16 ms·

Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

232 points by 7777777phil 10mo ago

daedrdev 10mo ago
This post is literally just 4 screenshots of articles, not even its own commentary or discussion.
- laughingcurve 10mo ago
  Don’t be too harsh, it’s the most effort Gary has put into his criticism in a while </s> I appreciate good critique but this is not it
sghiassy 10mo ago
LLMs help me read code 10x faster - I’ll take the win and say thanks
thechao 10mo ago
You're absolutely right! The irony of a five sentence article making giant claims isn't lost on me. Don't get me wrong: I'm amenable to the idea; but, y'know, my kids wrote longer essays in 4th grade.
emp17344 10mo ago
Guessing this isn’t going to be popular here, but he’s right. AI has some use cases, but isn’t the world-changing paradigm shift it’s marketed as. It’s becoming clear the tech is ultimately just a tool, not a precursor to AGI.
- teej 10mo ago
  Is that the claim the OP is making?
- sajithdilshan 10mo ago
  not YET.
- avaer 10mo ago
  If AGI is ever going to happen, then it's definitionally a precursor to it. So I'm not really sure how to parse your statement.
  - alex_young 10mo ago
    I’m not sure I follow. What if LLMs are helpful but not useful to AGI, but some other technology is? Seems likely.
    - avaer 10mo ago
      The comment wasn't referencing LLMs, but generative AI. Even then, given the deep impact of LLMs and how many people are using them already, it's a stretch to say LLMs will have no effect on the development of AGI. I think it's pretty obvious that AGI requires something more than LLMs, but I think it's equally obvious LLMs will have been involved in its development somewhere, even if just a stepping stone. So, a "precursor".
mattmaroon 10mo ago
Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!
- merlincorey 10mo ago
  > Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term. The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
  - _vertigo 10mo ago
    > Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
    - merlincorey 10mo ago
      "Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013. This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
      - sswatson 10mo ago
        It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.
smashed 10mo ago
Should have used an LLM to proofread.. LLMs can still cannot be trusted?
- warkdarrior 10mo ago
  How dare you accuse Gary-Marcus-5.2-2025-12-11 of being an LLM??
wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
Haters gonna hate.
tombert 10mo ago
I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet. Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is going pretty well, just that we need to work out the kinks. New technology is always buggy for awhile, and eventually it becomes boring.
- maccard 10mo ago
  > Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding. Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits. We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics. It can one shot a web frontend, just like v0 could in 2023. But that's still about all I've seen it work on.
  - BeetleB 10mo ago
    > We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics. If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them. The rest of us learn how to be productive with them despite these problems.
    - drewbug01 10mo ago
      > If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them. I struggle to take comments like this seriously - yes, it is very reasonable to expect these magical tools to copy and paste something without alterations. How on earth is that an unreasonable ask? The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high. What, precisely, are they good for?
robertclaus 10mo ago
Odds this was AI generated?
- kingstnap 10mo ago
  It's literally just four screenshots paired with this sentence. > Trying to orient our economy and geopolitical policy around such shoddy technology — particularly on the unproven hopes that it will dramatically improve– is a mistake. The screenshots are screenshots of real articles. The sentence is shorter than a typical prompt.
mythrwy 10mo ago
It's going well for coding. I just knocked out a mapping project that would have been a week+ of work (with docs and stackoverflow opened in the background) in a few hours. And yes, I do understand the code and what is happening and did have to make a couple of adjustments manually. I don't know that reducing coding work justifies the current valuations, but I wouldn't say it's "not going all that well".
dreadsword 10mo ago
This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to superficial reader's cognitive biases. I work commercializing AI in some very specific use cases where it extremely valuable. Where people are being lead astray is layering generalizations: general use cases (copilots) deployed across general populations and generally not doing very well. But that's PMF stuff, not a failure of the underlying tech.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to superficial reader's cognitive biases. I haven’t followed this author but the few times he’s come up his writings have been exactly this.
- kokanee 10mo ago
  I think both sides of this debate are conflating the tech and the market. First of all, there were forms of "AI" before modern Gen AI (machine learning, NLP, computer vision, predictive algorithms, etc) that were and are very valuable for specific use cases. Not much has changed there AFAICT, so it's fair that the broader conversation about Gen AI is focused on general use cases deployed across general populations. After all, Microsoft thinks it's a copilot company, so it's fair to talk about how copilots are doing. On the pro-AI side, people are conflating technology success with product success. Look at crypto -- the technology supports decentralization, anonymity, and use as a currency; but in the marketplace it is centralized, subject to KYC, and used for speculation instead of transactions. The potential of the tech does not always align with the way the world decides to use it. On the other side of the aisle, people are conflating the problematic socio-economics of AI with the state of the technology. I think you're correct to call it a failure of PMF, and that's a problem worth writing articles about. It just shouldn't be so hard to talk about the success of the technology and its failure in the marketplace in the same breath.
w4yai 10mo ago
[flagged]
1a527dd5 10mo ago
A year ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly and I was a self confessed skeptic. Then Gemini got good (around 2.5?), like I-turned-my-head good. I started to use it every week-ish, not to write code. But more like a tool (as you would a calculator). More recently Opus 4.5 was released and now I'm using it every day to assist in code. It is regularly helping me take tasks that would have taken 6-12 hours down to 15-30 minutes with some minor prompting and hand holding. I've not yet reached the point where I feel letting is loose and do the entire PR for me. But it's getting there.
- spaceywilly 10mo ago
  I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point is that AI will spread like any other technology. It’s not going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and more manual work, until one day we realize it’s everywhere and has become indispensable. It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it’s not as if we suddenly don’t need the engineer anymore. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
  - sheeh 10mo ago
    AI first of all is not a technology. Can people get their words straight before typing?
    - shawabawa3 10mo ago
