8 ms·

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

87 points by dreamfactored 1y ago

fullstick 1y ago
We're building AI workflows at my company. Yes chatbots, but also more interesting/complex workflows that I won't get into. Let's just say we have the data, expertise, and industry structure to leverage AI in valuable and useful ways. As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI, orchestrating containers and job, etc. All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like Westworld, and not so boring...
- brokencode 1y ago
  Boring is where the money is. Always has been. Westworld robots are still a long way off, but think about how far we’ve come so quickly. It’s pretty incredible that natural language computing is now seen as boring when it barely even existed 5 years ago.
bayesic 1y ago
> Sam Altman knew exactly which buttons to push. Congressional testimony about the need for regulation (from the company furthest ahead). Warnings about AI risk. OpenAI's playbook: Build in public, warn about dangers, present yourself as the responsible actor who needs resources to "do it safely." And this is why Matt Levine calls Sam Altman the greatest business negger of all time
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lnkl 1y ago
>Article praising LLMs. >Look inside. >Written by someone having a stake in LLM business. Every time.
- EA-3167 1y ago
  Hey, at least this one is willing to admit that they aren't building Machine Jesus. That's a start.
  - upghost 1y ago
    "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..." A rhetorical technique as old as dirt, but apparently still effective.
    - EA-3167 1y ago
      "Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!" But seriously, it isn't on me to justify my skepticism of the extreme claim, "We are in a race to build machine super-intelligence" because that skepticism is the rational default. Instead it's the burden of people who claim that we are in fact in that race, just like "self driving next year" was a claim for others to prove, just like "Crypto is the future of money" is a statement requiring a high degree of support. We've seen this all before, and in the end the argument in favor seems to boil down to, "Look at how much money we're moving around with this hype" and "Trust us, the best is yet to come." Maybe this time it will.
      - upghost 1y ago
        Just to clarify, I meant the rhetorical technique was being employed by the author of the article. He's downplaying the "AGI race" in order to normalize and validate the byproduct of the hype bubble to be as "normal and reliable as electricity and TCP/IP". It's clearly meant to attempt to disarm and appeal to skeptics, but there is more than enough dog whistling and performative contradiction in there to make it clear the true intention of the article -- praising Caesar. For the record, I would be more inclined to be sympathetic towards the author if any receipts (i.e., repos) were produced at all, but as you so correctly stated, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree you do not have burden of defending the author's claims, apologies if that was not clear.
- 1y ago
esafak 1y ago
At least pick a Douglas Adams book cover!
aeon_ai 1y ago
The author misses the deeper game: if you genuinely believe AGI is imminent, then current economic metrics become meaningless. Why optimize for revenue when the entire concept of scarcity-based economics dissolves? The $560B for those who believe in AGI isn't about ROI using today's money-in/money-out formula; it's about power positioning for a post-capitalist transition. Every major player knows that whoever controls the infrastructure once the threshold is crossed might control what comes after. The "bubble" narrative assumes these actors are optimizing for quarterly returns rather than civilizational leverage.
- chromanoid 1y ago
  I think the author addresses this, but dismisses it as fantasy, which constitues the bubble.
- zmmmmm 1y ago
  The problem with this is that it's entirely evidence free. I could also say, if you truly believe nuclear fusion is imminent we will have infinite free energy and all current economic metrics are meaningless. But there is no nuclear fusion bubble. Why not? Because people don't believe nuclear fusion is imminent. But for some reason they do believe AGI is imminent - despite there being no actual evidence of that. There is probably less understanding of what is needed to close the gap to true AGI than there is to close the gap to make nuclear fusion possible. The only distinction here is what people are willing to "believe" based on pure conjecture - which is why I class it as a true bubble.
  - teeray 1y ago
    > The only distinction here is what people are willing to "believe" based on pure conjecture It’s a religion. Repent now, the AGI is coming.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    "The problem with this is that it's entirely evidence free." That's more for less true for predicting any new financial trend. If AI is making devs 20-30% more efficient, then you could invest in tech stocks if you think they can ship as much with lower overhead. The financial metrics look better if that's true.
asdev 1y ago
The biggest issue with AI isn't AI itself, but the fact that it seemingly "saved" an overinflated economy. Economy needs a deep reset with high rates for longer and the AI narrative is just kicking the can down the road
- PessimalDecimal 1y ago
  This seems like the point of the hype and why it has so much traction. I suspect this hype cycle won't end until a new one forms, whether technology or some catastrophic event (disease, war) changes focus and allows the same delaying tactics.
