7 ms·

The Influentists: AI hype without proof

270 points by LucidLynx 9mo ago

mekoka 9mo ago
AI is like flossing. You waste more time listening to other people's opinions on whether it's helpful, than just trying it out yourself for a few days.
kinduff 9mo ago
I think humans are proxying their value through what they can do with AI. It's like a domestication flex.
dcre 9mo ago
To me, debunking hype has always felt like arguing with an advertisement. A good read about that: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hype-wont-save-us/ https://www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hype-wont-save-us/
- irishcoffee 9mo ago
  Hard to take that seriously. It’s a political hit-piece. Which I guess is most things today, but I don’t take those seriously either. Masks during Covid and LLMs, used as political pawns. It’s kind of sad.
  - dcre 9mo ago
    Are we talking about the same article?
datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
Anecdotally, I’m finding that, at least in the Spark ecosystem, AI-generated ideas and code are far from optimal. Some of this comes from misinterpreting the (sometimes poor) documentation, and some of it comes from, probably, there not being as many open source examples as CRUD apps, which AI “influentists” (to borrow from TFA) appear to often be hyping up. This matters a lot to us because the difference in performance of our workflows can be the difference in $10/day in costs and $1000/day in costs. Just like TFA stresses, it’s the expertise in the team that pushes back against poor AI-generated ideas and code that is keeping our business within reach of cash flow positive. ~”Surely this isn’t the right way to do this?”
- jimbo808 9mo ago
  Most text worth paying for (code, contracts, research) requires: - accountability - reliability - validation - security - liability Humans can reliably produce text with all of these features. LLMs can reliably produce text with none of them. If it doesn't have all of these, it could still be worth paying for if it's novel and entertaining. IMO, LLMs can't really do that either.
  - danielbln 9mo ago
    Let's not put humans on too much of a pedestal, there are plenty of us who are not that reliable either. That's why we have tests, linting, types and various other validation systems. Incidentally, LLMs can utilize these as well.
    - jimbo808 9mo ago
      Humans are unreliable in predictable ways. This makes review relatively painless since you know what to look for, and you can skim through the boilerplate and be pretty confident that it's right and isn't redundant/insecure, etc. LLMs can use linters and type checkers, but getting past them often times leads it down a path of mayhem and destruction, doing pretty dumb things to get them to pass.
doug_durham 9mo ago
I never read the tweet as anything other than that an expert with deep knowledge of their domain was able to produce a PoC. Which I still find to be very exciting and worthy of being promoted. This article didn't really debunk much.
- chasd00 9mo ago
  > expert with deep knowledge of their domain these are the kinds of people that can use generative AI best IMO. Deep domain knowledge is needed to spot when the model output is wrong even though it sounds 100% correct. I've seen people take a model's output as correct to a shocking degree like placing large bets at a horse track after uploading a pic of the schedule to ChatGPT. Many people believe whatever a computer tells them but, in their defense, no one has had to question a large calculation done by a calculator until now.
  - doug_durham 9mo ago
    Totally agree. The more you know about software development the better you can use the tools. A noob trying to write a kernel driver would quickly hit a brick wall and give up. It's kind of self correcting.
sleekest 9mo ago
I agree, if the benefits are so large, there should be clearer evidence (that isn't, "trust me, just use it"). That said, I use Antigravity with great success for self hosted software. I should publish it. Why haven't I? * The software is pretty specific to my requirements. * Antigravity did the vast amount of work, it feels unworthy? * I don't really want a project, but that shouldn't really stop me pushing to a public repo. * I'm a bit hesitant to "out" myself? Nonetheless, even though I'm not the person, I'm surprised there isn't more evidence out there.
- nirolo 9mo ago
  I think this "* The software is pretty specific to my requirements." is the biggest part for me. I built something with Antigravity over the holidays that I can use for myself and it solves my use case. I tried thinking about if this can be helpful for others and pushed it a bit further into a version that could be hosted. Which does not make that much sense because it is a computationally intense numerical solver for thermal bridges and just awfully slow on a free hosted platform. But the project was a couple of evenings and would otherwise haven taken me half a year to complete (and thus never been done). https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/ https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/
- expensive_news 9mo ago
  > Antigravity did the vast amount of work, it feels unworthy I think this is true for me as well. I have two types of projects that I’ve been working on - small ones with a mix of code I wrote and AI. I have posted these, as I spent a lot of time guiding the AI, cleaning up the AI’s output, and I think the overall project has value that others can learn from and built on. But I also have some that are almost 100% vibe-coded. First, those would take a lot of time to clean up and write documentation for to make them publishable/useful. But also, I do think they feel “unworthy”. Even though I think they can be helpful, and I was looking for open-source versions of those things. But how valuable can it really be if I was able to vibe-code it in a few prompts? The next person looking for it will probably do the same thing I did and vibe-code their own version after a few minutes.
pizzathyme 9mo ago
My anxiety about falling behind with AI plummeted after I realized many of these tweets are overblown in this way. I use AI every day, how is everyone getting more spectacular results than me? Turns out: they exaggerate. Here are several real stories I dug into: "My brick-and-mortar business wouldn't even exist without AI" --> meant they used Claude to help them search for lawyers in their local area and summarize permits they needed "I'm now doing the work of 10 product managers" --> actually meant they create draft PRD's. Did not mention firing 10 PMs "I launched an entire product line this weekend" --> meant they created a website with a sign up, and it shows them a single javascript page, no customers "I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF
- cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
  People say outrageous things when they’re follower farming.
- browningstreet 9mo ago
  Getting viral on X is the current replacement for selling courses for {daytrading,amazon FBA,crypto}. The content of the tweets isn't the thing.. bull-posting or invoking Cunningham's Law is. X is the destination for formula posting and some of those blue checkmarks are getting "reach" rev share kickbacks.
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    Yeah, if you get enough impressions, you get some revenue, so you don't need to sell any courses, just viral content. Which is why some (not ALL) exaggerate as suggested.
    - geerlingguy 9mo ago
      It's a bit insane how much reach you need before you'd earn anything impactful, though. I average 1-2M impressions/month, and have some video clips on X/Twitter that have gotten 100K+ views, and average earnings of around $42/month (over the past year). I imagine you'd need hundreds of millions of impressions/views on Twitter to earn a living with their current rates.
abicklefitch 9mo ago
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Legend2440 9mo ago
Idk man, all AI discussion feels like a waste of effort. “yes it will”, “no it won’t” - nobody really knows, it's just a bunch of extremely opinionated people rehashing the same tired arguments across 800 comments per thread. There’s no point in talking about it anymore, just wait to see how it all turns out.
- deleted 9mo ago
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- asadotzler 9mo ago
  It's not "yes it is" vs "no it won't" though. The discussion is "Yes it does" vs "no it doesn't" (present tense.) There's nothing wrong with guessing about the future, but lying about a present that is testable and unwillingness to submit to the testing is wrong.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    Even then nothing is learned. Every HN thread there is on AI coding: "I am using $model for writing software and its great." "I am using $model for writing software and it sucks and will never do it." 800 comments of that tit for tat in present tense. Still nothing learned. Doesn't help that no one talks about exactly what they are doing and exactly how they are doing it, because capitalism vs open technology discussions meant to uplift the species.
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      > Doesn't help that no one talks about exactly what they are doing and exactly how they are doing it Let me try a translation: > I am using $model for writing software and its great. I have generated an extremely simple javascript application that could have been mostly done by copy/paste from StackOverflow or even Geeks4Geeks and it runs. This is true. I have a PWA that I generated with a LLM on my phone right now. It works. Pretty sure even w3schools would be ashamed to post that code. > I am using $model for writing software and it sucks and will never do it. This is also true. At work I have a 15 year old codebase where everything is custom. You can't get a LLM to use it all as a context because you simply don't have ram for it so you can't even test the quality of advice given on it. You can't train a LLM on it because you don't have the budget for it. You maybe could get a LLM to generate code by prompting it "this is the custom object allocation function, these are the basic GUI classes, now generate me the boilerplate for this new dialog I'm supposed to do". Unfortunately it takes as long or longer than doing it yourself, and you can't trust the output to boot.
