4 ms·

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. Rather, they don't appear to live up to the hype, and they're sure as hell not a panacea. I'm prett

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. Rather, they don't appear to live up to the hype, and they're sure as hell not a panacea. I'm pretty bearish on LLMs. I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking). Than said, sure, they're useful. Doesn't mean they're worth it.

tra3 1y ago
Fair enough, I may have conflated "there's an AI bubble" with "AIs aren't useful". My employer pays for Claude pro access, and if they stopped paying tomorrow I'd consider paying for it myself. Although, it's much more likely for me to start self hosting them. So that's what it's worth to me, say $2500 USD in hardware over the next 3 years. I'd love to hear what your take on this is.
- brailsafe 1y ago
  $2500 is a relatively small investment for any sort of useful tool over 3 years, but that seems very low to me for this specific self-hosting endeavor
Agingcoder 1y ago
To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure. Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much. If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea. Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.
- alganet 1y ago
  > I don’t know how much. If you're not willing to measure how it helps you, then it's probably not worth it. I would go even further: if the effort of measuring is not feasible, then it's probably not worth it. That is more targeted at companies than you specifically, but it also works as an individual reflection. In the individual reflection, it works like this: you should think "how can I prove to myself that I'm not being bamboozled?". Once you acquire that proof, it should be easy to share it with others. If it's not, it's probably not a good proof (like an anecdote). I already said this, and I'll say it again: record yourself using LLMs. Then watch the recording. Is it that good? Notice that I am removing myself from the equation here, I will not judge how good is it, you're going to do it yourself.
  - aeon_ai 1y ago
    I just did it. You were right. It is, in fact, that good.
    - alganet 1y ago
      You could have recorded, found it to be good, and didn't shared the news. Only used for your self. But you decided to share only the news, not the recording. That tells me something. To be more clear, I can move this argument further. I promise you that if you share the recording that led you to believe that, I will not judge it. In fact, I will do the opposite and focus on people who judge it, trying my best to make the recording look good and point out whoever is nitpicking.
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    There is a difference between confirming that something is worth it and quantifying the benefit though. One only requires satisfying a lower bound, the other requires an exact number. For example I use a $30/month chatbot subscription for various utility tasks. If I value my time at above $60/hour I need to save half an hour each month (a minute a day) to make the investment worth it. That is absolutely true, just with simple googleable questions and light research tasks I save much more than 7 minutes a week. But how much do I actually save? What exactly is my time actually worth? Those are much more difficult questions to answer
    - brailsafe 1y ago
      For me it's less important how much time I think I save on any discrete task, and how much time I net over that time, accounting for how much time the set of tasks I'd be working on would have otherwise taken had I just manually done them. Right now, that means debits and credits in the ledger of time. Sometimes I gain a lot on tasks I probably otherwise wouldn't have done, but I also don't gain much overall by doing, and sometimes I lose a ton of time simply by leaning on a loop of re-doing inaccurate agent work in a way that's actually more time intensive than had I internalized the system in working memory and produced functionality more slowly. If I save an hour, but lose 6, when I'd otherwise have spent 2, then I net -4, but sometimes overall it's positive, so the value is more ambiguous. If my employer didn't pay for the tools, I really don't know whether I would. A good price and conservative usage pattern might net more.
- mattlutze 1y ago
