at hand-cranking engines or writing your own Forth compiler back when compilers were just getting started. My point of view, I guess, is that we might want to wait until the field is developed to the point where chauffeurs or C programmers (in this analogy) become a thing.
AstralStorm 1y ago
Except your toy model or toy version of the model will barely work to talk to you, much less write code. I've done this experiment with a much beefier set of GPUs (3080 10 GB + 3060 12 GB) allowing me to run one step up bigger model. It's not even comparable to free tiers. I have no idea how big the machines or clusters running that are, but they must be huge. I was very unimpressed with the local models I could run.
- blooalien 1y ago
  I dunno. Maybe you're expecting too much of them? They're obviously not gonna be like those massive data-center LLMs, but I've had some pretty good "brainstorming" sessions about code and documentation with Qwen and Gemma, and the latest vision-capable Qwen models do a really decent job of extracting data and text out of images (often more accurately than typical OCR engines) and even describing or captioning images, and for writing code, I've had good success with asking it to write me docstrings and type hints, and common "boilerplate" code, and even some pretty solid function requests that often come out exactly as I expected it to (as long as it's fed good "context" to work with, like some basic code-style rules, and access to library documentation and existing codebase).

grogenaut 1y ago

It's rapidly evolving, if you were to master just one explicit revision of say cursor then I think your anology would be correct. However to me it's more like keep abreast of the new things, try new stuff, don't settle on a solution, let the wave push you forward, don't be the coder who doesn't turn their camera on during meetings coding away in a corner for another year or 2 berfore trying ai tools because "they're bad". But this is the same for any tech that will span the industry. You have people who want to stay in their ways and those who are curious and moving forward, and at various times in people's careers they may be one or the other. This is one of those changes where I don't think you get the option to defer.