minimaxir 9mo ago
There are two major reasons people don't show proof about the impact of agentic coding: 1) The prompts/pipelines portain to proprietary IP that may or may not be allowed to be shown publically. 2) The prompts/pipelines are boring and/or embarrassing and showing them will dispel the myth that agentic coding is this mysterious magical process and open the people up to dunking. For example in the case of #2, I recently published the prompts I used to create a terminal MIDI mixer (https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/PROMPTS.md https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P...) in the interest of transparency, but those prompts correctly indicate that I barely had an idea how MIDI mixing works and in hindsight I was surprised I didn't get harrassed for it. Given the contentious climate, I'm uncertain how often I will be open-sourcing my prompts going forward.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  You weren't harassed for it because (1) it is interesting and (2) you were not hiding the AI involvement and passing it off as your own. The results (for me) are very much hit-and-miss and I still see it as a means of last resort rather than a reliable tool that I know the up and downsides of. There is a pretty good chance you'll be wasting your time and every now and then it really moves the needle. It is examples like yours that actually help to properly place the tool amongst the other options.
  - munksbeer 9mo ago
    I've seen people harassed for their personal projects because they used AI.
- deng 9mo ago
  No. The main reasons are that 1) the code AI produces is full of problems, and if you show it, people will make fun of you, or 2) if you actually run the code as a service people can use, you'll immediately get hacked by people to prove that the code is full of problems.
  - tptacek 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
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caditinpiscinam 9mo ago
Doesn't the existence of consumer products like ChatGPT indicate that LLMs aren't able to do human-level work? If OpenAI really had a digital workforce with the capabilities of ~100k programmers/scientists/writers/lawyers/doctors etc, wouldn't the most profitable move be to utilize those "workers" directly, rather that renting out their skills piecemeal?
- bluGill 9mo ago
  That depends on what the real value is. The sure way to get rich selling pickaxes to gold miners. However you would be even richer if you figured out where the gold really was and mined in that exact location.' Of course you can also get rich selling scams.
  - Balinares 9mo ago
    All the truer when there is more miners than gold, one can't help but note.
- twic 9mo ago
  If this stuff worked, then given that Microsoft has a huge share of it, shouldn't Microsoft's products be good? Or at least getting better. I use Bing most days [1], and it's consistently an absolute joke. [1] to farm reward points to get cosmetic items in video games
- cal_dent 9mo ago
  LLMs are able to do human-level work. I think surely now that is unquestionable? They can't do all human-level work, in the same way that not all humans can do all human-level work, but a lot of criticism implicitly benchmarks it against all work. LLMs have this remarkable ability to be both the smartest thing in the room and the dumbest thing at the same time. On the profitability point. Yes and no I guess. ChatGPT will likely go down as the most influential thing in the ai race (or early ai race) simply because it was the most visceral illustration of the art of the possible to the general public. Technical people will correct me or have arguments to why this isn't the case but they'll be wrong simply because ChatGPT captured consumer attention, which ultimately led to supercharged financial attention, and everything that has happened since is due to that. Whether its pure marketing or futuregazing, the world of money bought into it, with the ultimate view that this is the worst it will ever be. The ultimate profitable goal is unarguably replacing human labour (at a lesser all in cost) but if that is not possible, but you believe it could be possible, then showcasing and getting people to believe that you can achieve that goal, is pretty damn profitable too and it's proven to be for some people while giving them runway to continue to pursue the ultimate goal.
HellDunkel 9mo ago
This is a strage phenomenon where people get excited by the mere fact that someone else is excited by something which is not directly visible to the spectator. It works well in horror movies and as it seems with AI hype.
- deleted 9mo ago
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Fazebooking 9mo ago
Its still not a Hype, its still crazy what is possible today and we still have no clear at all if this progress continues as it does or not with the implication, that if it continues, it has major implications. My wife, who has no clue about coding at all, chatgpted a very basic android app only with guidance of chatgpt. She would never ever been able to do this in 5 hours or so without my guidance. I DID NOT HELP HER at all. I'm 'vibecoding' stuff small stuff for sure, non critical things for sure but lets be honest, i'm transforming a handfull of sentences and requirements into real working code, today. Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 def feel better than their prevous versions. Do they still fail? Yeah for sure but thats not the point. The industry continues to progress on every single aspect of this: Tooling like claude CLI, Gemini CLI, Intellij integration, etc., Context length, compute, inferencing time, quality, depth of thinking etc. there is no current plateau visible at all. And its not just LLMs, its the whole ecosystem of Machine Learning stuff: Highhly efficient weather model from google, Alpha fold, AlphaZero, Roboticsmovement, Environment detection, Image segmentation, ... And the power of claude for example, you will only get with learning how to use it. Like telling it your coding style, your expectations regarding tests etc. We often assume, that an LLM should just be the magic work collegue 10x programmer but its everything an dnothing. If you don't communicate well enough it is not helpful. And LLMs are not just good in coding, its great in reformulating emails, analysing error messages, writing basic SVG files, explaining kubernetes cluster status, being a friend for some people (see character.ai), explaining research paper, finding research, summarizing text, the list is way to long. Alone 2026 there will go so many new datacenters live which will add so much more compute again, that the research will continue to be faster and more efficient. There is also no current bubble to burst, Google fights against Microsoft, Antrophic and co. while on a global level USA competets with China and the EU on this technology. The richest companies on the planet are investing in this tech and they did not do this with bitcoins because they understod that bitcoin is stupid. But AI is not stupid. Or Machine learing is not stupid. Do not underestimate the current status of AI tools we have, do not underestimate the speed, continues progress and potential exponential growth of this. My timespan expecation for obvious advancments in AI is 5-15 years. Experts in this field predict already 2027/2030. But to iterate over this: a few years ago no one would have had a good idea how we could transform basic text into complex code in such a robust way, which such diverse input (different language, missing specs, ...) . No one. Even 'just generating a website'.
shermantanktop 9mo ago
I’ve taken to calling this (in my mind) the Age of the Sycophants. In politics, in corporate life, in technology and in social media, many people are building a public life around saying things that others want to hear, with demonstrably zero relationship to truth or even credibility.
- imiric 9mo ago
  It would certainly make an interesting anthropological case study. Humans have always been performative with those outside of their immediate social circle. Politics is effectively the art of performance, and using it to gain influence and power. With legacy media the general public was still largely on the receiving end of it, but modern technology and social media have given that ability to anyone capable of building an audience. So now performative behavior is everywhere, since we're all competing to get our voice heard, to experience adoration, fame, power, fortune. We're in this weird state where this is all done in digital worlds, where it's easier than ever to fabricate an image, and yet it all ends up affecting the real world in one way or another. Our leaders are celebrities who are good at this game, and not necessarily people worthy of this position. Honestly, I have little faith we can turn this around. It's going to get much worse before it gets better, if at all.
  - shermantanktop 9mo ago
    In the White House, you have to say what Trump wants to hear. If you are a foreign leader, you have to say you’ll share your peace prize with him, because that’s what he wants to hear. TACO is a thing because he wants to say things, but not do things. In tech, you have to say you’re bullish on AI, because that’s what managers want to hear. They say it their CEO, because that’s what CEO wants to hear. And the CEO says it to the public because that’s what Wall Street wants to hear. Turn around and ask ChatGPT a question and it tells you what you want to hear, along with a compliment about how smart you are.
DotaFan 9mo ago
I think this "trend" is due to AI companies paying (in some form) the influencers to promote AI. Simple as that.
kfarr 9mo ago