  > exotic topics [...] I don't know how much We also don't know, in situations like this, whether all of or how much of the research is true. As has been regularly and publicly demonstrated [0][1][2], the most capable of these systems still make very fundamental mistakes, misaligned to their goals. The LLMs really, really want to be our friend, and production models do exhibit tendencies to intentionally mislead when it's advantageous [3], even if it's against their alignment goals. 0: https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/oversight-was-not-followed-deloitte-apologises-for-ai-report-20251012-p5n1ty https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/oversigh... 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/australia/australian-lawyer-sorry-ai-errors-murder-case-fake-quotes-made-cases-rcna225220 https://www.nbcnews.com/world/australia/australian-lawyer-so... 2: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-lawyer-fine-ai-regulation/ https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... 3: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18058 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18058?
  - autoexec 1y ago
    > The LLMs really, really want to be our friend They want you to think they are your friend but they actually want to be your master and steal your personal data. It's what the companies who want to be masters over you and the AI have programed them to do. LLMs want to gain your confidence, and then your dependence, and then they can control you.
    - dangus 1y ago
      This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money. Similarly, a SaaS company that would very much prefer you renew your subscription isn’t trying to make you into an Orwellian slave. They’re trying to make a product that makes me want to pay for it. 100% of paid AI tools include the option to not train on your data, and most free ones do as well. Also, AI doesn’t magically invalidate GDPR.
      - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
        > This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money. It's not hyperbolic at all. The entire moat is brand lock-in. OpenAI owns the public impression of what AI is- for now- with a strong second place going to Claude for coders in specific. But that doesn't change that ChatGPT can generate code too, and Claude can also write poems. If you can't lock users into good experiences with your LLM product, you have no future in the market, so data retention and flattery are the names of the game. All the transformer-based LLMs out there can all do what all the other ones can do. Some are gated off about it, but it's simulated at best. Sometimes even circumvent-able with raw input. Twitter bots regularly get tricked into answering silly prompts by people simply requesting they forget current instructions. And, between DeepSeek's incredibly resource-light implementations of solid if limited models, which do largely the same sort of work without massive datacenters full of GPUs, plus Apple Intelligence rolling out experiences that largely run on ML-specific hardware in their local devices which immediately, full stop, wins the privacy argument, OpenAI and co are either getting nervous, or they're in denial. The capex for this stuff, the valuations, and the actual user experiences are simply not cohering. If this was indeed the revolution the valley said it was, and the people were lining up to pay prices that reflected the cost of running this tech, then there wouldn't be a debate at all. But that's simply not true: most LLM products are heavily subsidized, a lot of the big players in the space are downsizing what they had planned to build out to power this "future," and a whole lot of people cite their experiences as "fine." That's not a revolution.
James_K 1y ago
Something not being useful is distinct from it having no uses. It could well be the case that the use of AI creates more damage than it does good. Many people have found it a useful tool to create the appearance of work where none is happening.
QuantumGood 1y ago
Those that claim not useful usually link it to something like "never trust because hallucinations", or backtrack when called out like "yes, I should have added details", or speak of problems outweighing usefulness hence not useful, etc. But online, people do make this statement.
thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
The thing with the hype is it's always the same hype. "If you can just 3D print another 3D printer ..." "Apps are dead, everything will be AJAX" etc. I no longer believe the hype itself warrants attention or pushback. Let the hype boys raise money. No need to protect naive VCs.
- bigfishrunning 1y ago
  But if the hype boys manage to capture big portions of the market (Microsoft, Amazon, etc...) it starts affecting pensions and retirement accounts. The next few years are gonna be rough because of this hype.
- watwut 1y ago
  > Let the hype boys raise money. No need to protect naive VCs. I genuinely 100% believe that ability of hype boys to raise money is harming the economy and us all. Whatever structural reason for it existing is there, it would be the best to end it.
peteforde 1y ago
My dude, there is a small but weirdly dedicated group of people on this site that are hellbent on demanding "proof" that the wins we've personally gained from using LLMs in an intelligent way are real. It's actually been kind of exhausting, leading me to not weigh in on many threads.
