10 ms·

Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this

• hectdev 10mo ago
  It's the latest tech holy war. Tabs vs Spaces but more existential. I'm usually anti hype and I've been convinced of AI's use over and over when it comes to coding. And whenever I talk about it, I see that I come across as an evangelist. Some people appreciate that, online I get a lot of push back despite having tangible examples of how it has been useful.
  • anthem2025 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • throwout4110 10mo ago
    Right this is what I can’t quite understand. A lot of HN folks appear to have been burned by e.g. horrible corporate or business ideas by non technical people that don’t understand AI, that is completely understandable. What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. The progress has moved astoundingly fast and the sheer amount of capital and competition and pressure means the train is not slowing down. Predictions of “2025 is the year of coding agents” from a chorus of otherwise unpalatable CEOs was in fact absolutely true…
    • bigstrat2003 10mo ago
      > What I never understand is the population of coders that don’t see any value in coding agents or are aggressively against them, or people that deride LLMs as failing to be able to do X (or hallucinate etc) and are therefore useless and every thing is AI Slop, without recognizing that what we can do today is almost unrecognizeable from the world of 3 years ago. I don't recognize that because it isn't true. I try the LLMs every now and then, and they still make the same stupid hallucinations that ChatGPT did on day 1. AI hype proponents love to make claims that the tech has improved a ton, but based on my experience trying to use it those claims are completely baseless.
      • hectdev 10mo ago
        This fascinates me. Just observing but because it hasn't worked for you, everyone else must be lying? (I'm assuming that's what you mean by baseless) How does that bridge get built? I can provide tangible real life examples but I've found push back from that in other online conversations.
        • ggerni 10mo ago
          [flagged]
        • queenkjuul 10mo ago
          My boss has been passing off Claude generated code and documentation to me all year. It is consistently garbage. It consistently hallucinates. I consistently have to rewrite most, if not all, of what I'm handed. I do also try and use Claude Code for certain tasks. More often than not, i regret it, but I've started to zero in on tasks it's helpful with (configuration and debugging, not so much coding). But it's very easy then for me to hear people saying that AI gives them so much useful code, and for me to assume that they are like my boss: not examining that code carefully, or not holding their output to particularly high standards, or aren't responsible for the maintenance and thus don't need to care. That doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean they're right.
  • suprjami 10mo ago
    I don't see it that way. Tabs, spaces, curly brace placement, Vim, Emacs, VSCode, etc are largely aesthetic choices with some marginal unproven cognitive implications. I find people mostly prefer what they are used to, and if your preference was so superior then how could so many people build fantastic software using the method you don't like? AI isn't like that. AI is a bunch of people telling me this product can do wonderful things that will change society and replace workers, yet almost every time I use it, it falls far short of that promise. AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily.
    • Loughla 10mo ago
      >AI is certainly not reliable enough for me to jeopardize the quality of my work by using it heavily. I mean this in sincerity, and not at all snarky, but - have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively? I find that I can get what I need from chatbots (and refuse to call them AI until we have general AI just to be contrary) if I spend a couple of minutes considering constraints and being careful with my prompt language. When I've come across people in my real life who say they get no value from chatbots, it's because they're asking poorly formed questions, or haven't thought through the problem entirely. Working with chatbots is like working with a very bright lab puppy. They're willing to do whatever you want, but they'll definitely piss on the floor unless you tell them not to. Or am I entirely off base with your experience?
      • dwoldrich 10mo ago
        It would be helpful if you would relate your own bad experiences and how you overcame them. Leading off with "do it better" isn't very instructive. Unfortunately there's no useful training for much of anything in our industry, much less AI. I prefer to use LLM as a sock puppet to filter out implausible options in my problem space and to help me recall how to do boilerplate things. Like you, I think, I also tend to write multi-paragraph prompts repeating myself and calling back on every aspect to continuously hone in on the true subject I am interested in. I don't trust LLM's enough to operate on my behalf agentically yet. And, LLM is uncreative and hallucinatory as heck whenever it strays into novel territory, which makes it a dangerous tool.
  • jimbokun 10mo ago
    Most of the people against “AI” are not against it because they think it doesn’t work. It’s because they know it works better every day and the people controlling it are gleefully fucking over the rest of the world because they can. The plainly stated goal is TO ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN EMPLOYEES, with no plan for how those people will feed, clothe, or house themselves. The reactions the author was getting was the reaction of a horse talking to someone happily working for the glue factory.