      Is LLM a technology? Are you complaining about the use of AI to mean LLM? Because I think that ship has sailed
  - daxfohl 10mo ago
    Though I think it's a very steep sigmoid that we're still far on the bottom half of. For math it just did its first "almost independent" Erdos problem. In a couple months it'll probably do another, then maybe one each month for a while, then one morning we'll wake up and find whoom it solved 20 overnight and is spitting them out by the hour. For software it's been "curiosity ... curiosity ... curiosity ... occasionally useful assistant ... slightly more capable assistant" up to now, and it'll probably continue like that for a while. The inflection point will be when OpenAI/Anthropic/Google releases an e2e platform meant to be driven primarily by the product team, with engineering just being co-drivers. It probably starts out buggy and needing a lot of hand-holding (and grumbling) from engineering, but slowly but surely becomes more independently capable. Then at some point, product will become more confident in that platform than their own engineering team, and begin pushing out features based on that alone. Once that process starts (probably first at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google themselves, but spreading like wildfire across the industry), then it's just a matter of time until leadership declares that all feature development goes through that platform, and retains only as many engineers as is required to support the platform itself.
billsunshine 10mo ago
a historic moron. Marcus will make Krugman's internet==fax machine look like a good prediction
segfaultex 10mo ago
I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop. The same goes for code as well. I’ve explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local models/ tried less interactive “agents”/etc. it’s largely all slop. My coworkers who claim they’re shipping at warp speed using generative AI are almost categorically our worst developers by a mile.
- 4782626292283 10mo ago
  Ah, Gary Marcus, the 10x ninja whose hand-crafted bespoke code singlehandedly keeps his employer in business.
  - segfaultex 10mo ago
    That’s not what I’m suggesting at all.
bawolff 10mo ago
Holy moving goal posts batman! I hate generative AI, but its inarguable what we have now would have been considered pure magic 5 years ago.
meowface 10mo ago
How on Earth do people keep taking Gary Marcus seriously?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- throw310822 10mo ago
  He's such a joke that even LLMs make fun of him. The Gemini-generated Hacker News frontpage for December 9 2035 contains an article by Gary Marcus: "AI progress is stalling": https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news
- piskov 10mo ago
  As if the articles he’s linked were written by him
amw-zero 10mo ago
I’m starting to think this take is legitimately insane. As said in the article, a conservative estimate is that Gen AI can currently do 2.5% of all jobs in the entire economy. A technology that is really only a couple of years old. This is supposed to be _disappointing_? That’s millions of jobs _today_, in a totally nascent form. I mean I understand skepticism, I’m not exactly in love with AI myself, but the world has literally been transformed.
Jadiiee 10mo ago
It's more about how you use it. It should be a source of inspo. Not the end all be all.
gejose 10mo ago
I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1] > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. > In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI. > In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak’s cup of coffee benchmark). > In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.] > In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the mathematical literature written in natural language and convert them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification. Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early 2026. [1]https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-fi...
- ls612 10mo ago
  I'm pretty sure it can do all of those except for the one which requires a physical body (in the kitchen) and the one that humans can't do reliably either (construct 10000 loc bug-free).
- merlincorey 10mo ago
  Which ones are you claiming have already been achieved? My understanding of the current scorecard is that he's still technically correct, though I agree with you there is velocity heading towards some of these things being proven wrong by 2029. For example, in the recent thread about LLMs and solving an Erdos problem I remember reading in the comments that it was confirmed there were multiple LLMs involved as well as an expert mathematician who was deciding what context to shuttle between them and helping formulate things. Similarly, I've not yet heard of any non-expert Software Engineers creating 10,000+ lines of non-glue code that is bug-free. Even expert Engineers at Cloud Flare failed to create a bug-free OAuth library with Claude at the helm because some things are just extremely difficult to create without bugs even with experts in the loop.
herunan 10mo ago
First of all, popping in a few screenshots of articles and papers is not proper analysis. Second of all, GenAI is going well or not depending on how we frame it. In terms of saving time, money and effort when coding, writing, analysing, researching, etc. It’s extremely successful. In terms of leading us to AGI… GenAI alone won’t reach that. Current ROI is plateauing, and we need to start investing more somewhere else.
rpowers 10mo ago
I keep reading comments that claim GenAI's positive traits, but this usually amounts to some toy PoC that very eerily mirrors work found in code bootcamps. You want an app that has logins and comments and upvotes? GenAI is going to look amazing setting up a non-relational db to your node backend.
- demorro 10mo ago
  Aye. If you've not turned a real profit with your thing, I will default to believing that you don't know what you're talking about and are probably building toys. It's nothing to do with AI. I didn't believe "I rewrote my application in three weeks!" claims before AI, and I don't believe them now. Most people are not able to evaluate themselves, I don't see why that would have changed.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
afspear 10mo ago
Meanwhile I'm over here reducing my ADO ticket time estimates by 75%.
saberience 10mo ago
Gary Marcus (probably): "Hey this LLM isn't smarter than Einstein yet, it's not going all that well" The goalposts keep getting pushed further and further every month. How many math and coding Olympiads and other benchmarks will LLMs need to dominate before people will actually admit that in some domains it's really quite good. Sure, if you're a Nobel prize winner or PhD then LLMs aren't as good as you yet, but for 99% of the people in the world, LLMs are better than you at Math, Science, Coding, and every language probably except your native language, and it's probably better at you at that too...
mrbluecoat 10mo ago
> LLMs can still cannot be trusted But can they write grammatically correct statements?
- efilife 10mo ago
  This was the first thing I noticed too. This is the most low effort post I have ever seen that high up on hacker news
m463 10mo ago
I see stuff like this and think of these two things: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle or 2) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." or maybe originally: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you"
- joquarky 10mo ago
  > "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The only people who use this quote sincerely have been crackpots, in my experience.