Like everything in LLM land it's all about the prompt and agent pipeline. As others say below, these people are experts in their domain. Their prompts are essentially a form of codifying their own knowledge, as in Rakyll and Galen's examples, to achieve specific outcomes based on years and maybe even decades of work in the problem domain. It's no surprise their outputs when ingested by an LLM are useful, but it might not tell us much about the true native capability of a given AI system.
keyle 9mo ago
Great article. This needs to be framed. The whole trust me bro, and shock and awe of social medias is a non-stop assault these days. You can't open a wall without seeing those promoted up front and centre and without any proof. If AI was so good today, why isn't there an explosion of successful products? All we see is these half baked "zomg so good bro!" examples that are technically impressive, but decisively incomplete or really, proof of concepts. I'm not saying LLMs aren't useful, but they're currently completely misrepresented. Hype sells clicks, not value. But, whatever floats the investors' boat...
tossandthrow 9mo ago
Influences generally don't get to me. Sitting 2 hours with an Ai agent developing end to end products does.
ankit219 9mo ago
Its a strange phenomenon. You want to call out the bs but then you are just giving them engagement and boost. You want to stay away but there is a sort of confluence where these guys tend to ride on each others' post and boosts those posts anyway. If you ask questions, very rarely they answer, and if they do, it takes one question to unearth that it was the prompt or the skill. Eg: huggingface people post about claude finetuning models. how? when they gave everything in a skill file, and claude knew what scripts to write. Tinker is trying the same strategy. (yes, its impressive that claude could finetune, but not as impressive as the original claim that made me pay attention to the post) It does not matter if they get the details wrong, its just that it needs to be vague enough, and exciting enough. Infact vagueness and not sharing the code part signals they are doing something important or they are 'in the know' which they cannot share. The incentives are totally inverted.
- deleted 9mo ago
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arjie 9mo ago
If you don't get the results you don't get the results. If someone else can use this tool to get the results, they'll out-compete you. If they can't, then they've wasted time and you'll out-compete them. I see these influencer guys as idea-generators. It's super-cheap to test out some of these theories: e.g. how well Claude can do 3D modeling was an idea I wanted to test and I did and it's pretty good; I wanted to test Claude as a debugging aid and it's a huge help for me. But I would never sit down to convince a person who is not a friend. If someone wanted me to do that, I'd expect to charge them for it. So the guys who are doing it for free are either peddling bullshit or they have some other unspecified objective and no one likes that.
- zbentley 9mo ago
  Yes! And like … “out-compete” assumes a zero sum game. There are massive industries where the tools used to serve different market segments only barely overlap decades after the “game changing” tool was made available. Like, screw the whole “artisanal small-batch software” argument—there are massive new systems being written in C every day despite decades of claims that it is an obsolete language doomed to be replaced by better alternatives. Those alternatives caught on in some segments and not in others. Electric cars caught on in some segments and not in others. Steel-and-concrete building construction caught on in some segments and not in others. It’ll be fine.
fasouto 9mo ago
The article nails the pattern but I think it's fundamnetally an incentives problem. We're drowning in tweets, posts, news... (way more than anyone can reasonably consume). So what rises to the top? The most dramatic, attention-grabbing claims. "I built in 1 hour what took a team months" gets 10k retweets. "I used AI to speed up a well-scoped prototype after weeks of architectural thinking" gets...crickets Social platforms are optimized for engagement, not accuracy. The clarification thread will always get a fraction of the reach of the original hype. And the people posting know this. The frustrating part is there's no easy fix. Calling it out (like this article does) get almost no attention. And the nuanced followup never catches up with the viral tweet.
fuefhafj 9mo ago
A recent favorite of mine is simonw who usually is unable to stop hyping LLMs suddenly forgetting they exist in order to rhetorically "win" an argument: > If you're confident that you know how to securely configure and use Wireguard across multiple devices then great https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581183 What happened to your overconfidence in LLMs ability to help people without previous experience do something they were unable to before?
tin7in 9mo ago
I'm really surprised how much pushback and denial there is still from a lot of engineers. This is truly impressive and not only hype. Things have been impressive at least since April 2025.
- strange_quark 9mo ago
  Is this satire? This comment could not be a better example of what the linked article is talking about.
  - tin7in 9mo ago
    Not satire. The author is in denial of what's happening.
    - falkensmaize 9mo ago
      What is happening?
      - nottorp 9mo ago
        Not much. They can still parrot their training data. AGI is still 5-20 years away.
davesque 9mo ago
Almost every aspect of public life on social media nowadays is guided by sensationalism. It's simply a numbers game, and the "number" is engagement. Why would you do anything that's not completely geared towards engagement?
tgma 9mo ago
Being respected inside big companies has little to do with engagement on social media. Most of the best engineers are working hands-down. Arguably shitposting on the internet may have a negative correlation with technical ability inside Google. One of the times I think the draconian approach Apple has towards employee speaking as an associate of the firm without explicit authorization is the correct one.
LAC-Tech 9mo ago
This is very well said - it is much nicer and more professional than the sentiments I could express on the matter. The age of niche tech microcelebrities is on us. It existed a bit in the past (ESR, Uncle Bob, etc), but is much more of a thing now. Some of them make great content and don't say ridiculous things. Others not so much. Even tech executives are aping it...
int32_64 9mo ago
Perhaps nobody wants to have the uncomfortable conversation that AI is making the competent more competent and the incompetent less competent, because it would imply that AI provides brutally unequal benefits. The AI haters don't want this discussion because it would imply AI has any benefits, and the AI lovers don't want to have this discussion because it would imply the benefits of AI aren't universal and will increase inequality.
- ruszki 9mo ago
  I want to see an example of this. Any real example. So far what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t give my name to any of those barely usable code, and most of the time they were even slower, especially when they pretended that they reviewed their code. And even with reviews they happily accepted bad code. This was true even with my friends, not just random examples on the internet. I still need to understand every single line of the code to be responsible for it, and that takes the majority of time anyway, and quite often I need to rewrite most of it, because average code is not particularly good, because most code wasn’t produced by senior professionals, but random people making a random python script with only Hello World under their belt. So at the end doesn’t really matter whether I copy paste from a source, or an LLM does the same. I understand that many coder are happy with the “John made his first script in his life” level of code, but I’m paid well because I can do better, way better. Especially because I need to be responsible for my code, because the companies to whom I work are forced to be responsible. But of course, when there is no responsibility, I don’t care either. For those home projects where there is exactly zero risks. Even big names seem to use these only to those kind of projects. When they don’t really care.
  - idopmstuff 9mo ago
    I'll start by saying that in my past life I was a PM, and from that angle I can very much see how people writing code for large-scale, production systems take real issue with the quality of what LLMs produce. But these days I run a one-man business, and LLMs (currently Claude Code, previously GPT) have written me a ton of great code. To be clear, when I say "great" I don't mean up to your standards of code quality; rather, I mean that it does what I need it to do and saves me a bunch of time. I've got a great internal dashboard that pulls in data from a few places, and right now CC is adding some functionality to a script that does my end of month financial spreadsheet update. I have a script that filters inbound leads (I buy e-commerce brands, generally from marketplaces that send me an inordinate amount of emails that I previously had to wade through myself in order to find the rare gem). On the non-code front, I have a very long prompt that basically does the first pass of analysis of prospective acquisitions, and I use Shortcut.ai to clean up some of the P&Ls I get (I buy small e-commerce brands, so the finances are frequently bad). So while I can't speak to using LLMs to write code if you're working in any sort of real SaaS business, I can definitely say that there's real, valid code to be had from these things for other uses.
kaboomshebang 9mo ago
Good article. "hype first and context later". Loads of online content has become highly sentational. I notice this on Youtube (especially thumnails and titles) Seems to be a trend. I wonder if -- collectively -- we'll develop a "shield" for this: (more critical thinking?)
