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I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteous

• gdbsjjdn 1y ago
  Did you read TFA, which shows that developers are slower with AI and think they're faster? The two types of responses to AI I see are your very defensive type, and people saying "I don't get it".
  • atleastoptimal 1y ago
    The article is one person recording their own use of AI, finding no statistical significance but claiming since that the evaluated ratio of AI:human speed in performing various coding tasks resembled the METR study, that AI has no value. People have already talked about issues with the METR study, but importantly with that study and this blog post, it querying a small number of people using AI tools for the first time, working in a code base they already have experience and deep understanding of. Their claim following that is that because there hasn't been an exponential growth in App store releases, domain name registrations or Steam games, that, beyond just AI producing shoddy code, AI has led to no increase in the amount of software at all, or none that could be called remarkable or even notable in proportion to the claims made by those at AI companies. I think this ignores the obvious signs of growth in AI companies which providing software engineering and adjacent services via AI. These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product. These trends include 1. The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. 2. The massive growth in revenue of companies that use AI including Cursor, replit, loveable etc 3. The massive valuation of these companies Anecdotally, with AI I can make shovelware apps very easily, spin them up effortlessly and fix issues I don't have the expertise or time to do myself. I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps with capabilities avaliable today when it's clear that many many people can, have done so, have documented doing so, have made money selling those apps, etc.
    • The_Fox 1y ago
      > The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. You can't use growth of AI companies as evidence to refute the article. The premise is that it's a bubble. The growth IS the bubble, according to the claim. > I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps I agree... One-off apps seem like a place where AI can do OK. Not that I care about it. I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.
      • atleastoptimal 1y ago
        Bubbles are born out of evaluations, not revenue. Web3 was a bubble because the money its made wasn't real productivity, but hype cycles, pyramid schemes, etc. AI companies are merely selling API calls, there is no financial scheming, it is very simply that the product is worth what it is being sold for. > I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered. AI isn't at that level yet but it is making fast strides in subsets of it. I can't imagine systems of models and the models themselves won't reach there in a couple years given how bad AI coding tools were just a couple years ago.
        • guappa 1y ago
          Does the revenue cover the costs?
    • ThrowawayR2 1y ago
      > "These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product." Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.
      • atleastoptimal 1y ago
  • Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
    Bruce Tognazzini wrote that people always claim keyboard is faster than mouse but when researchers actually measured that, it turned out mouse was faster. Bruce explained that mousing is a low-cognition activity compared to keying so subjective perceptions are skewed.
    • jact 1y ago
      This is highly misleading: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/
      • Mikhail_Edoshin 1y ago
        Tognazzini wrote a magazine column with all the downsides: overly funny, non-academic, etc. I think Tog meant something like selecting commands from a menu vs using a command line across a range of applications. Anyway, studies like that must be somewhere in Proceedings of CHI, I guess. (Just checked bibliography in "Tog on interface", but nothing seemed to match. Found a comparison of different types of menus, but that's different. But also relevant: I guess most people would say using pop-up menu right at the mouse cursor will be faster than a fixed one at the top of the screen, yet the experiment shows the opposite.) Mousing implies things are visible and you merely point to them. Keyboard implies things are non-visible and you recall commands from memory. These two must have a principal difference. Many animals use tools: inanimate objects lying around that can be employed for some gain. Yet no animal makes a tool. Making a tool is different from using it because to make a tool one must foresee the need for it. And this implies a mental model of the world and the future, i.e. a very big change compared to simply using a suitable object on the spot. (The simplest "making" could be just carrying an object when there is no immediate need for it, e.g. a sufficiently long distance. Looks very simple and I myself do not know if any animals exhibit such behavior, it seems to be on the fence. It would be telling if they don't.) I think the difference between mousing and keying is about as big as of using a tool and making a tool. Of course, if we use the same app all day long, then its keys become motor movements, but this skill remains confined to the app.
• nemomarx 1y ago
  Find a way to make sure workers get the value of ai labor instead of bosses and the workers will like it better. If the result is "you do the same work but managers want everything in 20% of the time" why would anyone be happy?
  • atleastoptimal 1y ago
    I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit, but the only thing that would allow this to happen are systems and incentive structures that allow that to happen. A manager's job is to increase revenue and cut costs, that's how they get their job, how they keep their job, and how they are promoted. People very rarely get free benefits outside the range of what the incentive structures they exist in allow them to.
    • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
      And people don’t like this. Something being logical doesn’t mean people have to accept it. Also AI has been basically useless every time I tried it except converting some struct definitions across languages or similar tasks, it seems very unlikely that it would boost productivity by more than 10% let alone 400%.
      • atleastoptimal 1y ago
        What AI coding tools/models have you been using?
        • spc476 1y ago
          Let me guess ... they're holding it wrong, and the model they're using is older than 20 minutes.
          • atleastoptimal 1y ago
            You’re assuming how i would respond before i even respond. Please allow inquiries to happen naturally without polluting the thread with meritless cynicism.
• dreadnip 1y ago
  I don’t agree. HN is full of technical people, and technical people see LLMs for what they truly are: pattern matching text machines. We just don’t buy into the AGI hype because we’ve seen nothing to support it. I’m not concerned for my job, in fact I’d be very happy if real AGI would be achieved. It would probably be the crowning tech achievement of the human race so far. Not only would I not have to work anymore, the majority of the world wouldn’t have to. We’d suddenly be living in a completely different world. But I don’t believe that’s where we’re headed. I don’t believe LLMs in their current state can get us there. This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit. It’s a bubble and anyone who spends enough time in the space knows that.
