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Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that t
by blablabla123 10mo ago
Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill
Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. None of this is on par with a human. The code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow...
- delaminator 10mo agoYour assessment of Claude simply isn’t true. Or Stackoverflow is really good. I’m producing multiple projects per week that are weeks of work each.
- written-beyond 10mo agoI'm just as much of an avid llm code generator fan as you may be but I do wonder about the practicality of spending time making projects anymore. Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects? If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?
- jstummbillig 10mo agoThe value is that we need a lot more software and now, because building software has gotten so much less time consuming, you can sell software to people that could/would not have paid for it previously at a different price point.
- eschaton 10mo agoWe don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines. Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM) from a sufficiently detailed model of the data involved. In the 1970s you could wire up an OS-level forms library to your database schema and then serve literally thousands of users from a system less powerful than the CPU in modern peripheral or storage controller. And in less RAM too. People need to take a look at what was done before in order to truly have a proper degree of shame about how things are being done now.
- steve_adams_86 10mo ago> That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines. I mostly agree, but I do find them useful for fuzzing out tests and finding issues with implementations. I have moved away from larger architectural sketches using LLMs because over larger time scales I no longer find they actually save time, but I do think they're useful for finding ways to improve correctness and safety in code. It isn't the exciting and magical thing AI platforms want people to think it is, and it isn't indispensable, but I like having it handy sometimes. The key is that it still requires an operator who knows something is missing, or that there are still improvements to be made, and how to suss them out. This is far less likely to occur in the hands of people who don't know, in which case I agree that it's essentially a pachinko machine.
- skydhash 10mo agoMost CRUD software development is not really about the CRUD part. And for most framework, you can find packages that generate the UI and the glue code that ties it to the database. When you're doing CRUD, you're spending most of the time with the extra constraints designed by product. It's dealing with the CRUD events, the IAM system, the Notification system,...
- brookst 10mo agoI’m with you. Anyone writing in anything higher level than assembly, with anything less than the optimization work done by the demo scene, should feel great same. Down with force-multiplying abstractions! Down with intermediate languages and CPU agnostic binaries! Down with libraries!
- eschaton 10mo agoYou have clearly entirely understood exactly what I was saying and don’t look like a fool at all with this reply.
- fainpul 10mo agoBut what we're getting is a flood of buggy, unoriginal crap.
- sph 10mo ago> Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects? No offence to anyone but these generated projects are nothing ground-breaking. As soon as you venture outside the usual CRUD apps where novelty and serious engineering is necessary, the value proposition of LLMs drops considerably. For example, I'm exploring a novel design for a microkernel, and I have no need for machine generated boilerplate, as most of the hard work is not implementing yet another JSON API boilerplate, but it's thinking very hard with pen and paper about something few have thought before, and even fewer LLMs have been trained on, and have no intelligence to ponder upon the material. To be fair, even for the most dumb side-projects, like the notes app I wrote for myself, there is still a joy in doing things by hand, because I do not care about shipping early and getting VC money.
- delaminator 10mo agoWeird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database. I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version. I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant. I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.
- sph 10mo ago> I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself > I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. Then what is the point? For some of us, programming is an art form. Creativity is an art form and an ideal to strive towards. Why have a machine to create something we wouldn’t care about? The only result is a devaluation to zero of actual effort and passion, whose only beneficiary are those that only care about creating more “product”. Sure, you can pump out products with little effort now, all the while making a few ultrabilionaires richer. Good for you, I guess.
- blablabla123 10mo agoSure but these are likely just variations of existing things. And yet the quality is still behind the original
- bloppe 10mo agoWould you mind sharing some of these projects? I've found Claude's usefulness is highly variable, though somewhat predictable. It can write `jq` filters flawlessly every time, whereas I would normally spend 30 minutes scanning docs because nobody memorizes `jq` syntax. And it can comb through server logs in every pod of my k8s clusters extremely fast. But it often struggles making quality code changes in a large codebase, or writing good documentation that isn't just an English translation of the code it's documenting.
- steve_adams_86 10mo agoClaude has taught me so much about how to use jq better. And really, way more efficient ways of using the command line in general. It's great. Ironically, the more I learn the less I want to ask it to do things.
- datameta 10mo agoIn an ideal world we function in exactly this way - using LLMs to bootstrap our skill/knowledge improvement journeys.
- JamesSwift 10mo agoYeah, if you pay attention to its output you can pick up little tips and tricks all over the place.
- gloosx 10mo agoIt is always "I'm producing 300 projects in a nanosecond" but it's almost never about sharing or actually deploying these ;)
- DoctorOW 10mo agoThe problem I had that the larger your project gets, the more mistakes Claude makes. I (not a parent commenter) started with a basic CRUD web app and was blown away by how detailed it was, new CSS, good error handling, good selection and use of libraries, it could even write the terminal commands for package management and building. As the project grew to something larger Claude started forgetting that some code already existed in the project and started repeating itself, and worse still when I asked for new features it would pick a copy at random leaving them out of sync with eachother. Moving forward I've been alternating between writing stuff with AI, then rewriting it myself.