drnick1 9mo ago
> X trackers and content blocked > Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads. Why is this website serving such crap? For God's sake, if there is anything absolutely worth showing on X, just include a screenshot of it instead of subjecting us all to that malware.
mentalgear 9mo ago
Great post! Indeed, it s deeply disappointing to see how both the tech industry and scientific community have fallen into the same attention-seeking trap: hyping their work with vague, sensational claims, only to later "clarify" with far more grounded—and often mundane—statements. This tactic mirrors the strategies of tabloids, demagogues, and social media’s for-profit engagement playbook (think Zuckerberg, Musk, and the like). It’s a race to the bottom, eroding public trust and undermining the foundations of our society - all for short-term personal gain. What’s even more disheartening is how this dynamic rewards self-promotion over substance. Today’s "experts" are often those who excel at marketing themselves, while the most knowledgeable and honest voices remain in the shadows. Their "flaw"? Refusing to sacrifice integrity for attention.
pbasista 9mo ago
> We must stop granting automatic authority to those who rely on hype, or vibes, rather than evidence. > The tech community must shift its admiration back toward reproducible results and away from this “trust-me-bro” culture. Well said, in my opinion.
j45 9mo ago
The more expressive AI talkers are the less they usually come from a tech background that can understand what the technology actually could do. Someone mentioned to me they're like the historical paper boys who used to yell Extra Extra and announcing something trying to sell newspapers.
dang 9mo ago
Recent and related (were there others?): Google engineer says Claude Code built in one hour what her team spent a year on - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477966 - Jan 2026 (81 comments)
AgentME 9mo ago
LLMs are amazing and I do seriously wonder if the singularity could happen in my lifetime ... but there definitely are people over-hyping present capabilities too much right now. If present models were fully human-level proper-extended-Turing-test-passing AGI, then the results on the economy and the software ecosystem would be as immediately obvious and world-changing as a comet impact. I don't think Rakyll or Andrej are claiming these things; I think they're assuming their readers share more context with them and that it's not necessary to re-tread that every time they post about their surprise at AI currently being better than they expected. I've had the experience multiple times now of reading posts from people like them, nodding along, and then reading breathless quote-tweets of those very same posts exclaiming about how it means that AGI is here right now.
imiric 9mo ago
I'm still waiting for all these remarkable achievements produced with this new technology to provide tangible value to the world. Surely we should be seeing groundbreaking products and innovations in all industries by now, improving the lives of millions of people. Instead all we get is anecdata from influencers and entrepreneurs, and the technology being shoved into every brand and product. It's exhausting. At least it seems that the tide is starting to turn. Perhaps we are at the downward slope of the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
- kankerlijer 9mo ago
  It's quite likely that the answer to the worlds problems isn't more apps/products. AI may have arrived at a moment to bring the cost down of creating software there isn't much demand for in the first place.
  - imiric 9mo ago
    Sure, that's one part of it, but this technology is also used by highly intelligent people in tech and other industries, some of whom are singing its praises. I would expect to see amazing products and innovations from them, and yet progress has largely maintained the same momentum. Am I expecting too much, too soon?
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      Hey, why doesn't the pricing for google workspace go DOWN if it's become so cheap to maintain it because of "AI" "agents" ?
IncreasePosts 9mo ago
Writing code is the easiest thing to do at Google. Getting past layers of hierarchy and nailing down what the code will actually do and who gets credit for it will take years for a major project.
ahmetomer 9mo ago
The original post by Jaana made 8.4 million impressions, while the follow-up that included the previously/deliberately omitted context and some important information, such as "what I built is a toy version", has 277K impressions as of right now. I respect Jaana and have been following her for years. I'd expect she ought to know how that claim would have been understood. But I guess that's the only way to go viral nowadays. Also, this incident goes to show how the self-proclaimed AI influencer, Rohan Paul, puts a lot of thought and importance into sharing "news" about AI. As if it were not enough to share Jaana's bold claim without hesitation, he also emphasized it with an illustrious commentary: "Dario Amodei was so right about AI taking over coding." Slop, indeed.
yoz-y 9mo ago
This is an inverse fitness influencer. Claiming the steroids they’re taking are doing all the work and they don’t need to put in work anymore.
aeneas_ory 9mo ago
Thank you for calling this out, we are being gaslit by attention seeking influencers. The algorithmic brAInrot is propagated by those we thought we can trust, just like the instagram and youtube stars we cared about who turned out to be monsters. I sincerely hope those people become better or wane into meaninglessness. Rakyll seems to spend more time on X than working on advancing good software these days, a shame given her past accomplishments.
charles_f 9mo ago
This is well written. There is proof that AI isn't what they all make it to be, in the acquisitions of these companies. Why would Anthropic need Bun or OpenAI need windsurf for billions, if agents are all knowing and ready to replace devs? This is a modern marketing, based on FUD and sensationalism
jagoff 9mo ago
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williamcotton 9mo ago
Can someone please explain to me how I was able to construct this DSL in as short a time as I did? https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp Fully featured LSP (take a look at the GIFs in the repo), step debugger, BDD-testing framework built into the language and runtime itself (novel!), asynchronous/join in pipelines (novel!), middleware for postgres, jq, javascript, lua, graphql (with data loaders), etc. It does quite a bit. Take a look at my GitHub timeline for an idea of how long this took to build. It is 100% an experiment in language and framework design. Why would I otherwise spend years of my life handcrafting something where I just want to see how my harebrained ideas play out when actualized? I would absolutely love to talk about the language itself rather than how it was made but here we are. And I wrote my own blog in my own DSL. Tell me that's not just good old fashioned fun.
- kranner 9mo ago
  > Why would I otherwise spend years of my life handcrafting something where I just want to see how my harebrained ideas play out when actualized? If you're sure that's all you wanted out of it. If this were more a path-vs-destination kind of project for you, you might have gotten deep insights about programming language design and implementation over those years which the efficient route deprives you of.
  - williamcotton 9mo ago
    Thanks for your perspective and taking the time to lecture me!
    - kranner 9mo ago
      I did miss the sarcasm you pointed out in the separate mail to me (I should have paid more attention to the word "otherwise", I guess). I did not mean to lecture at you at all. I thought it was something you built very quickly with LLMs, but clearly this was a passion project, whether or not you used LLMs. My apologies.
bravetraveler 9mo ago
Influentists: LLM or get left behind! Also Influentists: surprisingly, not suggesting some friendly bioterrorism for the upper hand... or is this the real motivation for RTO? I wouldn't know. Anyway, I'll worry when the dead weight disappears and ceases to be replaced. Shields and energy reserves are critical, etc.
thegrim000 9mo ago
You know, there's a number of different competing propaganda battles going on: 1) There's the people and companies that stand to make money and build up companies by convincing people to buy their ai projects, hyping up ai, etc. 2) There's companies and nation states trying to destroy competitor's / other country's ai efforts, turn citizens against them, in order to gain an advantage/lead in the race. 3) There's, conversely, nation states that want to boost up and promote their ai industry in order to win the race rather than other countries winning (assuming there's a "win" at the end, like AGI, which I don't believe there is). 4) Normal citizens that have been ideologically brainwashed one way or the other, and so are going online to argue in a culture war for their beliefs / "side". 5) People posting crazy takes on ai, one way or the other, to get clicks / money on their articles. The whole topic is awash in serious propaganda. Effectively the only path forward is believing what you yourself know for sure, from your direct experience / knowledge.
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mylittlebrain 9mo ago
Off topic, but AI hype is appearing in hardware and consumer electronics. I just bought a rechargeable hand warmer that claims to have an "... Have Intelligent AI Temperature Control Chips That Can Accurately Control the Temperature," At least in the early days the Transistor, radios did have them.
AIorNot 9mo ago
I mean this is just how social media works these days for anything Our social hypemeter is broken beyond exaggeration The single karpathy tweet launched hundreds of linkedin, youtube, substack thinkpieces, business articles- sometimes more than actual model releases These days anything that gets our social attention is driven to 11

