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This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud t

• wffurr 1y ago
  >> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our heads down, and plug away using tools actually fit for purpose, like LSPs and refactoring tools. Very few have the courage to stand up in a professional setting and say the emperor has no clothes.
  • brookst 1y ago
    This is true, but it is also true that traditionally, people whose jobs are most likely to be affected by technological change are not the most dispassionate, objective judges of the technology.
  • geon 1y ago
    No developer job has yet been lost to AI. We are in a huge recession, and companies like to have an excuse to fire people that can be spun as a positive.
    • hobs 1y ago
      At my company at least four developer jobs were lost because of AI tooling, but keep spouting off about the entire economy at once.
      • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
        Four out of how many?
      • lm28469 1y ago
        I still believe the hype around llms killed way more jobs than the llms themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually create job in the next few years given the awful shit that's being deployed these days
    • ElevenLathe 1y ago
      That makes the fear worse, not better. It's clear that fake AI enthusiasm is a litmus test for how much shit you'll eat in order to toe the company line so that you can avoid layoffs in the worst jobs market since the GFC.
      • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
        * toe not tow
        • ElevenLathe 1y ago
          Thanks, I actually looked it up because I can never remember, but then autocorrect got me anyway!
    • latexr 1y ago
      > No developer job has yet been lost to AI. https://content.techgig.com/technology/developer-fires-entire-team-for-ai-now-ends-up-searching-for-engineers-on-linkedin/articleshow/116659064.cms https://content.techgig.com/technology/developer-fires-entir...
  • steveBK123 1y ago
    Absolutely, and you see this in non-Mag7/non-tech industries where CEOs are all announcing a parade of "head of AI" hires. Will it end up being a permanent role like CISO, or is this just faddish follow-along? I know some of the guys being hired into these roles and, lol.. let's just say they are not experts. My spouse works at a large (50k-100k) org in a program management role where she is getting a lot of pressure to organize various AI evangelism efforts aimed at developers. Workshops, bake offs, demo days, etc. I mean sounds neat, but is this being done because it's useful or because someone up high needs to justify their AI budget spend with AI usage metrics? Do we believe that ICs are actually so stupid/stubborn they need to be mandated, coaxed, coached, bullied and bribed to use something that makes their jobs easier? Doesn't most of the best tech end up being bottoms-up? Most of us who were around 15+ years ago recall a lot of BigCorp had to be dragged unwillingly into mobile by internal useres/devs who got their first iPhone and saw the light. A lot of stuff starts as small team internal skunk works / unofficial projects working around productivity drains. I am highly suspicious that the C-suite knows what people 10 levels down actually need for productivity enhancement.
    • GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
      > Most of us who were around 15+ years ago recall a lot of BigCorp had to be dragged unwillingly into mobile by internal useres/devs who got their first iPhone and saw the light. Yeah thanks guys. Now I have outlook/teams on my phone and am expected to be reachable 24/7. If not, I'm expected to respond to text, and share my phone number with my colleagues. Those I don't directly share it with will get it from someone who knows me.
  • darepublic 1y ago
    I sympathize with this, I would hate having some cargo cult bullshit foisted upon me by disingenuous management. However I'm not sure that it's AI who is "the emperor with no clothes". What I think _is_ such a facade are oftentimes the company itself, its business model, the product it is trying to build and the way its trying to build it. I have sometimes spoken my mind about these things -- petulantly, on my way out the door.
• geoduck14 1y ago
  >It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. Your comparison to smart phones is interesting. Smart phones are definitely transformative. There was a lot of hype, but still transformative. Do you believe that LLMs and AI is also going to be transformative?
  • brookst 1y ago
    People keep rediscovering the trough of disillusionment and mistaking it for a dead end.
  • pixelesque 1y ago
    Likewise with the dot com bubble and the web - it was a bubble and it was overhyped, but it was still transformative if you look back 20 years as to how things are different in terms of media, and commerce.
    • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
      Both smartphones (and tablets, and smart watches) and the internet went through the hype cycle [0], and the sentiments I've been reading lately indicate AI is in the "trough of disillusionment" right now. That said, I don't believe AI will ever reach the heights (i.e. the measurable ones, how much it penetrates our lives, how much money goes into it) as either smartphones or the internet had. Probably higher than VR / AR, but nowhere near the other ones. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
      • johnecheck 1y ago
        It will of they can actually make it think better than we do. Whether they ever will is hard to say, but it feels pretty clear that throwing more money at LLMs isn't going to get us there.
  • redwood 1y ago
    I think the transformation will primarily be in search personally. As in Google search type experiences. What that means is the ad model of the internet will come apart. And what that means is that the LLMs will need to charge for answer optimization to plug the ads hole. And so where this is going is basically a whole cottage industry around that. Around controlling and shaping knowledge in other words. Yes frightening politically more so than economically. At least from my view. And if it dumbs us down and erodes critical thinking then maybe it will have negative effects economically and politically long term.
• zippyman55 1y ago
  There are no error bars, no confidence intervals. Just a one trick pony that pastes tokens together to give you something that may look good to many people. Sure there are many good use cases, but there are still enough non-patchable and indeterminable in size holes in the watering pail to limit its effectiveness.
  • brookst 1y ago
    Are you saying the Internet is a fad?
    • scrollaway 1y ago
      Just like those newfangled computer thingamadjigies. Overhyped, no long term value.
    • techpineapple 1y ago
      Yes
    • nancyminusone 1y ago
      Its value certainly has declined in recent years.
    • zippyman55 1y ago
      Conventional AI and statistics has many opportunities for bounding answers. Then, a less subject knowable person can do something with the result. But if a LLM returns: THE INTERNET IS A FAD, someone may run off and post the result on HN, which would be embarrrasing.
    • freejazz 1y ago
      What even is the internet anymore? Do you mean the thing people use to access Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and "X"?
  • simianwords 1y ago
    Is there any error bar or confidence intervals in stackoverflow answers?
• qsort 1y ago
  > how in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in Different speeches for different audiences. On HN, for all its faults, people don't need to be told that yes, SOTA LLM can somewhat help you with code, parsing documentation, etc. A lot of people in the "real world" are still grossly underestimating this technology.
  • wffurr 1y ago
    >> A lot of people in the "real world" are still grossly underestimating this technology. Did you mean "overestimating"? "somewhat help" is putting it strongly, IMO.
    • GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
      Most businesses don't need google or netflix level engineering. People on HN are outliers. The corporate world needs simple CRUD apps so tech savvy but non developer employees can stop grinding away at Excel.
• baggachipz 1y ago
  > It's definitely interesting how in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in. It's like we all want you to party going no we all know what's going to happen Well, when people's financial and employment stability are dependent on placating the overlords who are entranced...
• numbers_guy 1y ago
  > This technology demos incredibly well You just summed up machine learning, not just AI/LLMs. My domain is very far from LLMs, but even in my domain, you can build a really cool demo, that is entirely misleading.
• Fricken 1y ago
  I've been following progress on self-driving cars since the 2004 and 2005 Darpa Challenges. Things were very exciting in the 2011-2015 timeframe. Demos were mindblowing. Engineers were giddy. The auto industry went from laughing to shaking in their boots, and then scrambling to make it appear as though they had a horse in the self-driving car race. Hundreds of billions in investment were flying around. Now here we are in 2025, things aren't dead at all, but also nobody with skin in the game is under any delusions about how hard it is to build and scale a viable robotaxi operation. So far the Self driving car hype cycle has served as a useful reference for understanding the hype with LLMs. The main difference with LLMs is that there is 10 times as much money flying around.
  • 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
    But I can actually use an LLM to do useful work for me and no one gets hurt. I think there’s too much hype and money, but LLMs are useful right now.
    • Fricken 1y ago
      SAE Level 2 automated vehicles are useful now, just not so useful that it's safe to take one's eyes off the road and hands off the wheel. LLMs are in a similar place, and still a long way from doing the whole job reliably by themselves. The current state of AI is one or several unknown unknowns away from real AGI. We're missing something fundamental. Likewise with autonomous vehicles, the mythical SAE level 5 vehicle that goes anywhere and everywhere there is a road is still very much science fiction.