  - lavarnann 1y ago
    Every disaster, man-made or not, will be used to drive shock therapy. Look at stock prices trajectory before and after COVID. When this bubble bursts, the ensuing chaos will be used in a similar manner.
chromanoid 1y ago
Great article! I share the experience mentioned in the article, LLMs facilitate a head-on interaction with any topic. It is similar to instructional YouTube videos (that imo were already transformative) but with the ability to ask detailed questions. And this is what becomes better with each iteration. When creative communities finally settle down on generative AI there will be not just a plethora of AI slop, but so much highly creative never seen before content. It might lead to a new golden age of indie low budget movie productions.
- exasperaited 1y ago
  There’s already a new golden age of indie low budget movies. Those guys will not use AI to generate significant parts of their content, because it defeats the point of making an indie movie at all. I never cease to be shocked at how little tech people think of what creative people do and why they do it.
  - chromanoid 1y ago
    You seem to have an agenda here. I am sure there are many many visions of special effects and story arcs that could never be realized because of not being able to pull it off. This will change now. Green screens and sophisticated SFX tech will not be necessary to create fantastical images. You may call these kind of movies low brow entertainment but I am very curious to see indie movie interpretations of my favorite litrpg books.
    - exasperaited 1y ago
      An agenda? I just give a shit about the creative people (indie filmmakers, photographers, artists, actors, models) I know, and I fail to see what AI brings them that their creativity does not already; special effects are such a tiny part of filmmaking, for example. I don’t mean to say I don’t think there are any uses but I think the main misunderstanding here is that what holds indie filmmakers back isn’t access to technology, generally.
      - 1y ago
handbanana_ 1y ago
>While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping. Developers who learned their craft in the age of pull requests and sprint planning sneer at their security failures, not realizing that 'best practices' are about to flip again. The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're deploying to production. Shipping where? What production? What kids? I've yet to see this. I see the tools everywhere, but not anything built with them. You'd think it would be getting yelled about from the mountaintops, but I'm still waiting.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  What would qualify as proof? If somebody builds a good product and ships it it will just look like a good product. People will call it vibe coded slop when it fails spectacularly.
  - layer8 1y ago
    If there isn't a strong uptick in the general quality and usefulness of software within the next couple of years, then it's not clear what AI coding/design is actually buying us. Other than possibly some cost reduction, but it would be optimistic to assume that the savings go to the users and not to big tech. Regardless, the proof will be in the pudding.
  - handbanana_ 1y ago
    I mean they would provide it--you would think this is something the AI coding businesses would be highlighting. "Here's an app tends of thousands use every day built with our AI tools!" Heck they did it with languages for the longest time. Here's twitter, we built it on Rails, everyone use Rails! Facebook, built on PHP, everyone use PHP! Feels weird that if these AI tools are doing all this work that no one is showing it off.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  I think what has happened is the following: A whole bunch of folks got into management thinking coding is beneath them, they are now wielding the power - let the code-monkeys do the typing. Then, turns out, coders are continuing to call the shots, and the management folks have coder-envy. Now, with LLMs, coding is again not only within management's reach, but they think it is trivial, and it can be outsourced to the LLM code-monkeys, and management has regained power from the pesky coder-class. So, you have management of all stripes "shipping" things, and dictating what coders should do - not realizing that they should stay in their lanes, and let coders decide for themselves what works best in their craft.
gargalatas 1y ago
I totaly agree with the author. Not even the smartphone or the iphone brought such a sudden change to so many people and in many cases, for free. I know we want to oppose this huge thing just because it doesn't make sense moraly but when you learn using this tool there is no way back. Just imagine what is coming in the next 5-10 years. Even if the tools remain at the same level as today, people have learned to use it so well that ever sector every industry will speed up tremendously. We will see great new products and ideas emerging. Just can't wait for the revolution.
- doctorwho42 1y ago
  Or we will see people become too dependent on it to see the forest for the trees on countless problems throughout the systems of society and business.
upghost 1y ago
> Within weeks I built a serverless system processing 5 million social media posts daily, tracking topic clusters and emerging narratives in real-time. Then brand monitoring dashboards. Then a "robojournalist" that could deep-dive any trending story. Then hardware and firmware specs for a coffee machine. Then my first mobile app. I call bullshit. Let's see some repos.
- AznHisoka 1y ago