  • atleastoptimal 1y ago
    Calling LLM's "pattern matching text machines" is a catchy thought-terminating cliche, which accounts to calling a human brain a "blob of fats, salts, and chemicals". It technically makes sense, but it is seeing the forest for the trees, and ignores the fact that this mere pattern patching text machine is doing things people said were impossible a few years ago. The simplicity and seeming mundanity of a technology has no bearing on its potential or emergent properties. A single termite, observed by itself, could never reveal what it could build when assembled together with its brethren. I agree that there are lots of limitations to current LLM's, but it seems somewhat naive to ignore the rapid pace of improvement over the last 5 years, the emergent properties of AI at scale, especially in doing things claimed to be impossible only years prior (remember when people said LLM's could never do math, or that image models could never get hands or text right?). Nobody understands with greater clarity or specificity the limitations of current LLM's than the people working in labs right now to make them better. The AGI prognostications aren't suppositions pulled out of the realm of wishful thinking, they exist because of fundamental revelations that have occurred in the development of AI as it has scaled up over the past decade. I know I claimed that HN's hatred of AI was an emotional one, but there is an element to their reasoning too that leads them down the wrong path. By seeing more flaws than the average person in these AI systems, and seeing the tact with which companies describe their AI offerings to make them seem more impressive (currently) than they are, you extrapolate that sense of "figuring things out" to a robust model of how AI is and must really be. In doing so, you pattern match AI hype to web3 hype and assume that since the hype is similar in certain ways, that it must also be a bubble/scam just waiting to pop and all the lies are revealed. This is the same pattern-matching trap that people accuse AI of making, and see through the flaws of an LLM output while it claims to have solved a problem correctly.
• munificent 1y ago
  > Are you motivated by reason, or resentment? I think most people are motivated by values. Reason and emotion are merely tools one can use in service of those. My experience that people who hew too strongly to the former tend to be more oblivious to what's going on in their psychology than most.
• foxylad 1y ago
  I own my company so have no fear of losing my job - indeed I'd love to offload all the development I do, so I have no resentment against AI. But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me. AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.
• SrslyJosh 1y ago
  I know it's probably childish and irrational and a symptom of my inferior intellect, but I have to ask, where's the proof that any of this shit works as well as AI stans claim it does? Please, enlighten me with your gigantic hyper-rational brain.
  • atleastoptimal 1y ago
    If you believe AI is overvalued and is a bubble waiting to burst then you are free to short NVDA. AI stans don’t become AI stans for no reason. They see the many enormous technological leaps and also see where progress is going. The many PhDs currently making millions at labs also have the right idea. Just look at ChatGPT’s growth alone. No product in history compares, and it’s not an accident.
    • jact 1y ago
      No product except tulips :^)
    • bofis 1y ago
      “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - Keynes
• scrubs 1y ago
  " ..hate ai..." Bad framing and worse argument. It's emotional. Every engineer here is evaluating what ai claims it can do as pronounced by ceos and managers (not expert in software dev) v reality. Follow the money.
  • Terr_ 1y ago
    > Follow the money. Yeah, it's frustrating to see someone opine "critics are motivated by resentment rather than facts" as if it were street-smart savvy psychoanalysis... while completely ignoring how many influential voices boosting the concept have a bajillions of dollars in motive to speak as credulously and optimistically as possible.
• ellen364 1y ago
  Love a bit of source analysis. I'd widen the frame a bit. People scared of losing their jobs might underestimate the usefulness of AI. Makes sense to me, it's the comforting belief. Worth keeping in mind while reading articles sceptical of AI. But there's another side to this conversation: the people whose writing is pro AI. What's motivating them? What's worth keeping in mind while reading that writing?
• wolvesechoes 1y ago
  It is not tribalism - I am self-aware enough to recognize my self-interest, and it in conflict with the interests of Sam Altmans of this world and modern slave-masters, sorry, managers. But I am not claiming that AI is useless. It is useful, but I would rather destroy every data center that enjoy strengthening of techno-feudalism.
• jcgrillo 1y ago
  > their apparent success Yeah so the thing is the "success" is only "apparent". Having actually tried to use this garbage to do work, as someone who has been deeply interested in ML for decades, I've found the tools to be approximately useless. The "apparent success" is not due to any utility, it's due entirely to marketing. I don't fear I'm missing out on anything. I've tried it, it didn't work. So why are my bosses a half dozen rungs up on the corporate ladder losing their entire minds over it? It's insanity. Delusional.
• DrillShopper 1y ago
  > It's an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning. Damn, when did it become wrong for me to advocate in my best interests while my boss is trying to do the same by shoving broken and useless AI tools up my ass?
• JohnMakin 1y ago
  This makes the logical fallacy that reasoning born out of resentment is always wrong, of course. It is possible for someone to be as you describe and also correct - I imagine this armchair psychoanalysis is way off though.
• queenkjuul 1y ago
  I'm motivated by Claude Code producing useless garbage every time i ask it to do anything, and Google giving me AI summaries about things that don't exist