anarticle 10mo ago
Download models you can find now and forever. The guardrails will only get worse, or models banned entirely. Whether it's because of "hurts people's health" or some other moral panic, it will kill this tech off. gpt-oss isn't bad, but even models you cannot run are worth getting since you may be able to run them in the future. I'm hedging against models being so nerfed they are useless. (This is unlikely, but drives are cheap and data is expensive.)
- joquarky 10mo ago
  Guardrails are just adjustable parameters. The trick is finding the right ones and turning them off. I forget the name, but there is at least one project dedicated to this.
  - anarticle 10mo ago
    Here's the thing: this is like 0days, the bar gets higher and higher on served models from OpenAI/Microsoft/Google. Sure, some have api access and you can allow spicier content but a better answer is: "tl;dr: not reading that." I'm tired of having to step around megacorp's opinions on how I should be running my software, what questions to ask. gpt5.2 is HELLA paternalistic when you ask for deep dives on technical questions. Try asking something near to state of the art and see how far you get, most decisions come with huge warnings about how "this idea won't work" etc. This deviates from my expectation, which is a fun word calculator to help me with back of the napkin calculations quickly so I can do other things. If that's not the core use case, fine. But that is a flag to me that says this will continue to be a moving target, which is the OPPOSITE of what a tool is. There are some projects to reverse alignment and other things, and those people are doing god's work for sure. For me, I want to be sure I have the ability to run these things on my own because I don't trust that this won't mutate into something not useful in my way on the long term.
didibus 10mo ago
Ignoring the actual poor quality of this write-up, I think we don't know how well GenAI is going to be honest. I feel we've not been able to properly measure or assess it's actual impact yet. Even as I use it, and I use it everyday, I can't really assess its true impact. Am I more productive or less overall? I'm not too sure. Do I do higher quality work or lower quality work overall? I'm not too sure. All I know, it's pretty cool, and using it is super easy. I probably use it too much, in a way, that it actually slows things down sometimes, when I use it for trivial things for example. At least when it comes to productivity/quality I feel we don't really know yet. But there are definite cool use-cases for it, I mean, I can edit photos/videos in ways I simply could not before, or generate a logo for a birthday party, I couldn't do that before. I can make a tune that I like, even if it's not the best song in the world, but it can have the lyrics I want. I can have it extract whatever from a PDF. I can have it tell me what to watch out for in a gigantic lease agreement I would not have bothered reading otherwise. I can have it fix my tests, or write my tests, not sure if it saves me time, but I hate doing that, so it definitely makes it more fun and I can kind of just watch videos at the same time, what I couldn't before. Coding quality of life improvements are there too, I want to generate a sample JSON out of a JSONSchema, and so on. If I want, I can write the a method using English prompts instead of the code itself, might not truly be faster or not, not sure, but sometimes it's less mentally taxing, depending on my mood, it can be more fun or less fun, etc. All those are pretty awesome wins and a sign that for sure those things will remain and I will happily pay for them. So maybe it depends on what you expected.
- sheeh 10mo ago
  And what do you think investors in OAI et al are expecting?
  - didibus 10mo ago
    I think there is a hype around it becoming revolutionary and so on, but I also think investors would get an decent ROI even if it just ends up that 50+ million of users pay 20$ a month, on top of some enterprise contracts and API fees and so on. Or the inevitable Ad-supported access. In my opinion, it's already useful enough, given the use-cases I described, to reach that level.
jaffee 10mo ago
What a joke this guy is. I can sit down and crank out a real, complex feature in a couple hours that would have previously taken days and ship it to the users of our AI platform who can then respond to RFQs in minutes where they would have previously spent hours matching descriptions to part numbers manually. ...and yet we still see these articles claiming LLMs are dying/overhyped/major issues/whatever. Cool man, I'll just be over here building my AI based business with AI and solving real problems in the very real manufacturing sector.
- joquarky 10mo ago
  I'm in a similar situation. Sometimes, I suspect that half the naysayers are just trolling for workable ideas; i.e., they want proof of someone's success so they can copy it.
blindriver 10mo ago
This entire take is nonsense. I just used ChatGPT to diagnose a very serious but ultimately not-dangerous health situation last week and it was perfect. It literally guided me perfectly without making me panic and helped me understand what was going on. We use ChatGPT at work to do things that we have literally laid people off for, because we don't need them anymore. This included fixing bugs at a level that is at least E5/senior software engineer. Sometimes it does something really bad but it definitely saves times and helps avoid adding headcount. Generative AI is years beyond what I would have expected even 1 year ago. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he's just picking and choosing one-off articles that make it seem like it's supporting his points.
unwise-exe 10mo ago
Meanwhile $employer is continuing to migrate individual tasks to in-house AI tooling, and has licensed an off-the-shelf coding agent for all of us developers to put in our IDEs.
siscia 10mo ago
I think that the wider industry is living right now what was coding and software engineering around 1 year or so ago. Yeah you could ask ChatGPT or Claude to write code, but it wasn't really there. It needs a while to adopt the model AND the UI. As in software are the first one because we are both makers and users.
joshcsimmons 10mo ago
Huh? Seems like black and white thinking to me. I had it make suggestions for 10 triage issues for my team today and agreed with all of its routings. That’s certainly better than 6 months ago.
sublinear 10mo ago
All this AI discussion has done is reveal how naive some people are. You're not losing your job unless you work on trivial codebases. There's a very clear pattern what those are: startups, greenfield, games, junk apps, mindless busywork that probably has an existing better tool on github, etc. Basically anything that doesn't have any concrete business requirements or legal liability. This isn't to say those codebases will always be trivial, but good luck cleaning that up or facing the reality of having to rewrite it properly. At least you have AI to help with boilerplate. Maybe you'll learn to read docs along the way. The people claiming to be significantly more productive are either novice programmers or optimistic for unexplained reasons they're still trying to figure out. When they want to let us know, most people still won't care because it's not even the good kind of unreasonable that brings innovation. The only real value in modern LLMs is that natural language processing is a lot better than it used to be. Are we done now?
fortyseven 10mo ago
