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by nikisil80 9mo ago

[flagged]

jgbuddy 9mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- tomhow 9mo ago
  When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
matusp 9mo ago
This is a natural response to software enshittification. You can hardly find an iOS app that is not plagued by ads, subscriptions, or hostile data collection. Now you can have your own small utilities that can work for you. This sort of personal software might be very valuable in the world where you are expected to pay 5$ to click any button.
- nikisil80 9mo ago
  Yeah sure but have you considered that the actual cost of running these models is actually much greater than whatever cost you might be shelling out for the ad-free apps? You're talking to someone who hates the slopification and enshittification of everything, so you don't need to convince me about that. However, everything I've seen described in the replies to my initial comment - while cute, and potentially helpful on a case-by-case basis, does NOT warrant the amount of resources we are pouring into AI right now. Not even fucking close. It'll all come crashing down, taxpayers the world over will be caught with the bag in their hands, and for what? So that we can all have a less robust version of an app that already exists but that has the colours we want and the button where we want it? If AI cost nothing and wasn't absolutely decimating our economy, I'd find what you've shared cute. However, we are putting literally all of our eggs, and the next generation's eggs, and the one after that, AND the one after that, into this one thing, which, I'm sorry, is so far away from everything that keeps on being promised to us that I can't help but feel extremely depressed.
  - minimaxir 9mo ago
    You are attempting to move the goalposts. There are two different points in this debate: 1) Modern LLMs are an inflection point for coding. 2) The current LLM ecosystem is unsustainable. This submission discussion is only about #1, which #2 does not invalidate. Even if the ecosystem crashes, then open-source LLMs that leverage the same tricks Opus 4.5 does will just be used instead.
    - strange_quark 9mo ago
      But it's only an inflection point if it's sustainable. When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?
      - minimaxir 9mo ago
        I said open-source models, not locally-hosted models. Essentially, more power to inference-only providers such as Groq and Together AI which host the large-scale OSS LLMs who will be less affected by a crash as long as the demand for coding agents is there.
      - nikisil80 9mo ago
        Checked your history. From a fellow skeptic, I know how hard it is to reason with people around here. You and I need to learn to let it go. In the end, the people at the top have set this up so that either way, they win. And we're down here telling the people at our level to stop feeding the monster, but told to fuck off anyways. So cool bro, you managed to ship a useless (except for your specific use-case) app to your iphone in an hour :O What I think this is doing is it's pitting people against the fact that most jobs in the modern economy (mine included btw) are devoid of purpose. This is something that, as a person on the far left, I've understood for a long time. However, a lot (and I mean a loooooot) of people have never even considered this. So when they find that an AI agent is able to do THEIR job for them in a fraction of the time, they MUST understand it as the AI being some finality to human ingenuity and progress given the self-importance they've attributed to themselves and their occupation - all this instead of realizing that, you know, all of our jobs are useless, we all do the exact same useless shit which is extremely easy to replicate quickly (except for a select few occupations) and that's it. I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't. I say this, again, as someone who beyond their PhD thesis (and even then) does not produce anything of value to the world, while being paid handsomely for it.
minimaxir 9mo ago
> Re-building things that most probably already exist, simply with your own little special flavour? That describes half of the current unicorn startups nowadays.
- christophilus 9mo ago
  More than half. What has anyone written that was truly new? Regardless, if you have an idea, you will build it out of some combination of conditionals, loops, and expressions… turns out agents are pretty good at those things, even when the idea you’re expressing is novel.
Johanx64 9mo ago
> none of this is going to improve people's lives. I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel. It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak. Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well. Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not. As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).
codepoet80 9mo ago
I don't think you've used it. I used it intensely and mostly autonomously (with clear instructions, including how to measure good output) almost non-stop over the holidays. Its a new abstraction for programming -- it doesn't replace software developers, it gives them a more natural way to describe what they want.
tomhow 9mo ago
Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

jgbuddy 9mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
tomhow 9mo ago
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

matusp 9mo ago

This is a natural response to software enshittification. You can hardly find an iOS app that is not plagued by ads, subscriptions, or hostile data collection. Now you can have your own small utilities that can work for you. This sort of personal software might be very valuable in the world where you are expected to pay 5$ to click any button.

nikisil80 9mo ago
Yeah sure but have you considered that the actual cost of running these models is actually much greater than whatever cost you might be shelling out for the ad-free apps? You're talking to someone who hates the slopification and enshittification of everything, so you don't need to convince me about that. However, everything I've seen described in the replies to my initial comment - while cute, and potentially helpful on a case-by-case basis, does NOT warrant the amount of resources we are pouring into AI right now. Not even fucking close. It'll all come crashing down, taxpayers the world over will be caught with the bag in their hands, and for what? So that we can all have a less robust version of an app that already exists but that has the colours we want and the button where we want it? If AI cost nothing and wasn't absolutely decimating our economy, I'd find what you've shared cute. However, we are putting literally all of our eggs, and the next generation's eggs, and the one after that, AND the one after that, into this one thing, which, I'm sorry, is so far away from everything that keeps on being promised to us that I can't help but feel extremely depressed.
- minimaxir 9mo ago
  You are attempting to move the goalposts. There are two different points in this debate: 1) Modern LLMs are an inflection point for coding. 2) The current LLM ecosystem is unsustainable. This submission discussion is only about #1, which #2 does not invalidate. Even if the ecosystem crashes, then open-source LLMs that leverage the same tricks Opus 4.5 does will just be used instead.
  - strange_quark 9mo ago
    But it's only an inflection point if it's sustainable. When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?
    - minimaxir 9mo ago
      I said open-source models, not locally-hosted models. Essentially, more power to inference-only providers such as Groq and Together AI which host the large-scale OSS LLMs who will be less affected by a crash as long as the demand for coding agents is there.
    - nikisil80 9mo ago
      Checked your history. From a fellow skeptic, I know how hard it is to reason with people around here. You and I need to learn to let it go. In the end, the people at the top have set this up so that either way, they win. And we're down here telling the people at our level to stop feeding the monster, but told to fuck off anyways. So cool bro, you managed to ship a useless (except for your specific use-case) app to your iphone in an hour :O What I think this is doing is it's pitting people against the fact that most jobs in the modern economy (mine included btw) are devoid of purpose. This is something that, as a person on the far left, I've understood for a long time. However, a lot (and I mean a loooooot) of people have never even considered this. So when they find that an AI agent is able to do THEIR job for them in a fraction of the time, they MUST understand it as the AI being some finality to human ingenuity and progress given the self-importance they've attributed to themselves and their occupation - all this instead of realizing that, you know, all of our jobs are useless, we all do the exact same useless shit which is extremely easy to replicate quickly (except for a select few occupations) and that's it. I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't. I say this, again, as someone who beyond their PhD thesis (and even then) does not produce anything of value to the world, while being paid handsomely for it.

minimaxir 9mo ago

> Re-building things that most probably already exist, simply with your own little special flavour? That describes half of the current unicorn startups nowadays.

christophilus 9mo ago
More than half. What has anyone written that was truly new? Regardless, if you have an idea, you will build it out of some combination of conditionals, loops, and expressions… turns out agents are pretty good at those things, even when the idea you’re expressing is novel.

Johanx64 9mo ago

> none of this is going to improve people's lives. I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel. It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak. Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well. Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not. As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).

codepoet80 9mo ago

I don't think you've used it. I used it intensely and mostly autonomously (with clear instructions, including how to measure good output) almost non-stop over the holidays. Its a new abstraction for programming -- it doesn't replace software developers, it gives them a more natural way to describe what they want.

tomhow 9mo ago

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html