- eschaton 10mo agoI produce a lot of shit every week too, but I don’t brag about my digestive system on “Hacker” “News.”
- delaminator 10mo agoYou are so bitter. Take a moment to ponder why you are that way.
- eschaton 10mo agoNice deflection. Did you use ChatGPT to come up with it?
- baobabKoodaa 10mo agoI'll do one better: I poop every day in the water closet!
- will4274 10mo ago> While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill If you believe this, you must also believe that global warming is unstoppable. OpenAI's energy costs are large compared to the current electricity market, but not so large compared to the current energy market. Environmentalists usually suggest that electrification - converting non-electrical energy to electrical energy - and then making that electrical energy clean - is the solution to global warming. OpenAI's energy needs are something like 10% of the current worldwide electricity market but less than 1% of the current worldwide energy market.
- rvnx 10mo agoImagine how big pile of trash as the current generation of graphics cards used for LLM training will get outdated. It will crash the hardware market (which is a good news for gamers)
- brookst 10mo agoA100’s are not suitable for gaming.
- rvnx 10mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw699ZbUKqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw699ZbUKqg Looks very playable to me. It's just an expensive card, but if the market is flooded with them, they can be used in gaming AND in local LLMs. So it can push the fall of server-side AI even further. These cards are 400 USD for reference, so if more and more are sold, we can imagine them getting down to 100 USD or so. (and then similar for A100, H100, etc) My main concern is the noise because I have seen datacenter hardware and it is crazy. Of course it's not ideal but there is something to do with it.
- blablabla123 10mo agoGoogle recently announced to double AI data center capacity every 6 month. While both unfortunately deal with exponential growth, we are talking about 1% growth CO2 which is bad enough vs 300% effectively per year according to Google
- lightbendover 10mo ago[dead]
- tikotus 10mo agoI'd rather phrase it as "code is straight out of GitHub, but tailored to match your data structures" That's at least how I use it. If I know there's a library that can solve the issue, I know an LLM can implement the same thing for me. Often much faster than integrating the library. And hey, now it's my code. Ethical? Probably not. Useful? Sometimes. If I know there isn't a library available, and I'm not doing the most trivial UI or data processing, well, then it can be very tough to get anything usable out of an LLM.
- infecto 10mo agoI am a senior engineer, I use cursor a lot in my day to day. I find I can code longer and typically faster than without. Is it on par with human? It’s getting pretty darn close to be honest, I am sure the “10x” engineers of the world would disagree but it definitely has surpassed a junior engineer. We all have our anecdotes but I am inclined to believe on average there is net value.
- boringg 10mo agoI think surpassed is not the right word because it doesn't create/ideate. However it is incredibly resourceful. Maybe like having a jr engineer to do your bidding without thinking or growing.
- infecto 10mo agoSurpassed is probably the wrong word but the intent is more that it can comprehend quite complicated algorithms and patterns and apply them to your problem space. So yea it’s not a human but I don’t think saying subpar to a human is the right comparison either. In many ways it’s much better, I can run N parallel revisions and have the best implementation picked for review. This all happens in seconds.
- chrisweekly 10mo agoYes, this. Creating multiple iterations in parallel allows much more meaningful exploration of the solution space. Create a branch for each framework and try them all, compare them directly in praxis not just in theory. My brother is doing this to great effect as a solopreneur, and having the time of his life.
- adastra22 10mo agoI use AI tools extensively. I have seen it come up with truly novel solutions.
- trgn 10mo agoi think less. not sure if that's a good thing. but small little bugs and improvements get cleared so quickly now.
- mark_l_watson 10mo agoI agree. re: energy and other resource use: the analogy I like is with driving cars: we use cars for transportation knowing the environmental costs so we don’t usually just go on two hour drives for the fun of it, rather we drive to get to work, go shopping. I use Gemini 3 but only in specific high value use cases. When I use commercial models I think a little about the societal costs. In the USA we have lost the thread here: we don’t maximize the use of small tuned models throughout society and industry, instead we use the pursuit of advanced AI as a distraction to the reality that our economy and competitiveness are failing.
- spider-mario 10mo agoMost of the energy for AI does not go into chatbots. Using Gemini is not remotely close to driving a car for 2 hours. If a prompt is 0.3 Wh (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur..., https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...), each prompt is closer to using an e-bike for 50 metres. You could have your morning shower 1°C less hot and save enough energy for about 200 prompts (assuming 50 litres per shower). (Or skip the shower altogether and save thousands of prompts.)
- mark_l_watson 10mo ago+1 interesting
- collinmanderson 10mo agoI think it's also worth comparing to the CO2 impact of consuming meat, especially beef, which is pretty high. (It's the training, not the inference, that's the biggest energy usage.)
- mattlondon 10mo agoTake this "sober" analysis with a big pinch of salt. IBM have totally missed the AI boat, and a large chunk of their revenue comes from selling expensive consultants to clients who do not have the expertise to do IT work themselves - this business model is at a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off country. IBM have an incentive to try and pour water on the AI fire to try and sustain their business.