I've just started ignoring people like this. You think everything's going bad? Okay fine. You go ahead and keep believing that. Maybe you could get it printed on a sandwich board and walk up and down the street with it.
moonshotideas 10mo ago
How long do you think it will be until the “ai isn’t doing anything” people are going away 1 month, 6 months, I’d say 1 Year at the most, anyone who has used Claude code since Dec 1st knows this in their bones, so I’d just let these people shout from the top of the hill until they run out of steam… Right around then, we can send a bunch of reconnaissance teams out to the abandoned Japanese islands to rescue them from the war that’s been over for 10 years - hopefully they can rejoin society, merge back with reality and get on with their lives
- joquarky 10mo ago
  I think the "AI isn't doing anything" crowd have some kind of vocabulary/language barriers/deficiencies that prevent them from refining their prompting methods into something that works for them. I find that the more precise I am in my prompts, the more precise the response. But that requires that I use vocabulary that I wouldn't use in a human conversation.
  - moonshotideas 9mo ago
    Same here, I created a prompt enhancer gpt and a prose enhancer gpt, and I tend to chain all my prompts through them, then I use an extension to remove markdown + replace Unicode, and then add tabs and proper formatting to product a final version of all my prompts. This tends to result in prompts that perform 20-25% better for all difficult or multi-part tasks. Logically this makes sense, the probabilites for next tokens the model produces follows the pattern it observes from the initial input, if your prose reflects that which individuals with higher intelligence tend to use, the model will continue this high in response and vice versa I’m curious to see what happens as the % of training input using synthetic data generated by models tips the scales so that markdown reflects higher intelligence inputs - I wonder when this will occur
dkobia 10mo ago
Preaching to the wrong choir. The HN community is reaping massive benefits from generative AI.
pj4533 10mo ago
All I know is that I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have. How do you quantify for the skeptics the mental shift that happens when you know you can just build stuff now? COULD I do this stuff before? Sure. But I wouldn’t have. Life gets in the way. Now, the bar is low so why not build stuff? Some of it ships, some of it is just experimentation. It’s all building. Trying to quantify that shift is impossible. It’s not a multiplier to productivity you measure by commits. It’s a builder mind shift.
- sjw987 10mo ago
  "I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have." Correction. The genAI has built it. I haven't got any skin on either side here, but doesn't the fact the genAI can build it imply that what you are doing is heavily trodden ground, that there will be less and less need for developers like you, and will gradually lead to many developers (like you) being cut out of the market entirely. For personal stuff it's wonderful. For work, it seems like a double edged sword that will eventually cut the devs that use it (and those that don't). Even if the business owners aren't completely daft and keep a (vastly diminished) workforce of dev/AI consultants on board, that could easily exclude you or me. It's going well if all the jobs it eradicates can be replaced with just as many jobs (they can't), or the powers that be catch on and realise there isn't that many jobs left for humans to do and institute some form of basic income system (they won't).
  - pj4533 10mo ago
    "The genAI has built it" -- this is the core point. If I did nothing except complain about AI for the past 10 months, would these projects exist? No they would not. So. I. Built. It. If you actually use these tools, really use them. You realize that it's an augmentation not a replacement. Simply because the training data is what has already come before (for now!). The LLMs need help, direction, focus...and those are learned skills dependent on the tooling. Not to mention ideas. And sure, I imagine the software development workforce will change quite a bit, probably this year, no doubt about that. But the need for builders will not change. I imagine that the 'builder' role will change to be traditional software developers, designers, sales people, writers, c-suite...whatever. So I think you are right. "That could easily exclude you or me". 100% correct. The required skill set to be a builder is changing on a weekly basis. The only way to keep up is to keep building with these tools. Trying things. Experimenting. Otherwise, yes, you will probably be replaced. By a builder.
nojvek 10mo ago
Gary Marcus again. The chief doomer of AI where goal posts keep on moving. Almost everyone around me, even the primary school kids use ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini/Claude in some form on almost a daily basis. The daily engagement is v strong. The models keep improving every year. Nano banana gets text spot on, human anatomy of digits and toes is spot on. Deep Research mode is mind boggling. All the major vendors have some form of voice interaction, and it feels pretty good. I use perplexity talk feature while driving to learn deep about a topic of interest. The trend is strong, betting against the trend isn't wise. I can paste entire books and ask questions about certain pieces. The context windows nowadays are wild. Price per token keeps on dropping, more capability keeps on coming online. Gary offers no solutions, just complaints.
kennyadam 10mo ago
I’ve been using Claude Code, Gemini 3 Pro, and Nano Banana Pro to plan, code, and create custom UI elements for dozens of time-saving applications. For years, I have been searching high and low for existing solutions, but all I found were either overpriced cloud offerings that were bloated with endless features I didn’t need and just complicated the UI, or abandoned GitHub repos consisting of an initial commit and a roadmap that has been waiting eight years for its first update and what code was present was half baked and out of date. The reality is that my requirements are so specific to my workflow that until these latest models came along, building exactly what I needed in a matter of hours for a cost of $20 a month was inconceivable. Now I provide a description of what functionality I need, some sketches of the UI I made on my ipad with an apple pencil and after a bit of back and forth to get everything dialled in and I’ve created a bit of software that will save me dozens if not hundreds of hours of previously tedious manual work.
tom_m 10mo ago
It's going well in terms of being a valuable tool. It's not going well from an economic point of view. There's going to be winners and losers in this bubble. Things will settle and it will be commonplace technology in the future. Not going anywhere. It's just over hyped right now. Then you consider the massive spend in data centers, the ram shortage, etc. The writing is on the wall.
starchild3001 9mo ago
How to read this brilliant blog post by Gary Marcus? - Replace all the occurances of "LLM" by "human"; - Replace all the occurences of "Scaling" by "additional education". Voila! You get an article that actually makes sense, plus you'll get a better sense of where the technology is -- these models are behaving much like humans across many tasks. They aren't perfect. But they are getting better everyday, and are quite useful. Thank you AI developers and researchers for making progress everyday! No "thank you" to people like Gary Marcus who'd be called a "perma bear" in financial parlance.