      • fellowniusmonk 1y ago
        I see you were very precise with what you wrote about SAE 2. I ride in waymo all the time, they are SAE 4. I know many people who take a waymo every day. What percentage of driving represents the delta between 4 and 5? SAE 4 level LLM/Ai (if we can really even make that comparison) would have far less difficulty in deployment and would be far more disruptive in a far shorter period of time than SAE 4 self driving cars.
• boplicity 1y ago
  I think it's easy to forget how much low-hanging-fruit there still is, in terms of taking full advantage of this technology. People are still figuring out very basic integrations, and even now, at this early stage, the things I can do with LLMs are pretty incredible. For example, I was able to set Cursor up on finally dragging an old codebase out of the dark ages. It then built new features that I've long wanted. It took a few hours on my end, but would have been at least a week or two without it. I'm not exposed to much of the hype, though, so maybe my calibration of what the hype is, is wrong.
  • chain030 1y ago
    "I think it's easy to forget how much low-hanging-fruit there still " Such as?
    • boplicity 1y ago
      So many things, once you start looking. However, most of the critics seem to focus on what it can't do currently, which seems to turn off their brains to the possibilities. Just look at what Cursor (and similar) have done in terms of the tooling for LLMs. There's still tons of progress to be made there, but similar tooling can happen across a variety of industries and categories. For example, I run a database of information that needs constant updating. I set up automated fact checking (with a human looped in), that enables nearly live updates, which would be incredibly expensive without an LLM. There are so many projects, big and small, just like that one, that are being created right now. The low hanging fruit is extremely abundant, for those who are able and willing to find it.
      • chain030 1y ago
        "The low hanging fruit is extremely abundant, for those who are able and willing to find it." Ok fella. Its so abundant right. So why not go ahead, start your own firm and profit from this opportunity, that according to you exists? lol.
        • 1y ago
• noosphr 1y ago
  On the one hand I see posts here by people who have no idea what they are talking about. On the other I get 5 hours of work done in 5 minutes every other day. Worst I can see happening is a doc-com crash. pets.com will go out of business, but amazon won't.
• rsynnott 1y ago
  One thing I find fascinating; go to any forum/subreddit/whatever for any LLM thing, and it will be full of people complaining that it's not as good as it used to be, and that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/whoever is intentionally degrading it, because they are so evil and want their products to be worse. Then a new model or tool comes out, all is wonderful for a bit, then repeat (except for GPT-5, oddly; that one seems to have inspired hatred from the start). It rarely seems to occur to people that familiarity breeds contempt; once the novelty wears off people start noticing the problems. The model isn't getting magically worse, you're just _noticing_ more.
  • boplicity 1y ago
    When GPT 5 came out, I was using GPT 4 mini for a regular automated task. This had been working quite well for some time. It stopped working right when GPT 5 came out. I switched to GPT 5 mini, and it started working exactly the same as it did previously. So yeah, I'm pretty sure they nuked GPT 4 when they launched GPT 5.
  • mvdtnz 1y ago
    I can't speak for all models but I can tell you for an absolute fact that Claude has degraded recently. Yes I've noticed it subjectively but Anthropic have also straight up come out and said "lol oops we 'accidentally' made it way worse, now that you've all noticed we'll roll that back". https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1nc4mem/update_on_recent_performance_concerns/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1nc4mem/update_on...
• thisisit 1y ago
  > It's definitely interesting how in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in I have seen that in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is transformative like say early smartphones. When it comes to wearing professional hats people fall into two categories. People who are using it outside their expertise area. Things they had to previously rely on others like back end operations. They gush about it - praising the technology as if they have discovered smartphones. Only when they use it for their expertise area they realize that AI might not be all it is hyped to be and that they need to be cautiously optimistic. Then there are people who are using it within their expertise area. Like vibe coding. There are people who gush about it. But there are more who are cautiously optimistic. They will tell you it works but in a contained environment.