- hatthew 1y ago
  Because there's a lot of evidence that people tend to overestimate/overstate how useful LLMs are. Everyone says "I wrote this thing using AI" but most of the time reading the prompt would be just as useful as reading the final product. Everyone says "I wrote this large codebase using AI" but most of the time the code is unmaintainable and probably could have been implemented with much less code by a real human, and also the final software isn't actually ready for prod yet. Everyone says "I find AI coding very useful" and neglects to mention that they are making small adhoc scripts, or they're in a domain that's mostly boilerplate anyways (e.g. some parts of web dev). The one killer application of LLMs seems to be text summarization. Everything else that I have seen is either a niche domain that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people, a final product that is slop and shouldn't been made in the first place, or minor gains that are worthwhile but nowhere near as groundbreaking as people claim. To be clear, I think LLMs are useful, and I personally use them regularly. But I've gained at most 5% productivity from them (likely much less). For me, it's exhausting to keep on trying to realize these gains everyone is talking about, while every time I dig into someone claiming to get massive gains I find that the actual impact is highly questionable.
  - peteforde 1y ago
    Your position implies that we need to prove that we're not smoking our own supply. I would argue that you are the one who should prove that we're not working (conservatively) 5-8x faster. The most telling part is when you said "most of the time reading the prompt". That strongly implies that you're attempting to one-shot whatever it is that you're working on. There is no "the prompt" in my current application. It's a 275k LoC ESP-IDF app spread across ~30 components that interact via FreeRTOS mechanisms as well as an app-wide event bus. It manages non-blocking UI, IO over multiple protocols, drives an OLED using a customized version of lvgl. It is, by any estimation, a serious and non-trivial application, and it was almost entirely crafted by LLM coding models being closely driven by yours truly across several hundred distinct Cursor conversations. It's probably taken me 10% of the time it would have taken me to do by hand, and that's precisely because I lean on it so heavily for initial buildout, thoughtful troubleshooting (it is never tired, never not available, and also knows more than I do about electronics as a bonus) and the occasional large cross-component refactor. I don't suspect that you're wrong. I know that you're wrong.
llm_nerd 1y ago
>I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45577203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45577203 There are thousands and thousands of comments just like this on this site. I would dare say tens of thousands. They regularly appear in any AI-related discussion. I've been involved in many threads on here where devs with Very Important Work announce that none of the AI tools are useful for them or for anyone with Real Problems, and at best they work for copy/paste junior devs who don't know what they're doing and are doing trivial work. This is right after they declare that anyone that isn't building a giant monolithic PHP app just like them are trend-chasers who are "cargo culting, like some tribe or something". >I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking) In a world where Tesla is a trillion dollar company based upon vapourware, and the president of largest economy (for now) is launching shitcoins and taking bribes through crypto, and every Western country saw a massive real-estate ramp up by unmetered mass migration, and Bitcoin is a $2T "currency" that has literally zero real world use beyond betting on itself, and sites like Polymarket exist for insiders to scam foolish rube outsiders out of their money, and... Dude, the AI bubble doesn't even remotely measure.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful." That's because no one has said that "AI" hype is the issue, not "AI" The hype machine and its followers have no tolerance for skepticism Any perceived skepticism of "AI", no matter how reasonable, triggers absurd accusations The author, like many others, tries to avoid the kneejerk defensiveness of "AI" hype subscribers: "Don't get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will - and they will." But this does not work. There is zero tolerance for skepticism. All disbelief must be countered "Crypto" hype was like this, before one of its ringleaders went to prison It's unlikely that fraud will be prosecuted under current political environment Fasten your seatbelts