  5 million social media posts is like <1% of all the posts out there. Its just a weekend project
- fourthark 1y ago
  This is all stuff for private use. It's credible that the author built these things with LLMs, not that they are secure or robust.
zmmmmm 1y ago
I think a key point from this article that I agree strongly with is the simple point that it is crucial that everyone recognise we are currently in an AI bubble. I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No, it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may even be supporting evidence for it. Compare with the dot com bubble : nobody would tell you there was no value in the internet. But it was still a bubble. A massive hyper inflated bubble. And when it popped, it left large swathes of the industry devastated even while a residual set of companies were left to carry on and build the "real" eventual internet based reworking of the entire economy which took 10 - 15 years. People would be well advised to have a look at this point in time at who survived the dot com bubble and why.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Once there's a consensus around a bubble the bubble has already burst?
  - minraws 1y ago
    Not really I searched up some of articles from 1996/97 dot com was already a bubble in 97... But it had minor 15-20% corrections but kept rising for another year or two after that... Bubbles are driving by irrational beliefs. And they won't be irrational if we could understand them. AI is surely a bubble but it can go on for another 3-4 years when something possibly unrelated to AI pops it.
- asdev 1y ago
  everyone does NOT recognize it, just go on Twitter if you don't think so
- entropsilk 1y ago
  The fact everyone thinks we are in an AI bubble is practically proof we are not in an AI bubble. The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too. What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall of worry.
time0ut 1y ago
The article resonates. AI coding assistants are cool and fun to use, but they just help solve a solved problem faster. The really exciting thing is exploring the new problems we can solve with this tool. It has really reignited my passion for building.
- hnthrow90348765 1y ago
  Businesses realizing a lot of their problems are already solved will be of great help to developers. I'm extremely tired of bespoke solutions when OTS or already-known would work just fine.
coarise 1y ago
The entire article revolves around the premise of AGI will not be achieved, Which is unjustified. Making reading the article a waste of time.
lgleason 1y ago
Have we made some significant advancements similar to what happened with the Internet back in the 90's with HTML? Yes. But, this is a bubble we are currently in just like the .com bubble with lots of irrational exuberance. That said, that job market is not as crazy as it was during .com, in fact right now most technologists are finding it more difficult to find work at the moment. Most of this AI hype started when the employment market started to slow down. Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts when crazy money enters the picture. So if, for example the fed really starts to cut rates and/or investment starts to really pick up and we have another boom period, the tail end of that seems to historically be when the bubbles pop. Put another way, there is a good chance that the bubble will continue to inflate for a few years before it pops.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  > Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts Meta has been offering 7 figure salaries for AI talent. This is a very different bubble from the .com bubble. The hiring frenzy in this limited to a very small group of people with unique skills/experience that few people posses. While at the same time thousands of other people are being let go in order to pay those big salaries to a few people (and in order to buy more GPUs). The C-suite has become obsessed with the idea that they're going to need much fewer engineers and they're hiring/firing like it.
stego-tech 1y ago
Not a bad position to take, and very similar to my personal one (that gets immediately conflated as "LOL AI DOOMER" by the AI Booster Club): yes, this is a bubble, and yes, it will eventually pop, but the tools won't go away. What's been democratized isn't the entirety of human skills, but the narrow field of custom ML-based tooling, and that's going to change quite a lot in the decades ahead as people utilize them in unexpectedly novel ways. It'll never be AGI or superintelligence, it won't create or cause the singularity, and it'll never be a substitute for learning, practicing, and honing skills into mastery. For the fields LLMs do displace in part or in whole, I still expect it'll largely displace the mediocre or the barely-passable, not the competent or experts. Those experts will, once the bubble pops and the hype train derails, find the novel and transformative uses for LLMs outside of building moats for big enterprises or vamping for investor capital. I especially enjoy the on-prem/locally-run angle, as I think that is where much of the transformation will occur - in places like homes, small offices, or private datacenters where a GPU or two can accelerate novel tasks for the entity using it, without divulging data to corporate entities or outright competitors. Inference is cheap, and a modest gaming GPU or AI accelerator can easily support 99.9% of individual use cases offline, with the right supporting infrastructure (which is improving daily!). All in all, an excellent post.
stillpointlab 1y ago