270 points by LucidLynx 9mo ago

AI is like flossing. You waste more time listening to other people's opinions on whether it's helpful, than just trying it out yourself for a few days.

kinduff 9mo ago

I think humans are proxying their value through what they can do with AI. It's like a domestication flex.

dcre 9mo ago

To me, debunking hype has always felt like arguing with an advertisement. A good read about that: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hype-wont-save-us/ https://www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hype-wont-save-us/

irishcoffee 9mo ago
Hard to take that seriously. It’s a political hit-piece. Which I guess is most things today, but I don’t take those seriously either. Masks during Covid and LLMs, used as political pawns. It’s kind of sad.
- dcre 9mo ago
  Are we talking about the same article?

datsci_est_2015 9mo ago

Anecdotally, I’m finding that, at least in the Spark ecosystem, AI-generated ideas and code are far from optimal. Some of this comes from misinterpreting the (sometimes poor) documentation, and some of it comes from, probably, there not being as many open source examples as CRUD apps, which AI “influentists” (to borrow from TFA) appear to often be hyping up. This matters a lot to us because the difference in performance of our workflows can be the difference in $10/day in costs and $1000/day in costs. Just like TFA stresses, it’s the expertise in the team that pushes back against poor AI-generated ideas and code that is keeping our business within reach of cash flow positive. ~”Surely this isn’t the right way to do this?”

jimbo808 9mo ago
Most text worth paying for (code, contracts, research) requires: - accountability - reliability - validation - security - liability Humans can reliably produce text with all of these features. LLMs can reliably produce text with none of them. If it doesn't have all of these, it could still be worth paying for if it's novel and entertaining. IMO, LLMs can't really do that either.
- danielbln 9mo ago
  Let's not put humans on too much of a pedestal, there are plenty of us who are not that reliable either. That's why we have tests, linting, types and various other validation systems. Incidentally, LLMs can utilize these as well.
  - jimbo808 9mo ago
    Humans are unreliable in predictable ways. This makes review relatively painless since you know what to look for, and you can skim through the boilerplate and be pretty confident that it's right and isn't redundant/insecure, etc. LLMs can use linters and type checkers, but getting past them often times leads it down a path of mayhem and destruction, doing pretty dumb things to get them to pass.

doug_durham 9mo ago

I never read the tweet as anything other than that an expert with deep knowledge of their domain was able to produce a PoC. Which I still find to be very exciting and worthy of being promoted. This article didn't really debunk much.

chasd00 9mo ago
> expert with deep knowledge of their domain these are the kinds of people that can use generative AI best IMO. Deep domain knowledge is needed to spot when the model output is wrong even though it sounds 100% correct. I've seen people take a model's output as correct to a shocking degree like placing large bets at a horse track after uploading a pic of the schedule to ChatGPT. Many people believe whatever a computer tells them but, in their defense, no one has had to question a large calculation done by a calculator until now.
- doug_durham 9mo ago
  Totally agree. The more you know about software development the better you can use the tools. A noob trying to write a kernel driver would quickly hit a brick wall and give up. It's kind of self correcting.

sleekest 9mo ago

I agree, if the benefits are so large, there should be clearer evidence (that isn't, "trust me, just use it"). That said, I use Antigravity with great success for self hosted software. I should publish it. Why haven't I? * The software is pretty specific to my requirements. * Antigravity did the vast amount of work, it feels unworthy? * I don't really want a project, but that shouldn't really stop me pushing to a public repo. * I'm a bit hesitant to "out" myself? Nonetheless, even though I'm not the person, I'm surprised there isn't more evidence out there.

nirolo 9mo ago
I think this "* The software is pretty specific to my requirements." is the biggest part for me. I built something with Antigravity over the holidays that I can use for myself and it solves my use case. I tried thinking about if this can be helpful for others and pushed it a bit further into a version that could be hosted. Which does not make that much sense because it is a computationally intense numerical solver for thermal bridges and just awfully slow on a free hosted platform. But the project was a couple of evenings and would otherwise haven taken me half a year to complete (and thus never been done). https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/ https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/
expensive_news 9mo ago
> Antigravity did the vast amount of work, it feels unworthy I think this is true for me as well. I have two types of projects that I’ve been working on - small ones with a mix of code I wrote and AI. I have posted these, as I spent a lot of time guiding the AI, cleaning up the AI’s output, and I think the overall project has value that others can learn from and built on. But I also have some that are almost 100% vibe-coded. First, those would take a lot of time to clean up and write documentation for to make them publishable/useful. But also, I do think they feel “unworthy”. Even though I think they can be helpful, and I was looking for open-source versions of those things. But how valuable can it really be if I was able to vibe-code it in a few prompts? The next person looking for it will probably do the same thing I did and vibe-code their own version after a few minutes.