232 points by 7777777phil 10mo ago

daedrdev 10mo ago

This post is literally just 4 screenshots of articles, not even its own commentary or discussion.

laughingcurve 10mo ago
Don’t be too harsh, it’s the most effort Gary has put into his criticism in a while </s> I appreciate good critique but this is not it

sghiassy 10mo ago

LLMs help me read code 10x faster - I’ll take the win and say thanks

thechao 10mo ago

You're absolutely right! The irony of a five sentence article making giant claims isn't lost on me. Don't get me wrong: I'm amenable to the idea; but, y'know, my kids wrote longer essays in 4th grade.

emp17344 10mo ago

Guessing this isn’t going to be popular here, but he’s right. AI has some use cases, but isn’t the world-changing paradigm shift it’s marketed as. It’s becoming clear the tech is ultimately just a tool, not a precursor to AGI.

teej 10mo ago
Is that the claim the OP is making?
sajithdilshan 10mo ago
not YET.
avaer 10mo ago
If AGI is ever going to happen, then it's definitionally a precursor to it. So I'm not really sure how to parse your statement.
- alex_young 10mo ago
  I’m not sure I follow. What if LLMs are helpful but not useful to AGI, but some other technology is? Seems likely.
  - avaer 10mo ago
    The comment wasn't referencing LLMs, but generative AI. Even then, given the deep impact of LLMs and how many people are using them already, it's a stretch to say LLMs will have no effect on the development of AGI. I think it's pretty obvious that AGI requires something more than LLMs, but I think it's equally obvious LLMs will have been involved in its development somewhere, even if just a stepping stone. So, a "precursor".

mattmaroon 10mo ago

Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

merlincorey 10mo ago
> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term. The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
- _vertigo 10mo ago
  > Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.
  - merlincorey 10mo ago
    "Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013. This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
    - sswatson 10mo ago
      It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

smashed 10mo ago

Should have used an LLM to proofread.. LLMs can still cannot be trusted?

warkdarrior 10mo ago
How dare you accuse Gary-Marcus-5.2-2025-12-11 of being an LLM??

wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago

Haters gonna hate.

tombert 10mo ago

I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet. Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is going pretty well, just that we need to work out the kinks. New technology is always buggy for awhile, and eventually it becomes boring.

maccard 10mo ago
> Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding. Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits. We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics. It can one shot a web frontend, just like v0 could in 2023. But that's still about all I've seen it work on.
- BeetleB 10mo ago
  > We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics. If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them. The rest of us learn how to be productive with them despite these problems.
  - drewbug01 10mo ago
    > If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them. I struggle to take comments like this seriously - yes, it is very reasonable to expect these magical tools to copy and paste something without alterations. How on earth is that an unreasonable ask? The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high. What, precisely, are they good for?

robertclaus 10mo ago

Odds this was AI generated?

kingstnap 10mo ago
It's literally just four screenshots paired with this sentence. > Trying to orient our economy and geopolitical policy around such shoddy technology — particularly on the unproven hopes that it will dramatically improve– is a mistake. The screenshots are screenshots of real articles. The sentence is shorter than a typical prompt.

mythrwy 10mo ago

It's going well for coding. I just knocked out a mapping project that would have been a week+ of work (with docs and stackoverflow opened in the background) in a few hours. And yes, I do understand the code and what is happening and did have to make a couple of adjustments manually. I don't know that reducing coding work justifies the current valuations, but I wouldn't say it's "not going all that well".

dreadsword 10mo ago

This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to superficial reader's cognitive biases. I work commercializing AI in some very specific use cases where it extremely valuable. Where people are being lead astray is layering generalizations: general use cases (copilots) deployed across general populations and generally not doing very well. But that's PMF stuff, not a failure of the underlying tech.

Aurornis 10mo ago
> This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to superficial reader's cognitive biases. I haven’t followed this author but the few times he’s come up his writings have been exactly this.
kokanee 10mo ago
I think both sides of this debate are conflating the tech and the market. First of all, there were forms of "AI" before modern Gen AI (machine learning, NLP, computer vision, predictive algorithms, etc) that were and are very valuable for specific use cases. Not much has changed there AFAICT, so it's fair that the broader conversation about Gen AI is focused on general use cases deployed across general populations. After all, Microsoft thinks it's a copilot company, so it's fair to talk about how copilots are doing. On the pro-AI side, people are conflating technology success with product success. Look at crypto -- the technology supports decentralization, anonymity, and use as a currency; but in the marketplace it is centralized, subject to KYC, and used for speculation instead of transactions. The potential of the tech does not always align with the way the world decides to use it. On the other side of the aisle, people are conflating the problematic socio-economics of AI with the state of the technology. I think you're correct to call it a failure of PMF, and that's a problem worth writing articles about. It just shouldn't be so hard to talk about the success of the technology and its failure in the marketplace in the same breath.

w4yai 10mo ago

[flagged]

1a527dd5 10mo ago

A year ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly and I was a self confessed skeptic. Then Gemini got good (around 2.5?), like I-turned-my-head good. I started to use it every week-ish, not to write code. But more like a tool (as you would a calculator). More recently Opus 4.5 was released and now I'm using it every day to assist in code. It is regularly helping me take tasks that would have taken 6-12 hours down to 15-30 minutes with some minor prompting and hand holding. I've not yet reached the point where I feel letting is loose and do the entire PR for me. But it's getting there.