This is a good article, but it has a flaw that I keep seeing in these. Articles like this say "I built this app, and that app, and another app, and another one". Ok, let's see them. Are they any good? Please post the github link, or link to the webpage. I'm reminded of the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba.
ankit219 1y ago
Somewhat related to the article, but mostly anecdotal. In SF, i have had chats with (~15) engineers who after some prodding admitted that they feel the whole AGI thing is passing them by (not that it is close). In a sense that they want to be doing something deeper, build/research something which is more than an API call (paraphrasing and not disparaging making API calls), and want to build where the action is (read: train models or be at the forefront). I understand you need a specific skillset to be in that position, just that it's slightly off putting that to do any meaningful work in this field you need a lot of compute. I understand they raised funding and what not, yet want something more than they are working on. I am not sure of the solution, but the cause sure seems to be the hype that is created currently.
commenter711 1y ago
Slop-esque article written by someone with a clear bias. At least the linked articles were a nice read...
nunez 1y ago
I'm having trouble with the concept of claiming that one "wrote" something that was entirely, or almost-entirely, generated by AI. I use Tesla's FSD all of the time. When it's on, I'm "driving" insofar as I'm monitoring my surroundings and preparing to take over if the car does something crazy. However, I'll usually tell people that the car drove, not me. I also don't understand the value of using AI to write stuff in loads of unfamiliar languages. I get why one might choose Rust vs. Golang vs. JavaScript depending on the mission, but I would think that those differences go away entirely when you're depending on an LLM to author something in those languages AND you aren't skilled enough in those languages to understand when something's suboptimal or not. This just feels like an express train to bankruptcy via technical debt. I'm also having trouble with the notion of AI accelerating the creation of side projects. For me, actually writing the code (or figuring out how the language works) is part of the fun that I get from doing side projects. If I wanted to create something as quickly as possible, I'd just buy a SaaS subscription or physical version for what I want. It's also insane to me that we're just not AT ALL considering how LLMs stunt the growth of our juniors. Spending hours banging my head against the wall on tiny bugs is how I got to where I am today. I'm going to guess that's the case for many of the people on HN as well. That learning process goes away entirely once an LLM goes into the mix. You can just ask it to fix whatever's broken, no understanding of the bug required. This is fine for seniors who know why things happen how they happen, but I can't imagine juniors making up this skill gap. It's like learning a new language vs having your phone generate whatever in the target language. The end result is the same, but there's no way you can really learn that language with your phone doing the work, unless one assigns no value to learning that language in the first place. Finally, I have trouble accepting the idea of giving up the keyboard once you become an "architect." I very much understand that us "architects" have less free time in the day to fire up the IDE (death by meetings, basically), but giving that up entirely feels somewhat career-limiting to me. Then again, this is a moot point if the market moves towards making software development an AI-only activity. What's crazy to me is that most developers and architects sneered at low/no-code solutions because they created unmaintainable codebases that were too proprietary to make sense of, yet here we are lapping up code generated by "coder" LLMs and accepting that they "might" produce insecure code here and there. Insane.
tim333 1y ago
> I think [AGI is] alchemy-level nonsense. Fair enough but he doesn't give much factual reasoning to support that. If you believe the brain is a biological computer and AI computing keeps advancing, at some point it will be able to do the same stuff or better, which is what most people think of as AGI. I wrote about that for my uni entrance exam 43 years ago and it's always just seemed obvious common sense to me. I know Turing wrote about it before then but I never read that - it's just seems kind of obvious it'll happen.
- dreamfactored 1y ago
  Working on a follow up article on exactly this (it is mathematically impossible and we have receipts...)
  - tim333 1y ago
    I'm not sure what mathematical principle you could invoke that would make sense? Roger Penrose made an argument like we can know Gödel's theorem is true without being able to prove it but AI can't, but I think you can figure both are guessing in a similar pattern recognising kind of way.
    - dreamfactored 1y ago
      Hopefully will post here before the weekend but tl;dr the mathematics to model neurons has not yet been discovered/invented
tokyovigilante 1y ago
This is the most coherent and IMO accurate take on AI/LLM I have seen in 5 years. As a specialist in one of the original industries Geoffrey Hinton predicted would be gone (Radiology) my job remains safe and even more in demand 9 years later. Meanwhile, as a hobbyist programmer, I’m suddenly able to build multiple production tools solving real problems, simply because AI agents are doing the scut-work for me and optimising my time into code review and architectural design. For $200/month, it’s paying for itself many times over.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