- evanjrowley 10mo agoIs this true in 2025? Asking because the biggest IT consulting branch of IBM, Global Technology Services (GTS), was spun off into Kyndryl back in 2021[0]. Same goes for some premier software products (including one I consulted for) back in 2019[1]. Anecdotal evidence suggests the consulting part of IBM was already significantly smaller than in the past. It's worth noting that IBM may view these AI companies as competitors to it's Watson AI tech[2]. It already existed before the GPU crunch and hyperscaler boom - runs on proprietary IBM hardware. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hcl-technologies-to-acquire-select-ibm-software-products-for-1-8b-300761682.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hcl-technologies-to... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson
- mattlondon 10mo agoI know people who still work there and are doing consultancy work for clients. I am a former IBMer myself but my memory is hazy. IIRC there was 2 arms of the consultants - one was the boring day to day stuff, and the other was "innovation services" or something. Maybe the spun out the drudgery GTS and kept the "innovation" service? No idea.
- vmh1928 10mo agoThe part that was spun off was "Infrastructure Services" (from the Wiki article.) Outsourcing and operations, not the business consulting organization that provides high level strategy to coding services. https://www.ibm.com/consulting https://www.ibm.com/consulting
- trgn 10mo ago> Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. the facts though, read like an endorsement not a criticism
- diggyhole 10mo agoI've had decent results hackin', wackin' and smashin'.
- MisterTea 10mo agoYesterday I was talking to coworkers about AI I mentioned that a friend of mine used ChatGPT to help him move. So a coworker said I have to test this and asked ChatGPT if he could fit a set of the largest Magnepan speakers (the wide folding older room divider style) in his Infinity QX80. The results were hilarious. It had some of the dimensions right but it then decided the QX80 is as wide as a box truck (~8-8.5 feet/2.5 m) and to align the nearly 7 foot long speakers sideways between the wheel wells. It also posted hilariously incomprehensible ASCII diagrams.
- tim333 10mo agoAn issue with the doom forecasts is most of the hypothetical $8tn hasn't happened yet. Current big tech capex is about $315bn this year, $250bn last against a pre AI level ~$100bn so ~$400bn has been spent so far on AI boom data centers. https://sherwood.news/business/amazon-plans-100-billion-spend-on-ai-in-2025/ https://sherwood.news/business/amazon-plans-100-billion-spen... The future spend is optional - AGI takeoff, you spend loads, not happening not so much. Say it levels of at $800bn. The world's population is ~8bn so $100 a head so you'd need to be making $10 or $20 per head per year. Quite possibly doable.
- tempfile 10mo agoLol. If you ballpark numbers like that probably anything is doable!
- tim333 10mo ago$10/head x $8bn people is easier said than done - only your major enterprises like Google or Amazon can. But AI even if just LLMs may be there.
- trueismywork 10mo ago65% of people in the world earn less than 3000 euros/year.
- golol 10mo agoGetting 65% of the population to spend 1% of their income on some new digital toy forever does not seem so far fetched.
- gfaster 10mo agoThat seems super far fetched given that 37%[1] of the world's population does not have internet access. You could reasonably restrict further to populations that speak languages that are even passably represented in LLMs. Even disregarding that, if you're making <3000 euros a year, I really don't think you'd be willing or able to spend that much money to let your computer gaslight you. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet
- TheOccasionalWr 10mo agoI'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow". That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works. By now there has been so much code ingested from all kinds of sources, including Stackoverflow LLM is able to help generate quite good code in many occasions. My point being it is extremly useful for super popular languages and many languages where resources are more scarce for developer but because they got the code from who knows where, it can definitely give you many useful ideas. It's not human, which I'm not sure what is supposed to actually mean. Humans make mistakes, humans make good code. AI does also both. What it definitely needs is a good programmer still on top to know what he is getting and how to improve it. I find AI (LLM) very useful as a very good code completion and light coder where you know exactly what to do because you did it a thousand times but it's wasteful to be typing it again. Especially a lot of boilerplate code or tests. It's also useful for agentic use cases because some things you just couldn't do before because there was nothing to understand a human voice/text input and translate that to an actual command. But that is all far from some AGI and it all costs a lot today an average company to say that this actually provided return on the money but it definitely speeds things up.
- prewett 10mo ago> I'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow". That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works. I'm not an AI lover, but I did try Gemini for a small, well-contained algorithm for a personal project that I didn't want to spend the time looking up, and it was straight-up a StackOverflow solution. I found out because I said "hm, there has to be a more elegant solution", and quickly found the StackOverflow solution that the AI regurgitated. Another 10 or 20 minutes of hunting uncovered another StackOverflow solution with the requisite elegance.
- guywithahat 10mo ago> it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but they're definitely not impossible to fulfill, in fact I'd argue the energy requirements are some of the most straightforward to fulfill. Bringing a natural gas power plant online is not the hardest part in creating AGI
- lavezzi 10mo ago> Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. Didn't IBM just sign quite a big deal with Groq?