    • IAmBroom 10mo ago
      I don't think you're qualified to speak for most of the people against AI.
  • sulicat 10mo ago
    I'm probably one of the people that would say AI (at least LLMs) isn't all its cracked up to be and even I have examples where it has been useful to me. I think the feeling stems from the exaggeration of the value it provides combined with a large number of internal corporate LLMs being absolute trash. The overvaluation is seen in effect everywhere from the stock market, the price of RAM, the cost of energy as well as IP theft issues etc etc. AI has taken over and yet it still feels like just a really good fuzzy search. Like yeah I can search something 10x faster than before but might get a bad answer every now and then. Yeah its been useful (so have many other things). No it's not worth building trillion dollar data centers for. I would be happier if the spend went towards manufacturing or semiconductor fabs.
    • rr808 10mo ago
      Lol you made me think my power bill has gone up but I didn't get a pay rise for my increased productivity.
  • postalrat 10mo ago
    I see LLM's as kinda the new hotness in IDEs. And some people will use vi forever.
  • gaigalas 10mo ago
    I think it's more a continuation of IDE versus pure editor. More precisely: In one side, it's the "tools that build up critical mass" philosophy. AI firmly resides here. On the other, it's the "all you need is brain and plain text" philosophy. We don't see much AI in this camp. One thing I learned is that you should never underestimate the "all you need is brain and plain text" camp. That philosophy survived many, many "fatal blows" and has come up on top several times. It has one unique feature: resilience to bloat, something that the current smart tools camp is obviously overlooking.
  • the__alchemist 10mo ago
    Similar experience. I think it's become an identity politics concept. To those who consider themselves to be anti AI, the concept of the tool having any use is haram. It feels awkward living in the "LLMs are a useful tool for some tasks" experience. I suspect this is because the two tribes are the loudest.
• mips_avatar 10mo ago
  The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6 months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness, stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.
  • miltonlost 10mo ago
    Severe food sickness? I know WebMD rightly gets a lot of hate, but this is one thing where it would be good for. Stolen items? Depending on the items and the place, possibly police. Missed flights? Customer service agent at the airport for your airline or call the airline help line.
    • mips_avatar 10mo ago
      Well I got so weak I needed to go to the hospital, and that was tough.
  • buildsjets 10mo ago
    This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.
    • mips_avatar 10mo ago
      IDK I got really sick in a foreign country, I wasn't sure how to get to the hospital and I was alone in a hotel room. I don't really know how using chatgpt to help me isn't actualizing.
      • blibble 10mo ago
        did you try asking at the reception desk?
• WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
  I also would like to see AI end up dying off except for a few niches, but I find myself using it more and more. It is not a productivity boost in the way I end up using it, interestingly. Actually I think it is actively harming my continued development, though that could just be me getting older, or perhaps massive anxiety from joblessness. Still, I can't help but ask it if everything I do is a good idea. Even in the SO era I would try to find a reference for every little choice I made to determine if it was a good or bad practice.
  • SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
    That honestly sounds like addiction.
• CSMastermind 10mo ago
  My friends at Google are some of the most negative about the potential of AI to improve software development. I was always surprised by this and assumed internally at Google would be one of the first places to adopt these.
  • gipp 10mo ago
    Engineers at Google are much less likely to be doing green-field generation of large amounts of code . It's much more incremental, carefully measured changes to mature, complex software stacks, and done within the Google ecosystem, which is heavily divergent from the OSS-focused world of startups, where most training data comes from
    • karmasimida 10mo ago
      That is the problem. AI is optimized to solve a problem no matter what it takes. It will try to solve one problem by creating 10 more. I think long time/term agentic AI is just snake oil at this point. AI works best if you can segment your task into 5-10 minutes chunks, including the AI generating time, correcting time and engineer review time. To put it another way, a 10 minute sync with human is necessary, otherwise it will go astray. Then it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job. Yes I typed less, but I didn’t feel the thrill of doing so.