pizzathyme 9mo ago

My anxiety about falling behind with AI plummeted after I realized many of these tweets are overblown in this way. I use AI every day, how is everyone getting more spectacular results than me? Turns out: they exaggerate. Here are several real stories I dug into: "My brick-and-mortar business wouldn't even exist without AI" --> meant they used Claude to help them search for lawyers in their local area and summarize permits they needed "I'm now doing the work of 10 product managers" --> actually meant they create draft PRD's. Did not mention firing 10 PMs "I launched an entire product line this weekend" --> meant they created a website with a sign up, and it shows them a single javascript page, no customers "I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
People say outrageous things when they’re follower farming.
browningstreet 9mo ago
Getting viral on X is the current replacement for selling courses for {daytrading,amazon FBA,crypto}. The content of the tweets isn't the thing.. bull-posting or invoking Cunningham's Law is. X is the destination for formula posting and some of those blue checkmarks are getting "reach" rev share kickbacks.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Yeah, if you get enough impressions, you get some revenue, so you don't need to sell any courses, just viral content. Which is why some (not ALL) exaggerate as suggested.
  - geerlingguy 9mo ago
    It's a bit insane how much reach you need before you'd earn anything impactful, though. I average 1-2M impressions/month, and have some video clips on X/Twitter that have gotten 100K+ views, and average earnings of around $42/month (over the past year). I imagine you'd need hundreds of millions of impressions/views on Twitter to earn a living with their current rates.

abicklefitch 9mo ago

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Legend2440 9mo ago

Idk man, all AI discussion feels like a waste of effort. “yes it will”, “no it won’t” - nobody really knows, it's just a bunch of extremely opinionated people rehashing the same tired arguments across 800 comments per thread. There’s no point in talking about it anymore, just wait to see how it all turns out.

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asadotzler 9mo ago
It's not "yes it is" vs "no it won't" though. The discussion is "Yes it does" vs "no it doesn't" (present tense.) There's nothing wrong with guessing about the future, but lying about a present that is testable and unwillingness to submit to the testing is wrong.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Even then nothing is learned. Every HN thread there is on AI coding: "I am using $model for writing software and its great." "I am using $model for writing software and it sucks and will never do it." 800 comments of that tit for tat in present tense. Still nothing learned. Doesn't help that no one talks about exactly what they are doing and exactly how they are doing it, because capitalism vs open technology discussions meant to uplift the species.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    > Doesn't help that no one talks about exactly what they are doing and exactly how they are doing it Let me try a translation: > I am using $model for writing software and its great. I have generated an extremely simple javascript application that could have been mostly done by copy/paste from StackOverflow or even Geeks4Geeks and it runs. This is true. I have a PWA that I generated with a LLM on my phone right now. It works. Pretty sure even w3schools would be ashamed to post that code. > I am using $model for writing software and it sucks and will never do it. This is also true. At work I have a 15 year old codebase where everything is custom. You can't get a LLM to use it all as a context because you simply don't have ram for it so you can't even test the quality of advice given on it. You can't train a LLM on it because you don't have the budget for it. You maybe could get a LLM to generate code by prompting it "this is the custom object allocation function, these are the basic GUI classes, now generate me the boilerplate for this new dialog I'm supposed to do". Unfortunately it takes as long or longer than doing it yourself, and you can't trust the output to boot.

minimaxir 9mo ago

There are two major reasons people don't show proof about the impact of agentic coding: 1) The prompts/pipelines portain to proprietary IP that may or may not be allowed to be shown publically. 2) The prompts/pipelines are boring and/or embarrassing and showing them will dispel the myth that agentic coding is this mysterious magical process and open the people up to dunking. For example in the case of #2, I recently published the prompts I used to create a terminal MIDI mixer (https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/PROMPTS.md https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui/blob/main/agent_notes/P...) in the interest of transparency, but those prompts correctly indicate that I barely had an idea how MIDI mixing works and in hindsight I was surprised I didn't get harrassed for it. Given the contentious climate, I'm uncertain how often I will be open-sourcing my prompts going forward.

jacquesm 9mo ago
You weren't harassed for it because (1) it is interesting and (2) you were not hiding the AI involvement and passing it off as your own. The results (for me) are very much hit-and-miss and I still see it as a means of last resort rather than a reliable tool that I know the up and downsides of. There is a pretty good chance you'll be wasting your time and every now and then it really moves the needle. It is examples like yours that actually help to properly place the tool amongst the other options.
- munksbeer 9mo ago
  I've seen people harassed for their personal projects because they used AI.
deng 9mo ago
No. The main reasons are that 1) the code AI produces is full of problems, and if you show it, people will make fun of you, or 2) if you actually run the code as a service people can use, you'll immediately get hacked by people to prove that the code is full of problems.
- tptacek 9mo ago

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caditinpiscinam 9mo ago

Doesn't the existence of consumer products like ChatGPT indicate that LLMs aren't able to do human-level work? If OpenAI really had a digital workforce with the capabilities of ~100k programmers/scientists/writers/lawyers/doctors etc, wouldn't the most profitable move be to utilize those "workers" directly, rather that renting out their skills piecemeal?

bluGill 9mo ago
That depends on what the real value is. The sure way to get rich selling pickaxes to gold miners. However you would be even richer if you figured out where the gold really was and mined in that exact location.' Of course you can also get rich selling scams.
- Balinares 9mo ago
  All the truer when there is more miners than gold, one can't help but note.
twic 9mo ago
If this stuff worked, then given that Microsoft has a huge share of it, shouldn't Microsoft's products be good? Or at least getting better. I use Bing most days [1], and it's consistently an absolute joke. [1] to farm reward points to get cosmetic items in video games
cal_dent 9mo ago
LLMs are able to do human-level work. I think surely now that is unquestionable? They can't do all human-level work, in the same way that not all humans can do all human-level work, but a lot of criticism implicitly benchmarks it against all work. LLMs have this remarkable ability to be both the smartest thing in the room and the dumbest thing at the same time. On the profitability point. Yes and no I guess. ChatGPT will likely go down as the most influential thing in the ai race (or early ai race) simply because it was the most visceral illustration of the art of the possible to the general public. Technical people will correct me or have arguments to why this isn't the case but they'll be wrong simply because ChatGPT captured consumer attention, which ultimately led to supercharged financial attention, and everything that has happened since is due to that. Whether its pure marketing or futuregazing, the world of money bought into it, with the ultimate view that this is the worst it will ever be. The ultimate profitable goal is unarguably replacing human labour (at a lesser all in cost) but if that is not possible, but you believe it could be possible, then showcasing and getting people to believe that you can achieve that goal, is pretty damn profitable too and it's proven to be for some people while giving them runway to continue to pursue the ultimate goal.

HellDunkel 9mo ago

This is a strage phenomenon where people get excited by the mere fact that someone else is excited by something which is not directly visible to the spectator. It works well in horror movies and as it seems with AI hype.