tra3 1y ago

Fair enough, I may have conflated "there's an AI bubble" with "AIs aren't useful". My employer pays for Claude pro access, and if they stopped paying tomorrow I'd consider paying for it myself. Although, it's much more likely for me to start self hosting them. So that's what it's worth to me, say $2500 USD in hardware over the next 3 years. I'd love to hear what your take on this is.

brailsafe 1y ago
$2500 is a relatively small investment for any sort of useful tool over 3 years, but that seems very low to me for this specific self-hosting endeavor

Agingcoder 1y ago

To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure. Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much. If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea. Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.

alganet 1y ago
> I don’t know how much. If you're not willing to measure how it helps you, then it's probably not worth it. I would go even further: if the effort of measuring is not feasible, then it's probably not worth it. That is more targeted at companies than you specifically, but it also works as an individual reflection. In the individual reflection, it works like this: you should think "how can I prove to myself that I'm not being bamboozled?". Once you acquire that proof, it should be easy to share it with others. If it's not, it's probably not a good proof (like an anecdote). I already said this, and I'll say it again: record yourself using LLMs. Then watch the recording. Is it that good? Notice that I am removing myself from the equation here, I will not judge how good is it, you're going to do it yourself.
- aeon_ai 1y ago
  I just did it. You were right. It is, in fact, that good.
  - alganet 1y ago
    You could have recorded, found it to be good, and didn't shared the news. Only used for your self. But you decided to share only the news, not the recording. That tells me something. To be more clear, I can move this argument further. I promise you that if you share the recording that led you to believe that, I will not judge it. In fact, I will do the opposite and focus on people who judge it, trying my best to make the recording look good and point out whoever is nitpicking.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  There is a difference between confirming that something is worth it and quantifying the benefit though. One only requires satisfying a lower bound, the other requires an exact number. For example I use a $30/month chatbot subscription for various utility tasks. If I value my time at above $60/hour I need to save half an hour each month (a minute a day) to make the investment worth it. That is absolutely true, just with simple googleable questions and light research tasks I save much more than 7 minutes a week. But how much do I actually save? What exactly is my time actually worth? Those are much more difficult questions to answer
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    For me it's less important how much time I think I save on any discrete task, and how much time I net over that time, accounting for how much time the set of tasks I'd be working on would have otherwise taken had I just manually done them. Right now, that means debits and credits in the ledger of time. Sometimes I gain a lot on tasks I probably otherwise wouldn't have done, but I also don't gain much overall by doing, and sometimes I lose a ton of time simply by leaning on a loop of re-doing inaccurate agent work in a way that's actually more time intensive than had I internalized the system in working memory and produced functionality more slowly. If I save an hour, but lose 6, when I'd otherwise have spent 2, then I net -4, but sometimes overall it's positive, so the value is more ambiguous. If my employer didn't pay for the tools, I really don't know whether I would. A good price and conservative usage pattern might net more.
mattlutze 1y ago
> exotic topics [...] I don't know how much We also don't know, in situations like this, whether all of or how much of the research is true. As has been regularly and publicly demonstrated [0][1][2], the most capable of these systems still make very fundamental mistakes, misaligned to their goals. The LLMs really, really want to be our friend, and production models do exhibit tendencies to intentionally mislead when it's advantageous [3], even if it's against their alignment goals. 0: https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/oversight-was-not-followed-deloitte-apologises-for-ai-report-20251012-p5n1ty https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/oversigh... 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/australia/australian-lawyer-sorry-ai-errors-murder-case-fake-quotes-made-cases-rcna225220 https://www.nbcnews.com/world/australia/australian-lawyer-so... 2: https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-lawyer-fine-ai-regulation/ https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-la... 3: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18058 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18058?
- autoexec 1y ago
  > The LLMs really, really want to be our friend They want you to think they are your friend but they actually want to be your master and steal your personal data. It's what the companies who want to be masters over you and the AI have programed them to do. LLMs want to gain your confidence, and then your dependence, and then they can control you.
  - dangus 1y ago
    This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money. Similarly, a SaaS company that would very much prefer you renew your subscription isn’t trying to make you into an Orwellian slave. They’re trying to make a product that makes me want to pay for it. 100% of paid AI tools include the option to not train on your data, and most free ones do as well. Also, AI doesn’t magically invalidate GDPR.
    - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
      > This seems hyperbolic to me. Sometimes companies just want to make money. It's not hyperbolic at all. The entire moat is brand lock-in. OpenAI owns the public impression of what AI is- for now- with a strong second place going to Claude for coders in specific. But that doesn't change that ChatGPT can generate code too, and Claude can also write poems. If you can't lock users into good experiences with your LLM product, you have no future in the market, so data retention and flattery are the names of the game. All the transformer-based LLMs out there can all do what all the other ones can do. Some are gated off about it, but it's simulated at best. Sometimes even circumvent-able with raw input. Twitter bots regularly get tricked into answering silly prompts by people simply requesting they forget current instructions. And, between DeepSeek's incredibly resource-light implementations of solid if limited models, which do largely the same sort of work without massive datacenters full of GPUs, plus Apple Intelligence rolling out experiences that largely run on ML-specific hardware in their local devices which immediately, full stop, wins the privacy argument, OpenAI and co are either getting nervous, or they're in denial. The capex for this stuff, the valuations, and the actual user experiences are simply not cohering. If this was indeed the revolution the valley said it was, and the people were lining up to pay prices that reflected the cost of running this tech, then there wouldn't be a debate at all. But that's simply not true: most LLM products are heavily subsidized, a lot of the big players in the space are downsizing what they had planned to build out to power this "future," and a whole lot of people cite their experiences as "fine." That's not a revolution.

James_K 1y ago

Something not being useful is distinct from it having no uses. It could well be the case that the use of AI creates more damage than it does good. Many people have found it a useful tool to create the appearance of work where none is happening.