spaceywilly 10mo ago
I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point is that AI will spread like any other technology. It’s not going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and more manual work, until one day we realize it’s everywhere and has become indispensable. It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it’s not as if we suddenly don’t need the engineer anymore. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
- sheeh 10mo ago
  AI first of all is not a technology. Can people get their words straight before typing?
  - shawabawa3 10mo ago
    Is LLM a technology? Are you complaining about the use of AI to mean LLM? Because I think that ship has sailed
- daxfohl 10mo ago
  Though I think it's a very steep sigmoid that we're still far on the bottom half of. For math it just did its first "almost independent" Erdos problem. In a couple months it'll probably do another, then maybe one each month for a while, then one morning we'll wake up and find whoom it solved 20 overnight and is spitting them out by the hour. For software it's been "curiosity ... curiosity ... curiosity ... occasionally useful assistant ... slightly more capable assistant" up to now, and it'll probably continue like that for a while. The inflection point will be when OpenAI/Anthropic/Google releases an e2e platform meant to be driven primarily by the product team, with engineering just being co-drivers. It probably starts out buggy and needing a lot of hand-holding (and grumbling) from engineering, but slowly but surely becomes more independently capable. Then at some point, product will become more confident in that platform than their own engineering team, and begin pushing out features based on that alone. Once that process starts (probably first at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google themselves, but spreading like wildfire across the industry), then it's just a matter of time until leadership declares that all feature development goes through that platform, and retains only as many engineers as is required to support the platform itself.

billsunshine 10mo ago

a historic moron. Marcus will make Krugman's internet==fax machine look like a good prediction

segfaultex 10mo ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop. The same goes for code as well. I’ve explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local models/ tried less interactive “agents”/etc. it’s largely all slop. My coworkers who claim they’re shipping at warp speed using generative AI are almost categorically our worst developers by a mile.

4782626292283 10mo ago
Ah, Gary Marcus, the 10x ninja whose hand-crafted bespoke code singlehandedly keeps his employer in business.
- segfaultex 10mo ago
  That’s not what I’m suggesting at all.

bawolff 10mo ago

Holy moving goal posts batman! I hate generative AI, but its inarguable what we have now would have been considered pure magic 5 years ago.

meowface 10mo ago

How on Earth do people keep taking Gary Marcus seriously?

deleted 10mo ago
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throw310822 10mo ago
He's such a joke that even LLMs make fun of him. The Gemini-generated Hacker News frontpage for December 9 2035 contains an article by Gary Marcus: "AI progress is stalling": https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news
piskov 10mo ago
As if the articles he’s linked were written by him

amw-zero 10mo ago

I’m starting to think this take is legitimately insane. As said in the article, a conservative estimate is that Gen AI can currently do 2.5% of all jobs in the entire economy. A technology that is really only a couple of years old. This is supposed to be _disappointing_? That’s millions of jobs _today_, in a totally nascent form. I mean I understand skepticism, I’m not exactly in love with AI myself, but the world has literally been transformed.

Jadiiee 10mo ago

It's more about how you use it. It should be a source of inspo. Not the end all be all.

gejose 10mo ago

I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1] > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. > In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI. > In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak’s cup of coffee benchmark). > In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.] > In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the mathematical literature written in natural language and convert them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification. Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early 2026. [1]https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-fi...

ls612 10mo ago
I'm pretty sure it can do all of those except for the one which requires a physical body (in the kitchen) and the one that humans can't do reliably either (construct 10000 loc bug-free).
merlincorey 10mo ago
Which ones are you claiming have already been achieved? My understanding of the current scorecard is that he's still technically correct, though I agree with you there is velocity heading towards some of these things being proven wrong by 2029. For example, in the recent thread about LLMs and solving an Erdos problem I remember reading in the comments that it was confirmed there were multiple LLMs involved as well as an expert mathematician who was deciding what context to shuttle between them and helping formulate things. Similarly, I've not yet heard of any non-expert Software Engineers creating 10,000+ lines of non-glue code that is bug-free. Even expert Engineers at Cloud Flare failed to create a bug-free OAuth library with Claude at the helm because some things are just extremely difficult to create without bugs even with experts in the loop.

herunan 10mo ago

First of all, popping in a few screenshots of articles and papers is not proper analysis. Second of all, GenAI is going well or not depending on how we frame it. In terms of saving time, money and effort when coding, writing, analysing, researching, etc. It’s extremely successful. In terms of leading us to AGI… GenAI alone won’t reach that. Current ROI is plateauing, and we need to start investing more somewhere else.

rpowers 10mo ago

I keep reading comments that claim GenAI's positive traits, but this usually amounts to some toy PoC that very eerily mirrors work found in code bootcamps. You want an app that has logins and comments and upvotes? GenAI is going to look amazing setting up a non-relational db to your node backend.

demorro 10mo ago
Aye. If you've not turned a real profit with your thing, I will default to believing that you don't know what you're talking about and are probably building toys. It's nothing to do with AI. I didn't believe "I rewrote my application in three weeks!" claims before AI, and I don't believe them now. Most people are not able to evaluate themselves, I don't see why that would have changed.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

afspear 10mo ago

Meanwhile I'm over here reducing my ADO ticket time estimates by 75%.

saberience 10mo ago

Gary Marcus (probably): "Hey this LLM isn't smarter than Einstein yet, it's not going all that well" The goalposts keep getting pushed further and further every month. How many math and coding Olympiads and other benchmarks will LLMs need to dominate before people will actually admit that in some domains it's really quite good. Sure, if you're a Nobel prize winner or PhD then LLMs aren't as good as you yet, but for 99% of the people in the world, LLMs are better than you at Math, Science, Coding, and every language probably except your native language, and it's probably better at you at that too...

mrbluecoat 10mo ago

> LLMs can still cannot be trusted But can they write grammatically correct statements?

efilife 10mo ago
This was the first thing I noticed too. This is the most low effort post I have ever seen that high up on hacker news

m463 10mo ago

I see stuff like this and think of these two things: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle or 2) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." or maybe originally: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you"

joquarky 10mo ago
> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The only people who use this quote sincerely have been crackpots, in my experience.

anarticle 10mo ago

Download models you can find now and forever. The guardrails will only get worse, or models banned entirely. Whether it's because of "hurts people's health" or some other moral panic, it will kill this tech off. gpt-oss isn't bad, but even models you cannot run are worth getting since you may be able to run them in the future. I'm hedging against models being so nerfed they are useless. (This is unlikely, but drives are cheap and data is expensive.)