87 points by dreamfactored 1y ago

We're building AI workflows at my company. Yes chatbots, but also more interesting/complex workflows that I won't get into. Let's just say we have the data, expertise, and industry structure to leverage AI in valuable and useful ways. As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI, orchestrating containers and job, etc. All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like Westworld, and not so boring...

brokencode 1y ago
Boring is where the money is. Always has been. Westworld robots are still a long way off, but think about how far we’ve come so quickly. It’s pretty incredible that natural language computing is now seen as boring when it barely even existed 5 years ago.

bayesic 1y ago

> Sam Altman knew exactly which buttons to push. Congressional testimony about the need for regulation (from the company furthest ahead). Warnings about AI risk. OpenAI's playbook: Build in public, warn about dangers, present yourself as the responsible actor who needs resources to "do it safely." And this is why Matt Levine calls Sam Altman the greatest business negger of all time

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

lnkl 1y ago

>Article praising LLMs. >Look inside. >Written by someone having a stake in LLM business. Every time.

EA-3167 1y ago
Hey, at least this one is willing to admit that they aren't building Machine Jesus. That's a start.
- upghost 1y ago
  "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..." A rhetorical technique as old as dirt, but apparently still effective.
  - EA-3167 1y ago
    "Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!" But seriously, it isn't on me to justify my skepticism of the extreme claim, "We are in a race to build machine super-intelligence" because that skepticism is the rational default. Instead it's the burden of people who claim that we are in fact in that race, just like "self driving next year" was a claim for others to prove, just like "Crypto is the future of money" is a statement requiring a high degree of support. We've seen this all before, and in the end the argument in favor seems to boil down to, "Look at how much money we're moving around with this hype" and "Trust us, the best is yet to come." Maybe this time it will.
    - upghost 1y ago
      Just to clarify, I meant the rhetorical technique was being employed by the author of the article. He's downplaying the "AGI race" in order to normalize and validate the byproduct of the hype bubble to be as "normal and reliable as electricity and TCP/IP". It's clearly meant to attempt to disarm and appeal to skeptics, but there is more than enough dog whistling and performative contradiction in there to make it clear the true intention of the article -- praising Caesar. For the record, I would be more inclined to be sympathetic towards the author if any receipts (i.e., repos) were produced at all, but as you so correctly stated, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree you do not have burden of defending the author's claims, apologies if that was not clear.
1y ago

esafak 1y ago

At least pick a Douglas Adams book cover!

aeon_ai 1y ago

The author misses the deeper game: if you genuinely believe AGI is imminent, then current economic metrics become meaningless. Why optimize for revenue when the entire concept of scarcity-based economics dissolves? The $560B for those who believe in AGI isn't about ROI using today's money-in/money-out formula; it's about power positioning for a post-capitalist transition. Every major player knows that whoever controls the infrastructure once the threshold is crossed might control what comes after. The "bubble" narrative assumes these actors are optimizing for quarterly returns rather than civilizational leverage.

chromanoid 1y ago
I think the author addresses this, but dismisses it as fantasy, which constitues the bubble.
zmmmmm 1y ago
The problem with this is that it's entirely evidence free. I could also say, if you truly believe nuclear fusion is imminent we will have infinite free energy and all current economic metrics are meaningless. But there is no nuclear fusion bubble. Why not? Because people don't believe nuclear fusion is imminent. But for some reason they do believe AGI is imminent - despite there being no actual evidence of that. There is probably less understanding of what is needed to close the gap to true AGI than there is to close the gap to make nuclear fusion possible. The only distinction here is what people are willing to "believe" based on pure conjecture - which is why I class it as a true bubble.
- teeray 1y ago
  > The only distinction here is what people are willing to "believe" based on pure conjecture It’s a religion. Repent now, the AGI is coming.
- giantg2 1y ago
  "The problem with this is that it's entirely evidence free." That's more for less true for predicting any new financial trend. If AI is making devs 20-30% more efficient, then you could invest in tech stocks if you think they can ship as much with lower overhead. The financial metrics look better if that's true.

asdev 1y ago

The biggest issue with AI isn't AI itself, but the fact that it seemingly "saved" an overinflated economy. Economy needs a deep reset with high rates for longer and the AI narrative is just kicking the can down the road