QuantumGood 1y ago

Those that claim not useful usually link it to something like "never trust because hallucinations", or backtrack when called out like "yes, I should have added details", or speak of problems outweighing usefulness hence not useful, etc. But online, people do make this statement.

thatjoeoverthr 1y ago

The thing with the hype is it's always the same hype. "If you can just 3D print another 3D printer ..." "Apps are dead, everything will be AJAX" etc. I no longer believe the hype itself warrants attention or pushback. Let the hype boys raise money. No need to protect naive VCs.

bigfishrunning 1y ago
But if the hype boys manage to capture big portions of the market (Microsoft, Amazon, etc...) it starts affecting pensions and retirement accounts. The next few years are gonna be rough because of this hype.
watwut 1y ago
> Let the hype boys raise money. No need to protect naive VCs. I genuinely 100% believe that ability of hype boys to raise money is harming the economy and us all. Whatever structural reason for it existing is there, it would be the best to end it.

peteforde 1y ago

My dude, there is a small but weirdly dedicated group of people on this site that are hellbent on demanding "proof" that the wins we've personally gained from using LLMs in an intelligent way are real. It's actually been kind of exhausting, leading me to not weigh in on many threads.

hatthew 1y ago
Because there's a lot of evidence that people tend to overestimate/overstate how useful LLMs are. Everyone says "I wrote this thing using AI" but most of the time reading the prompt would be just as useful as reading the final product. Everyone says "I wrote this large codebase using AI" but most of the time the code is unmaintainable and probably could have been implemented with much less code by a real human, and also the final software isn't actually ready for prod yet. Everyone says "I find AI coding very useful" and neglects to mention that they are making small adhoc scripts, or they're in a domain that's mostly boilerplate anyways (e.g. some parts of web dev). The one killer application of LLMs seems to be text summarization. Everything else that I have seen is either a niche domain that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people, a final product that is slop and shouldn't been made in the first place, or minor gains that are worthwhile but nowhere near as groundbreaking as people claim. To be clear, I think LLMs are useful, and I personally use them regularly. But I've gained at most 5% productivity from them (likely much less). For me, it's exhausting to keep on trying to realize these gains everyone is talking about, while every time I dig into someone claiming to get massive gains I find that the actual impact is highly questionable.
- peteforde 1y ago
  Your position implies that we need to prove that we're not smoking our own supply. I would argue that you are the one who should prove that we're not working (conservatively) 5-8x faster. The most telling part is when you said "most of the time reading the prompt". That strongly implies that you're attempting to one-shot whatever it is that you're working on. There is no "the prompt" in my current application. It's a 275k LoC ESP-IDF app spread across ~30 components that interact via FreeRTOS mechanisms as well as an app-wide event bus. It manages non-blocking UI, IO over multiple protocols, drives an OLED using a customized version of lvgl. It is, by any estimation, a serious and non-trivial application, and it was almost entirely crafted by LLM coding models being closely driven by yours truly across several hundred distinct Cursor conversations. It's probably taken me 10% of the time it would have taken me to do by hand, and that's precisely because I lean on it so heavily for initial buildout, thoughtful troubleshooting (it is never tired, never not available, and also knows more than I do about electronics as a bonus) and the occasional large cross-component refactor. I don't suspect that you're wrong. I know that you're wrong.

llm_nerd 1y ago

>I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45577203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45577203 There are thousands and thousands of comments just like this on this site. I would dare say tens of thousands. They regularly appear in any AI-related discussion. I've been involved in many threads on here where devs with Very Important Work announce that none of the AI tools are useful for them or for anyone with Real Problems, and at best they work for copy/paste junior devs who don't know what they're doing and are doing trivial work. This is right after they declare that anyone that isn't building a giant monolithic PHP app just like them are trend-chasers who are "cargo culting, like some tribe or something". >I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking) In a world where Tesla is a trillion dollar company based upon vapourware, and the president of largest economy (for now) is launching shitcoins and taking bribes through crypto, and every Western country saw a massive real-estate ramp up by unmetered mass migration, and Bitcoin is a $2T "currency" that has literally zero real world use beyond betting on itself, and sites like Polymarket exist for insiders to scam foolish rube outsiders out of their money, and... Dude, the AI bubble doesn't even remotely measure.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful." That's because no one has said that "AI" hype is the issue, not "AI" The hype machine and its followers have no tolerance for skepticism Any perceived skepticism of "AI", no matter how reasonable, triggers absurd accusations The author, like many others, tries to avoid the kneejerk defensiveness of "AI" hype subscribers: "Don't get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will - and they will." But this does not work. There is zero tolerance for skepticism. All disbelief must be countered "Crypto" hype was like this, before one of its ringleaders went to prison It's unlikely that fraud will be prosecuted under current political environment Fasten your seatbelts