joquarky 10mo ago
Guardrails are just adjustable parameters. The trick is finding the right ones and turning them off. I forget the name, but there is at least one project dedicated to this.
- anarticle 10mo ago
  Here's the thing: this is like 0days, the bar gets higher and higher on served models from OpenAI/Microsoft/Google. Sure, some have api access and you can allow spicier content but a better answer is: "tl;dr: not reading that." I'm tired of having to step around megacorp's opinions on how I should be running my software, what questions to ask. gpt5.2 is HELLA paternalistic when you ask for deep dives on technical questions. Try asking something near to state of the art and see how far you get, most decisions come with huge warnings about how "this idea won't work" etc. This deviates from my expectation, which is a fun word calculator to help me with back of the napkin calculations quickly so I can do other things. If that's not the core use case, fine. But that is a flag to me that says this will continue to be a moving target, which is the OPPOSITE of what a tool is. There are some projects to reverse alignment and other things, and those people are doing god's work for sure. For me, I want to be sure I have the ability to run these things on my own because I don't trust that this won't mutate into something not useful in my way on the long term.

didibus 10mo ago

Ignoring the actual poor quality of this write-up, I think we don't know how well GenAI is going to be honest. I feel we've not been able to properly measure or assess it's actual impact yet. Even as I use it, and I use it everyday, I can't really assess its true impact. Am I more productive or less overall? I'm not too sure. Do I do higher quality work or lower quality work overall? I'm not too sure. All I know, it's pretty cool, and using it is super easy. I probably use it too much, in a way, that it actually slows things down sometimes, when I use it for trivial things for example. At least when it comes to productivity/quality I feel we don't really know yet. But there are definite cool use-cases for it, I mean, I can edit photos/videos in ways I simply could not before, or generate a logo for a birthday party, I couldn't do that before. I can make a tune that I like, even if it's not the best song in the world, but it can have the lyrics I want. I can have it extract whatever from a PDF. I can have it tell me what to watch out for in a gigantic lease agreement I would not have bothered reading otherwise. I can have it fix my tests, or write my tests, not sure if it saves me time, but I hate doing that, so it definitely makes it more fun and I can kind of just watch videos at the same time, what I couldn't before. Coding quality of life improvements are there too, I want to generate a sample JSON out of a JSONSchema, and so on. If I want, I can write the a method using English prompts instead of the code itself, might not truly be faster or not, not sure, but sometimes it's less mentally taxing, depending on my mood, it can be more fun or less fun, etc. All those are pretty awesome wins and a sign that for sure those things will remain and I will happily pay for them. So maybe it depends on what you expected.

sheeh 10mo ago
And what do you think investors in OAI et al are expecting?
- didibus 10mo ago
  I think there is a hype around it becoming revolutionary and so on, but I also think investors would get an decent ROI even if it just ends up that 50+ million of users pay 20$ a month, on top of some enterprise contracts and API fees and so on. Or the inevitable Ad-supported access. In my opinion, it's already useful enough, given the use-cases I described, to reach that level.

jaffee 10mo ago

What a joke this guy is. I can sit down and crank out a real, complex feature in a couple hours that would have previously taken days and ship it to the users of our AI platform who can then respond to RFQs in minutes where they would have previously spent hours matching descriptions to part numbers manually. ...and yet we still see these articles claiming LLMs are dying/overhyped/major issues/whatever. Cool man, I'll just be over here building my AI based business with AI and solving real problems in the very real manufacturing sector.

joquarky 10mo ago
I'm in a similar situation. Sometimes, I suspect that half the naysayers are just trolling for workable ideas; i.e., they want proof of someone's success so they can copy it.

blindriver 10mo ago

This entire take is nonsense. I just used ChatGPT to diagnose a very serious but ultimately not-dangerous health situation last week and it was perfect. It literally guided me perfectly without making me panic and helped me understand what was going on. We use ChatGPT at work to do things that we have literally laid people off for, because we don't need them anymore. This included fixing bugs at a level that is at least E5/senior software engineer. Sometimes it does something really bad but it definitely saves times and helps avoid adding headcount. Generative AI is years beyond what I would have expected even 1 year ago. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he's just picking and choosing one-off articles that make it seem like it's supporting his points.

unwise-exe 10mo ago

Meanwhile $employer is continuing to migrate individual tasks to in-house AI tooling, and has licensed an off-the-shelf coding agent for all of us developers to put in our IDEs.

siscia 10mo ago

I think that the wider industry is living right now what was coding and software engineering around 1 year or so ago. Yeah you could ask ChatGPT or Claude to write code, but it wasn't really there. It needs a while to adopt the model AND the UI. As in software are the first one because we are both makers and users.

joshcsimmons 10mo ago

Huh? Seems like black and white thinking to me. I had it make suggestions for 10 triage issues for my team today and agreed with all of its routings. That’s certainly better than 6 months ago.

sublinear 10mo ago

All this AI discussion has done is reveal how naive some people are. You're not losing your job unless you work on trivial codebases. There's a very clear pattern what those are: startups, greenfield, games, junk apps, mindless busywork that probably has an existing better tool on github, etc. Basically anything that doesn't have any concrete business requirements or legal liability. This isn't to say those codebases will always be trivial, but good luck cleaning that up or facing the reality of having to rewrite it properly. At least you have AI to help with boilerplate. Maybe you'll learn to read docs along the way. The people claiming to be significantly more productive are either novice programmers or optimistic for unexplained reasons they're still trying to figure out. When they want to let us know, most people still won't care because it's not even the good kind of unreasonable that brings innovation. The only real value in modern LLMs is that natural language processing is a lot better than it used to be. Are we done now?

fortyseven 10mo ago

I've just started ignoring people like this. You think everything's going bad? Okay fine. You go ahead and keep believing that. Maybe you could get it printed on a sandwich board and walk up and down the street with it.