PessimalDecimal 1y ago
This seems like the point of the hype and why it has so much traction. I suspect this hype cycle won't end until a new one forms, whether technology or some catastrophic event (disease, war) changes focus and allows the same delaying tactics.
- lavarnann 1y ago
  Every disaster, man-made or not, will be used to drive shock therapy. Look at stock prices trajectory before and after COVID. When this bubble bursts, the ensuing chaos will be used in a similar manner.

chromanoid 1y ago

Great article! I share the experience mentioned in the article, LLMs facilitate a head-on interaction with any topic. It is similar to instructional YouTube videos (that imo were already transformative) but with the ability to ask detailed questions. And this is what becomes better with each iteration. When creative communities finally settle down on generative AI there will be not just a plethora of AI slop, but so much highly creative never seen before content. It might lead to a new golden age of indie low budget movie productions.

exasperaited 1y ago
There’s already a new golden age of indie low budget movies. Those guys will not use AI to generate significant parts of their content, because it defeats the point of making an indie movie at all. I never cease to be shocked at how little tech people think of what creative people do and why they do it.
- chromanoid 1y ago
  You seem to have an agenda here. I am sure there are many many visions of special effects and story arcs that could never be realized because of not being able to pull it off. This will change now. Green screens and sophisticated SFX tech will not be necessary to create fantastical images. You may call these kind of movies low brow entertainment but I am very curious to see indie movie interpretations of my favorite litrpg books.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    An agenda? I just give a shit about the creative people (indie filmmakers, photographers, artists, actors, models) I know, and I fail to see what AI brings them that their creativity does not already; special effects are such a tiny part of filmmaking, for example. I don’t mean to say I don’t think there are any uses but I think the main misunderstanding here is that what holds indie filmmakers back isn’t access to technology, generally.
    - 1y ago

handbanana_ 1y ago

>While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping. Developers who learned their craft in the age of pull requests and sprint planning sneer at their security failures, not realizing that 'best practices' are about to flip again. The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're deploying to production. Shipping where? What production? What kids? I've yet to see this. I see the tools everywhere, but not anything built with them. You'd think it would be getting yelled about from the mountaintops, but I'm still waiting.

worldsayshi 1y ago
What would qualify as proof? If somebody builds a good product and ships it it will just look like a good product. People will call it vibe coded slop when it fails spectacularly.
- layer8 1y ago
  If there isn't a strong uptick in the general quality and usefulness of software within the next couple of years, then it's not clear what AI coding/design is actually buying us. Other than possibly some cost reduction, but it would be optimistic to assume that the savings go to the users and not to big tech. Regardless, the proof will be in the pudding.
- handbanana_ 1y ago
  I mean they would provide it--you would think this is something the AI coding businesses would be highlighting. "Here's an app tends of thousands use every day built with our AI tools!" Heck they did it with languages for the longest time. Here's twitter, we built it on Rails, everyone use Rails! Facebook, built on PHP, everyone use PHP! Feels weird that if these AI tools are doing all this work that no one is showing it off.
bwfan123 1y ago
I think what has happened is the following: A whole bunch of folks got into management thinking coding is beneath them, they are now wielding the power - let the code-monkeys do the typing. Then, turns out, coders are continuing to call the shots, and the management folks have coder-envy. Now, with LLMs, coding is again not only within management's reach, but they think it is trivial, and it can be outsourced to the LLM code-monkeys, and management has regained power from the pesky coder-class. So, you have management of all stripes "shipping" things, and dictating what coders should do - not realizing that they should stay in their lanes, and let coders decide for themselves what works best in their craft.

gargalatas 1y ago

I totaly agree with the author. Not even the smartphone or the iphone brought such a sudden change to so many people and in many cases, for free. I know we want to oppose this huge thing just because it doesn't make sense moraly but when you learn using this tool there is no way back. Just imagine what is coming in the next 5-10 years. Even if the tools remain at the same level as today, people have learned to use it so well that ever sector every industry will speed up tremendously. We will see great new products and ideas emerging. Just can't wait for the revolution.

doctorwho42 1y ago
Or we will see people become too dependent on it to see the forest for the trees on countless problems throughout the systems of society and business.

upghost 1y ago

> Within weeks I built a serverless system processing 5 million social media posts daily, tracking topic clusters and emerging narratives in real-time. Then brand monitoring dashboards. Then a "robojournalist" that could deep-dive any trending story. Then hardware and firmware specs for a coffee machine. Then my first mobile app. I call bullshit. Let's see some repos.