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Fazebooking 9mo ago

Its still not a Hype, its still crazy what is possible today and we still have no clear at all if this progress continues as it does or not with the implication, that if it continues, it has major implications. My wife, who has no clue about coding at all, chatgpted a very basic android app only with guidance of chatgpt. She would never ever been able to do this in 5 hours or so without my guidance. I DID NOT HELP HER at all. I'm 'vibecoding' stuff small stuff for sure, non critical things for sure but lets be honest, i'm transforming a handfull of sentences and requirements into real working code, today. Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 def feel better than their prevous versions. Do they still fail? Yeah for sure but thats not the point. The industry continues to progress on every single aspect of this: Tooling like claude CLI, Gemini CLI, Intellij integration, etc., Context length, compute, inferencing time, quality, depth of thinking etc. there is no current plateau visible at all. And its not just LLMs, its the whole ecosystem of Machine Learning stuff: Highhly efficient weather model from google, Alpha fold, AlphaZero, Roboticsmovement, Environment detection, Image segmentation, ... And the power of claude for example, you will only get with learning how to use it. Like telling it your coding style, your expectations regarding tests etc. We often assume, that an LLM should just be the magic work collegue 10x programmer but its everything an dnothing. If you don't communicate well enough it is not helpful. And LLMs are not just good in coding, its great in reformulating emails, analysing error messages, writing basic SVG files, explaining kubernetes cluster status, being a friend for some people (see character.ai), explaining research paper, finding research, summarizing text, the list is way to long. Alone 2026 there will go so many new datacenters live which will add so much more compute again, that the research will continue to be faster and more efficient. There is also no current bubble to burst, Google fights against Microsoft, Antrophic and co. while on a global level USA competets with China and the EU on this technology. The richest companies on the planet are investing in this tech and they did not do this with bitcoins because they understod that bitcoin is stupid. But AI is not stupid. Or Machine learing is not stupid. Do not underestimate the current status of AI tools we have, do not underestimate the speed, continues progress and potential exponential growth of this. My timespan expecation for obvious advancments in AI is 5-15 years. Experts in this field predict already 2027/2030. But to iterate over this: a few years ago no one would have had a good idea how we could transform basic text into complex code in such a robust way, which such diverse input (different language, missing specs, ...) . No one. Even 'just generating a website'.

shermantanktop 9mo ago

I’ve taken to calling this (in my mind) the Age of the Sycophants. In politics, in corporate life, in technology and in social media, many people are building a public life around saying things that others want to hear, with demonstrably zero relationship to truth or even credibility.

imiric 9mo ago
It would certainly make an interesting anthropological case study. Humans have always been performative with those outside of their immediate social circle. Politics is effectively the art of performance, and using it to gain influence and power. With legacy media the general public was still largely on the receiving end of it, but modern technology and social media have given that ability to anyone capable of building an audience. So now performative behavior is everywhere, since we're all competing to get our voice heard, to experience adoration, fame, power, fortune. We're in this weird state where this is all done in digital worlds, where it's easier than ever to fabricate an image, and yet it all ends up affecting the real world in one way or another. Our leaders are celebrities who are good at this game, and not necessarily people worthy of this position. Honestly, I have little faith we can turn this around. It's going to get much worse before it gets better, if at all.
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  In the White House, you have to say what Trump wants to hear. If you are a foreign leader, you have to say you’ll share your peace prize with him, because that’s what he wants to hear. TACO is a thing because he wants to say things, but not do things. In tech, you have to say you’re bullish on AI, because that’s what managers want to hear. They say it their CEO, because that’s what CEO wants to hear. And the CEO says it to the public because that’s what Wall Street wants to hear. Turn around and ask ChatGPT a question and it tells you what you want to hear, along with a compliment about how smart you are.

DotaFan 9mo ago

I think this "trend" is due to AI companies paying (in some form) the influencers to promote AI. Simple as that.

kfarr 9mo ago

Like everything in LLM land it's all about the prompt and agent pipeline. As others say below, these people are experts in their domain. Their prompts are essentially a form of codifying their own knowledge, as in Rakyll and Galen's examples, to achieve specific outcomes based on years and maybe even decades of work in the problem domain. It's no surprise their outputs when ingested by an LLM are useful, but it might not tell us much about the true native capability of a given AI system.

keyle 9mo ago

Great article. This needs to be framed. The whole trust me bro, and shock and awe of social medias is a non-stop assault these days. You can't open a wall without seeing those promoted up front and centre and without any proof. If AI was so good today, why isn't there an explosion of successful products? All we see is these half baked "zomg so good bro!" examples that are technically impressive, but decisively incomplete or really, proof of concepts. I'm not saying LLMs aren't useful, but they're currently completely misrepresented. Hype sells clicks, not value. But, whatever floats the investors' boat...

tossandthrow 9mo ago

Influences generally don't get to me. Sitting 2 hours with an Ai agent developing end to end products does.

ankit219 9mo ago

Its a strange phenomenon. You want to call out the bs but then you are just giving them engagement and boost. You want to stay away but there is a sort of confluence where these guys tend to ride on each others' post and boosts those posts anyway. If you ask questions, very rarely they answer, and if they do, it takes one question to unearth that it was the prompt or the skill. Eg: huggingface people post about claude finetuning models. how? when they gave everything in a skill file, and claude knew what scripts to write. Tinker is trying the same strategy. (yes, its impressive that claude could finetune, but not as impressive as the original claim that made me pay attention to the post) It does not matter if they get the details wrong, its just that it needs to be vague enough, and exciting enough. Infact vagueness and not sharing the code part signals they are doing something important or they are 'in the know' which they cannot share. The incentives are totally inverted.

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arjie 9mo ago

If you don't get the results you don't get the results. If someone else can use this tool to get the results, they'll out-compete you. If they can't, then they've wasted time and you'll out-compete them. I see these influencer guys as idea-generators. It's super-cheap to test out some of these theories: e.g. how well Claude can do 3D modeling was an idea I wanted to test and I did and it's pretty good; I wanted to test Claude as a debugging aid and it's a huge help for me. But I would never sit down to convince a person who is not a friend. If someone wanted me to do that, I'd expect to charge them for it. So the guys who are doing it for free are either peddling bullshit or they have some other unspecified objective and no one likes that.

zbentley 9mo ago
Yes! And like … “out-compete” assumes a zero sum game. There are massive industries where the tools used to serve different market segments only barely overlap decades after the “game changing” tool was made available. Like, screw the whole “artisanal small-batch software” argument—there are massive new systems being written in C every day despite decades of claims that it is an obsolete language doomed to be replaced by better alternatives. Those alternatives caught on in some segments and not in others. Electric cars caught on in some segments and not in others. Steel-and-concrete building construction caught on in some segments and not in others. It’ll be fine.

fasouto 9mo ago

The article nails the pattern but I think it's fundamnetally an incentives problem. We're drowning in tweets, posts, news... (way more than anyone can reasonably consume). So what rises to the top? The most dramatic, attention-grabbing claims. "I built in 1 hour what took a team months" gets 10k retweets. "I used AI to speed up a well-scoped prototype after weeks of architectural thinking" gets...crickets Social platforms are optimized for engagement, not accuracy. The clarification thread will always get a fraction of the reach of the original hype. And the people posting know this. The frustrating part is there's no easy fix. Calling it out (like this article does) get almost no attention. And the nuanced followup never catches up with the viral tweet.