      • citizenpaul 10mo ago
        > it just makes software engineering into bothering supervisor job. I'm pretty sure this is the entire enthusiasm from C-level for AI in a nutshell. Until AI SWE resisted being mashed into a replaceable cog job that they don't have to think/care about. AI is the magic beans that are just tantalizingly out of reach and boy do they want it.
        • spwa4 10mo ago
          But every version of AI for almost a century had this property, right down from the first vocoders that were going to replace entire callcenters to convolutional AI that was going to give us self-driving cars. Yes, a century, vocoders were 1930s technology, but they can essentially read the time aloud. ... except they didn't. In fact most AI tech were good for a nice demo and little else. In some cases, really unfairly. For instance, convnet map matching doesn't work well not because it doesn't work well, but because you can't explain to humans when it won't work well. It's unpredictable, like a human. If you ask a human to map a building in heavy fog they may come back with "sorry". SLAM with lidar is "better", except no, it's a LOT worse. But when it fails it's very clear why it fails because it's a very visual algorithm. People expect of AIs that they can replace humans but that doesn't work, because people also demand AIs never say no, never fail, like the Star Trek computer (the only problem the star trek computer ever has is that it is misunderstood or follows policy too well). If you have a delivery person occasionally they will radically modify the process, or refuse to deliver. No CEO is ever going to allow an AI drone to change the process and No CEO will ever accept "no" from an AI drone. More generally, no business person seems to ever accept a 99% AI solution, and all AI solutions are 99%, or actually mostly less. AI winters. I get the impression another one is coming, and I can feel it's going to be a cold one. But in 10 years, LLMs will be in a lot of stuff, like with every other AI winter. A lot of stuff ... but a lot less than CEOs are declaring it will be in today.
• icedchai 10mo ago
  My experience is the productivity gains are negative to neutral. Someone else basically wrote that the total "work" was simply being moved from one bucket to another. (I can't find the original link.) Example: you might spend less time on initial development, but more time on code review and rework. That has been my personal experience.
• Xeronate 10mo ago
  Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning process and I mainly use it for things like follow up questions.
  • deaux 10mo ago
    It is, it can be an enormous learning accelerator for new skills, for both adults and genuinely curious kids. The gap between low and high performancer will explode. I can tell you that if I had LLMs I would've finished schooling at least 25% quicker, while learning much more. When I say this on HN some are quick to point out the fallibility of LLMs, ignoring that the huge majority of human teachers are many times more fallible. Now this is a privileged place where many have been taught by what is indeed the global top 0.1% of teachers and professors, so it makes more sense that people would respond this way. Another source of these responses is simply fear. In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process. I can't tell you if this is the same inside e.g. China. I'm fairly sure it's not nearly as bad though as kids there derive much less benefit from cheating on homework/the learning process, as they're more singularly judged on standardized tests where AI is not available.
    • sfink 10mo ago
      Fallibility isn't the problem. It's probably a net benefit for learning. Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.
      • deaux 10mo ago
        I don't get this line of thinking. Never in my life have I heard the reasoning "replacing effort is the problem" when talking about children who are able to afford 24/7 brilliant private tutors. Having access to that has always been seen as an enormous privilege.
• xg15 10mo ago
  Not sure if that's also category #2 or a new one, but also: Places where AI is at risk of effectively becoming a drug and being actively harmful for the user: Virtual friends/spouses, delusion-confirming sycophants, etc.
• wkat4242 10mo ago
  I also hoped it would crash and burn. The real value added usecases will remain. The overhyped crap won't. But the shockwave will cause a huge recession and all those investors that put up trillions will not take their losses. Rich people never get poorer. One way or another us consumers will end up paying for their mistakes. Either by huge inflation, job losses, energy costs, service enshittification whatever. We're already seeing the memory crisis having huge knock on effects with next year's phones being much more expensive. That's one of the ways we are going to be paying for this circus. I really see value in it too, sure. But the amount of investment that goes into it is insane. It's not that valuable by far. LLMs are not good for everything and the next big thing is still a big question mark. AI is dragged in by the hair into usecases where it doesn't belong. The same shit we saw with blockchains, but now on a world crashing scale. It's very scary seeing so much insanity. But anyway whatever I think doesn't matter. Whatever happens will happen.