moonshotideas 10mo ago

How long do you think it will be until the “ai isn’t doing anything” people are going away 1 month, 6 months, I’d say 1 Year at the most, anyone who has used Claude code since Dec 1st knows this in their bones, so I’d just let these people shout from the top of the hill until they run out of steam… Right around then, we can send a bunch of reconnaissance teams out to the abandoned Japanese islands to rescue them from the war that’s been over for 10 years - hopefully they can rejoin society, merge back with reality and get on with their lives

joquarky 10mo ago
I think the "AI isn't doing anything" crowd have some kind of vocabulary/language barriers/deficiencies that prevent them from refining their prompting methods into something that works for them. I find that the more precise I am in my prompts, the more precise the response. But that requires that I use vocabulary that I wouldn't use in a human conversation.
- moonshotideas 9mo ago
  Same here, I created a prompt enhancer gpt and a prose enhancer gpt, and I tend to chain all my prompts through them, then I use an extension to remove markdown + replace Unicode, and then add tabs and proper formatting to product a final version of all my prompts. This tends to result in prompts that perform 20-25% better for all difficult or multi-part tasks. Logically this makes sense, the probabilites for next tokens the model produces follows the pattern it observes from the initial input, if your prose reflects that which individuals with higher intelligence tend to use, the model will continue this high in response and vice versa I’m curious to see what happens as the % of training input using synthetic data generated by models tips the scales so that markdown reflects higher intelligence inputs - I wonder when this will occur

dkobia 10mo ago

Preaching to the wrong choir. The HN community is reaping massive benefits from generative AI.

pj4533 10mo ago

All I know is that I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have. How do you quantify for the skeptics the mental shift that happens when you know you can just build stuff now? COULD I do this stuff before? Sure. But I wouldn’t have. Life gets in the way. Now, the bar is low so why not build stuff? Some of it ships, some of it is just experimentation. It’s all building. Trying to quantify that shift is impossible. It’s not a multiplier to productivity you measure by commits. It’s a builder mind shift.

sjw987 10mo ago
"I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have." Correction. The genAI has built it. I haven't got any skin on either side here, but doesn't the fact the genAI can build it imply that what you are doing is heavily trodden ground, that there will be less and less need for developers like you, and will gradually lead to many developers (like you) being cut out of the market entirely. For personal stuff it's wonderful. For work, it seems like a double edged sword that will eventually cut the devs that use it (and those that don't). Even if the business owners aren't completely daft and keep a (vastly diminished) workforce of dev/AI consultants on board, that could easily exclude you or me. It's going well if all the jobs it eradicates can be replaced with just as many jobs (they can't), or the powers that be catch on and realise there isn't that many jobs left for humans to do and institute some form of basic income system (they won't).
- pj4533 10mo ago
  "The genAI has built it" -- this is the core point. If I did nothing except complain about AI for the past 10 months, would these projects exist? No they would not. So. I. Built. It. If you actually use these tools, really use them. You realize that it's an augmentation not a replacement. Simply because the training data is what has already come before (for now!). The LLMs need help, direction, focus...and those are learned skills dependent on the tooling. Not to mention ideas. And sure, I imagine the software development workforce will change quite a bit, probably this year, no doubt about that. But the need for builders will not change. I imagine that the 'builder' role will change to be traditional software developers, designers, sales people, writers, c-suite...whatever. So I think you are right. "That could easily exclude you or me". 100% correct. The required skill set to be a builder is changing on a weekly basis. The only way to keep up is to keep building with these tools. Trying things. Experimenting. Otherwise, yes, you will probably be replaced. By a builder.

nojvek 10mo ago

Gary Marcus again. The chief doomer of AI where goal posts keep on moving. Almost everyone around me, even the primary school kids use ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini/Claude in some form on almost a daily basis. The daily engagement is v strong. The models keep improving every year. Nano banana gets text spot on, human anatomy of digits and toes is spot on. Deep Research mode is mind boggling. All the major vendors have some form of voice interaction, and it feels pretty good. I use perplexity talk feature while driving to learn deep about a topic of interest. The trend is strong, betting against the trend isn't wise. I can paste entire books and ask questions about certain pieces. The context windows nowadays are wild. Price per token keeps on dropping, more capability keeps on coming online. Gary offers no solutions, just complaints.

kennyadam 10mo ago

I’ve been using Claude Code, Gemini 3 Pro, and Nano Banana Pro to plan, code, and create custom UI elements for dozens of time-saving applications. For years, I have been searching high and low for existing solutions, but all I found were either overpriced cloud offerings that were bloated with endless features I didn’t need and just complicated the UI, or abandoned GitHub repos consisting of an initial commit and a roadmap that has been waiting eight years for its first update and what code was present was half baked and out of date. The reality is that my requirements are so specific to my workflow that until these latest models came along, building exactly what I needed in a matter of hours for a cost of $20 a month was inconceivable. Now I provide a description of what functionality I need, some sketches of the UI I made on my ipad with an apple pencil and after a bit of back and forth to get everything dialled in and I’ve created a bit of software that will save me dozens if not hundreds of hours of previously tedious manual work.

tom_m 10mo ago

It's going well in terms of being a valuable tool. It's not going well from an economic point of view. There's going to be winners and losers in this bubble. Things will settle and it will be commonplace technology in the future. Not going anywhere. It's just over hyped right now. Then you consider the massive spend in data centers, the ram shortage, etc. The writing is on the wall.

starchild3001 9mo ago

How to read this brilliant blog post by Gary Marcus? - Replace all the occurances of "LLM" by "human"; - Replace all the occurences of "Scaling" by "additional education". Voila! You get an article that actually makes sense, plus you'll get a better sense of where the technology is -- these models are behaving much like humans across many tasks. They aren't perfect. But they are getting better everyday, and are quite useful. Thank you AI developers and researchers for making progress everyday! No "thank you" to people like Gary Marcus who'd be called a "perma bear" in financial parlance.