AznHisoka 1y ago
5 million social media posts is like <1% of all the posts out there. Its just a weekend project
fourthark 1y ago
This is all stuff for private use. It's credible that the author built these things with LLMs, not that they are secure or robust.

zmmmmm 1y ago

I think a key point from this article that I agree strongly with is the simple point that it is crucial that everyone recognise we are currently in an AI bubble. I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No, it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may even be supporting evidence for it. Compare with the dot com bubble : nobody would tell you there was no value in the internet. But it was still a bubble. A massive hyper inflated bubble. And when it popped, it left large swathes of the industry devastated even while a residual set of companies were left to carry on and build the "real" eventual internet based reworking of the entire economy which took 10 - 15 years. People would be well advised to have a look at this point in time at who survived the dot com bubble and why.

worldsayshi 1y ago
Once there's a consensus around a bubble the bubble has already burst?
- minraws 1y ago
  Not really I searched up some of articles from 1996/97 dot com was already a bubble in 97... But it had minor 15-20% corrections but kept rising for another year or two after that... Bubbles are driving by irrational beliefs. And they won't be irrational if we could understand them. AI is surely a bubble but it can go on for another 3-4 years when something possibly unrelated to AI pops it.
asdev 1y ago
everyone does NOT recognize it, just go on Twitter if you don't think so
entropsilk 1y ago
The fact everyone thinks we are in an AI bubble is practically proof we are not in an AI bubble. The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too. What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall of worry.

time0ut 1y ago

The article resonates. AI coding assistants are cool and fun to use, but they just help solve a solved problem faster. The really exciting thing is exploring the new problems we can solve with this tool. It has really reignited my passion for building.

hnthrow90348765 1y ago
Businesses realizing a lot of their problems are already solved will be of great help to developers. I'm extremely tired of bespoke solutions when OTS or already-known would work just fine.

coarise 1y ago

The entire article revolves around the premise of AGI will not be achieved, Which is unjustified. Making reading the article a waste of time.

lgleason 1y ago

Have we made some significant advancements similar to what happened with the Internet back in the 90's with HTML? Yes. But, this is a bubble we are currently in just like the .com bubble with lots of irrational exuberance. That said, that job market is not as crazy as it was during .com, in fact right now most technologists are finding it more difficult to find work at the moment. Most of this AI hype started when the employment market started to slow down. Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts when crazy money enters the picture. So if, for example the fed really starts to cut rates and/or investment starts to really pick up and we have another boom period, the tail end of that seems to historically be when the bubbles pop. Put another way, there is a good chance that the bubble will continue to inflate for a few years before it pops.

UncleOxidant 1y ago
> Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts Meta has been offering 7 figure salaries for AI talent. This is a very different bubble from the .com bubble. The hiring frenzy in this limited to a very small group of people with unique skills/experience that few people posses. While at the same time thousands of other people are being let go in order to pay those big salaries to a few people (and in order to buy more GPUs). The C-suite has become obsessed with the idea that they're going to need much fewer engineers and they're hiring/firing like it.

stego-tech 1y ago

Not a bad position to take, and very similar to my personal one (that gets immediately conflated as "LOL AI DOOMER" by the AI Booster Club): yes, this is a bubble, and yes, it will eventually pop, but the tools won't go away. What's been democratized isn't the entirety of human skills, but the narrow field of custom ML-based tooling, and that's going to change quite a lot in the decades ahead as people utilize them in unexpectedly novel ways. It'll never be AGI or superintelligence, it won't create or cause the singularity, and it'll never be a substitute for learning, practicing, and honing skills into mastery. For the fields LLMs do displace in part or in whole, I still expect it'll largely displace the mediocre or the barely-passable, not the competent or experts. Those experts will, once the bubble pops and the hype train derails, find the novel and transformative uses for LLMs outside of building moats for big enterprises or vamping for investor capital. I especially enjoy the on-prem/locally-run angle, as I think that is where much of the transformation will occur - in places like homes, small offices, or private datacenters where a GPU or two can accelerate novel tasks for the entity using it, without divulging data to corporate entities or outright competitors. Inference is cheap, and a modest gaming GPU or AI accelerator can easily support 99.9% of individual use cases offline, with the right supporting infrastructure (which is improving daily!). All in all, an excellent post.