• jliptzin 10mo ago
  My friends and I have always wondered as we've gotten older what's going to be the new tech that the younger generation seems to know and understand innately while the older generations remain clueless and always need help navigating (like computers/internet for my parents' generation and above). I am convinced that thing is AI. Kids growing up today are using AI for everything, whether or not that's sanctioned or if it's ultimately helpful or harmful to their intellectual growth. I think the jury is still out on that. But I do remember growing up in the 90s, spending a lot of time on the computer, older people would remark how I'll have no social skills, I won't be able to write cursive or do arithmetic in my head, won't learn any real skills, etc, turns out I did just fine and now those same people always have to call me for help when they run into the smallest issue with technology. I think a lot of people here are going to become roadkill if they refuse to learn how to use these new tools. I just built a web app in 3 weeks with only prompts to Claude Code, I didn't write a single line of code, and it works great. It's pretty basic, but probably would have taken me 3+ months instead of 3 weeks doing it the old fashioned way. If you tried it once a year ago and have written it off, a lot has changed since then and the tools continue to improve every month. I really think that eventually no one will be checking code just like hardly anyone checks the assembly output of a compiler anymore. You have to understand how the context window works, how to establish guardrails so you're not wasting time repeating the same things over and over again, force it to check its own work with lots of tests, etc. It's really a game changer when you can just say in one prompt "write me an admin dashboard that displays users, sessions, and orders with a table and chart going back 30 days" or "wire up my site for google analytics, my tag code is XXXXXXX" and it just works.
  • queenkjuul 10mo ago
    The thing is, Claude Code is great for unimportant casual projects, and genuinely very bad at working in big, complex, established projects. The latter of course being the ones most people actually work on. Well either it's bad at it, or everyone on my team is bad at prompting. Given how dedicated my boss has been to using Claude for everything for the past year and the output continuing to be garbage, though, i don't think it's a lack of effort on the team's part, i have to believe Claude just isn't good at my job.
• mark_l_watson 10mo ago
  I basically agree. OK: Small focused models for specific use cases, small models like the new mistral-3-3B that I found today to be good at tool use I and thus for building narrow ranged applications. I have been mostly been paid to work on AI projects since 1982, but I want to pull my hair out and scream over the big push in the USA to develop super-AGI. Such a waste of resources and such a hit on society that needs resources used for better purposes.
• eru 10mo ago
  > [...] a large number of places where LLMs make apparently-effective tools that have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving learning a new skill, [...] Don't people learn from imperfect teachers all the time?
  • sfink 10mo ago
    Yes, they do. In fact, imperfect teachers can sometimes induce more learning than more perfect ones. And that's what is insidious about learning from AI. It looks like something we've seen before, something where we know how to make it useful and take advantage even of the gaps and inadequacies. AI can be effective for learning a new skill, but you have to be constantly on your guard to prevent it from hacking your brain and making you helpless and useless. AI isn't the parent holding your bicycle and giving you a push and letting go when you're ready. It's the welded-on training wheels that become larger and more structurally necessary until the bike can't roll forward at all without them. It feeds you the lie that all you need is the theory, you don't ever need to apply it because the AI will do that for you so don't worry your pretty little head over it. AI teaches you that if something requires effort, you're just not relying on the AI enough. The path to success goes only through AI, and those people who try to build their own skills without it are suckers because the AI can effortlessly create things 100x bigger and better and more complex. Personally, I still believe that human + AI hybrids have enormous potential. It's just that using AI constantly pushes away from beneficial hybridization and towards dependency. You have to constantly fight against your innate impulses, because it hacks them to your detriment. I'd actually like to see an AI trained to not give answers, but to search out the point where they get you 90% of the way there and then steadfastly refuse to give you the last 10%. An AI built with the goal not of producing artifacts or answers, but of producing learning and growth in the user. (Then again, I'd like to see the same thing in an educational system...)
    • eru 10mo ago
      > Personally, I still believe that human + AI hybrids have enormous potential. [...] That was true in chess for a long time, but since at least 20 years or so, approximately anytime the human deviates from what the AI suggests, it's a mistake.
• forgotoldacc 10mo ago
  As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me. That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it. Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there. And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.
• KPGv2 10mo ago
  > must be plausible, need not be accurate This includes IME the initial stages of art creation (the planning, not generating, stage). It's kind of like having someone to bounce ideas off of at 3am. It's a convenient way of trigging your own brain to be inspired.