4 ms·
But they say "yes, it didn't work 6 months ago, but it does now", and they say this every month. They're constantly resetting the goal post. Today it works, it
by JohnKemeny 1y ago
But they say "yes, it didn't work 6 months ago, but it does now", and they say this every month. They're constantly resetting the goal post.
Today it works, it didn't in the past, but it does now. Rinse and repeat.
- Sebguer 1y agothis is only a compelling counter-argument if you are referring to a single, individual person who is saying this repeatedly. and there probably are! but the author of this article is not that person, and is also speaking to a very specific loop that only first truly became prevalent 6-9 months ago.
- jasonfarnon 1y ago"they say this every month" But I think the commenter is saying "they" comprises many different people, and they can each honestly say, at different times, "LLMs just started working". I had been loving LLMs for solving NLP since they came out, and playing with them all the time, but in my field I've only found them to improve productivity earlier this year (gemini 2.5).
- conception 1y agoI don’t think this is true actually. There was a huge shift of llm coding ability with the release of sonnet 2.5. That was a real shift in how people started using LMS for coding. Before that it was more of a novelty not something people used a lot for real work. As someone who is not a software engineer, as of about November 2024, I “write” hundreds of lines of code a day for meaningful work to get done.
- ipaddr 1y agoHow did you manage before?
- conception 1y agoThe work just wasn’t done. Or it took enough time for me to go and learn how to do it.
- nsonha 1y agoWhy focus on the 6 months or however long you think the cycle is. The milestones of AI coding are self-explanatory: autocomplete (shit) -> multi-files edit (useful for simple cases) -> agent (feedback loop with rag & tool use), this is where we are. Really think about it and ask yourself if it's possible that AI can make any, ANY work a little more efficient?
- jasonfarnon 1y agoI don't really get this argument. Technology can be improving can't it? You're just saying that people saying it's improving, isn't a great signal. Maybe not, but you still don't conclude that the tech isn't improving, right? If you're old enough, remember the internet was very much hyped. Al gore was involved. But it's probably been every bit as transformative as promised.
- prmph 1y agoTechnology improving is not the issue. 1. LLM fanboy: "LLMs are awesome, they can do x, y, and z really well." 2. LLM skeptic: "OK, but I tried them and found them wanting for doing x, y, and z" 3. LLM fanboy: "You're doing it wrong. Do it this way ..." 4. The LLM skeptic goes to try it that way, still finds it unsatisfactory. A few months pass.... 5. LLM fanboy: "Hey, have you tried model a.b.c-new? The problems with doing x, y, and z have now been fixed" (implicitly now agrees that the original complaints were valid) 6. LLM skeptic: "What the heck, I though you denied there were problems with LLMs doing x, y, and z? And I still have problems getting them to do it well" 7. Goto 3
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- skwirl 1y agoIt doesn’t really matter what this or that person said six months ago or what they are saying today. This morning I used cursor to write something in under an hour that previously would have taken me a couple of days. That is what matters to me. I gain nothing from posting about my experience here. I’ve got nothing to sell and nothing to prove. You write like this is some grand debate you are engaging in and trying to win. But to people on what you see as the other side, there is no debate. The debate is over. You drag your feet at your own peril.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe thing about people making claims like “An LLM did something for me in an hour that would take me days” is that people conveniently leave out what their own skill level is. I’ve definitely seen humans do stuff in an hour that takes others days to do. In fact, I see it all the time. And sometimes, I know people who have skills to do stuff very quickly but they choose not to because they’d rather procrastinate and not get pressured to pick up even more work. And some people waste even more time writing stuff from scratch when libraries exist for whatever they’re trying to do, which could get them up and running quickly. So really I don’t think these bold claims of LLMs being so much faster than humans hit as hard as some people think they do. And here’s the thing: unless you’re using the time you save to fill yourself up with even more work, you’re not really making productivity gains, you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.