stillpointlab 1y ago

This is a good article, but it has a flaw that I keep seeing in these. Articles like this say "I built this app, and that app, and another app, and another one". Ok, let's see them. Are they any good? Please post the github link, or link to the webpage. I'm reminded of the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba.

ankit219 1y ago

Somewhat related to the article, but mostly anecdotal. In SF, i have had chats with (~15) engineers who after some prodding admitted that they feel the whole AGI thing is passing them by (not that it is close). In a sense that they want to be doing something deeper, build/research something which is more than an API call (paraphrasing and not disparaging making API calls), and want to build where the action is (read: train models or be at the forefront). I understand you need a specific skillset to be in that position, just that it's slightly off putting that to do any meaningful work in this field you need a lot of compute. I understand they raised funding and what not, yet want something more than they are working on. I am not sure of the solution, but the cause sure seems to be the hype that is created currently.

commenter711 1y ago

Slop-esque article written by someone with a clear bias. At least the linked articles were a nice read...

nunez 1y ago

I'm having trouble with the concept of claiming that one "wrote" something that was entirely, or almost-entirely, generated by AI. I use Tesla's FSD all of the time. When it's on, I'm "driving" insofar as I'm monitoring my surroundings and preparing to take over if the car does something crazy. However, I'll usually tell people that the car drove, not me. I also don't understand the value of using AI to write stuff in loads of unfamiliar languages. I get why one might choose Rust vs. Golang vs. JavaScript depending on the mission, but I would think that those differences go away entirely when you're depending on an LLM to author something in those languages AND you aren't skilled enough in those languages to understand when something's suboptimal or not. This just feels like an express train to bankruptcy via technical debt. I'm also having trouble with the notion of AI accelerating the creation of side projects. For me, actually writing the code (or figuring out how the language works) is part of the fun that I get from doing side projects. If I wanted to create something as quickly as possible, I'd just buy a SaaS subscription or physical version for what I want. It's also insane to me that we're just not AT ALL considering how LLMs stunt the growth of our juniors. Spending hours banging my head against the wall on tiny bugs is how I got to where I am today. I'm going to guess that's the case for many of the people on HN as well. That learning process goes away entirely once an LLM goes into the mix. You can just ask it to fix whatever's broken, no understanding of the bug required. This is fine for seniors who know why things happen how they happen, but I can't imagine juniors making up this skill gap. It's like learning a new language vs having your phone generate whatever in the target language. The end result is the same, but there's no way you can really learn that language with your phone doing the work, unless one assigns no value to learning that language in the first place. Finally, I have trouble accepting the idea of giving up the keyboard once you become an "architect." I very much understand that us "architects" have less free time in the day to fire up the IDE (death by meetings, basically), but giving that up entirely feels somewhat career-limiting to me. Then again, this is a moot point if the market moves towards making software development an AI-only activity. What's crazy to me is that most developers and architects sneered at low/no-code solutions because they created unmaintainable codebases that were too proprietary to make sense of, yet here we are lapping up code generated by "coder" LLMs and accepting that they "might" produce insecure code here and there. Insane.

tim333 1y ago

> I think [AGI is] alchemy-level nonsense. Fair enough but he doesn't give much factual reasoning to support that. If you believe the brain is a biological computer and AI computing keeps advancing, at some point it will be able to do the same stuff or better, which is what most people think of as AGI. I wrote about that for my uni entrance exam 43 years ago and it's always just seemed obvious common sense to me. I know Turing wrote about it before then but I never read that - it's just seems kind of obvious it'll happen.

dreamfactored 1y ago
Working on a follow up article on exactly this (it is mathematically impossible and we have receipts...)
- tim333 1y ago
  I'm not sure what mathematical principle you could invoke that would make sense? Roger Penrose made an argument like we can know Gödel's theorem is true without being able to prove it but AI can't, but I think you can figure both are guessing in a similar pattern recognising kind of way.
  - dreamfactored 1y ago
    Hopefully will post here before the weekend but tl;dr the mathematics to model neurons has not yet been discovered/invented

tokyovigilante 1y ago

This is the most coherent and IMO accurate take on AI/LLM I have seen in 5 years. As a specialist in one of the original industries Geoffrey Hinton predicted would be gone (Radiology) my job remains safe and even more in demand 9 years later. Meanwhile, as a hobbyist programmer, I’m suddenly able to build multiple production tools solving real problems, simply because AI agents are doing the scut-work for me and optimising my time into code review and architectural design. For $200/month, it’s paying for itself many times over.

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