fuefhafj 9mo ago

A recent favorite of mine is simonw who usually is unable to stop hyping LLMs suddenly forgetting they exist in order to rhetorically "win" an argument: > If you're confident that you know how to securely configure and use Wireguard across multiple devices then great https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581183 What happened to your overconfidence in LLMs ability to help people without previous experience do something they were unable to before?

tin7in 9mo ago

I'm really surprised how much pushback and denial there is still from a lot of engineers. This is truly impressive and not only hype. Things have been impressive at least since April 2025.

strange_quark 9mo ago
Is this satire? This comment could not be a better example of what the linked article is talking about.
- tin7in 9mo ago
  Not satire. The author is in denial of what's happening.
  - falkensmaize 9mo ago
    What is happening?
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      Not much. They can still parrot their training data. AGI is still 5-20 years away.

davesque 9mo ago

Almost every aspect of public life on social media nowadays is guided by sensationalism. It's simply a numbers game, and the "number" is engagement. Why would you do anything that's not completely geared towards engagement?

tgma 9mo ago

Being respected inside big companies has little to do with engagement on social media. Most of the best engineers are working hands-down. Arguably shitposting on the internet may have a negative correlation with technical ability inside Google. One of the times I think the draconian approach Apple has towards employee speaking as an associate of the firm without explicit authorization is the correct one.

LAC-Tech 9mo ago

This is very well said - it is much nicer and more professional than the sentiments I could express on the matter. The age of niche tech microcelebrities is on us. It existed a bit in the past (ESR, Uncle Bob, etc), but is much more of a thing now. Some of them make great content and don't say ridiculous things. Others not so much. Even tech executives are aping it...

int32_64 9mo ago

Perhaps nobody wants to have the uncomfortable conversation that AI is making the competent more competent and the incompetent less competent, because it would imply that AI provides brutally unequal benefits. The AI haters don't want this discussion because it would imply AI has any benefits, and the AI lovers don't want to have this discussion because it would imply the benefits of AI aren't universal and will increase inequality.

ruszki 9mo ago
I want to see an example of this. Any real example. So far what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t give my name to any of those barely usable code, and most of the time they were even slower, especially when they pretended that they reviewed their code. And even with reviews they happily accepted bad code. This was true even with my friends, not just random examples on the internet. I still need to understand every single line of the code to be responsible for it, and that takes the majority of time anyway, and quite often I need to rewrite most of it, because average code is not particularly good, because most code wasn’t produced by senior professionals, but random people making a random python script with only Hello World under their belt. So at the end doesn’t really matter whether I copy paste from a source, or an LLM does the same. I understand that many coder are happy with the “John made his first script in his life” level of code, but I’m paid well because I can do better, way better. Especially because I need to be responsible for my code, because the companies to whom I work are forced to be responsible. But of course, when there is no responsibility, I don’t care either. For those home projects where there is exactly zero risks. Even big names seem to use these only to those kind of projects. When they don’t really care.
- idopmstuff 9mo ago
  I'll start by saying that in my past life I was a PM, and from that angle I can very much see how people writing code for large-scale, production systems take real issue with the quality of what LLMs produce. But these days I run a one-man business, and LLMs (currently Claude Code, previously GPT) have written me a ton of great code. To be clear, when I say "great" I don't mean up to your standards of code quality; rather, I mean that it does what I need it to do and saves me a bunch of time. I've got a great internal dashboard that pulls in data from a few places, and right now CC is adding some functionality to a script that does my end of month financial spreadsheet update. I have a script that filters inbound leads (I buy e-commerce brands, generally from marketplaces that send me an inordinate amount of emails that I previously had to wade through myself in order to find the rare gem). On the non-code front, I have a very long prompt that basically does the first pass of analysis of prospective acquisitions, and I use Shortcut.ai to clean up some of the P&Ls I get (I buy small e-commerce brands, so the finances are frequently bad). So while I can't speak to using LLMs to write code if you're working in any sort of real SaaS business, I can definitely say that there's real, valid code to be had from these things for other uses.

kaboomshebang 9mo ago

Good article. "hype first and context later". Loads of online content has become highly sentational. I notice this on Youtube (especially thumnails and titles) Seems to be a trend. I wonder if -- collectively -- we'll develop a "shield" for this: (more critical thinking?)

drnick1 9mo ago

> X trackers and content blocked > Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads. Why is this website serving such crap? For God's sake, if there is anything absolutely worth showing on X, just include a screenshot of it instead of subjecting us all to that malware.

mentalgear 9mo ago

Great post! Indeed, it s deeply disappointing to see how both the tech industry and scientific community have fallen into the same attention-seeking trap: hyping their work with vague, sensational claims, only to later "clarify" with far more grounded—and often mundane—statements. This tactic mirrors the strategies of tabloids, demagogues, and social media’s for-profit engagement playbook (think Zuckerberg, Musk, and the like). It’s a race to the bottom, eroding public trust and undermining the foundations of our society - all for short-term personal gain. What’s even more disheartening is how this dynamic rewards self-promotion over substance. Today’s "experts" are often those who excel at marketing themselves, while the most knowledgeable and honest voices remain in the shadows. Their "flaw"? Refusing to sacrifice integrity for attention.

pbasista 9mo ago

> We must stop granting automatic authority to those who rely on hype, or vibes, rather than evidence. > The tech community must shift its admiration back toward reproducible results and away from this “trust-me-bro” culture. Well said, in my opinion.

j45 9mo ago

The more expressive AI talkers are the less they usually come from a tech background that can understand what the technology actually could do. Someone mentioned to me they're like the historical paper boys who used to yell Extra Extra and announcing something trying to sell newspapers.

dang 9mo ago

Recent and related (were there others?): Google engineer says Claude Code built in one hour what her team spent a year on - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46477966 - Jan 2026 (81 comments)

AgentME 9mo ago

LLMs are amazing and I do seriously wonder if the singularity could happen in my lifetime ... but there definitely are people over-hyping present capabilities too much right now. If present models were fully human-level proper-extended-Turing-test-passing AGI, then the results on the economy and the software ecosystem would be as immediately obvious and world-changing as a comet impact. I don't think Rakyll or Andrej are claiming these things; I think they're assuming their readers share more context with them and that it's not necessary to re-tread that every time they post about their surprise at AI currently being better than they expected. I've had the experience multiple times now of reading posts from people like them, nodding along, and then reading breathless quote-tweets of those very same posts exclaiming about how it means that AGI is here right now.

imiric 9mo ago

I'm still waiting for all these remarkable achievements produced with this new technology to provide tangible value to the world. Surely we should be seeing groundbreaking products and innovations in all industries by now, improving the lives of millions of people. Instead all we get is anecdata from influencers and entrepreneurs, and the technology being shoved into every brand and product. It's exhausting. At least it seems that the tide is starting to turn. Perhaps we are at the downward slope of the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

kankerlijer 9mo ago
It's quite likely that the answer to the worlds problems isn't more apps/products. AI may have arrived at a moment to bring the cost down of creating software there isn't much demand for in the first place.
- imiric 9mo ago
  Sure, that's one part of it, but this technology is also used by highly intelligent people in tech and other industries, some of whom are singing its praises. I would expect to see amazing products and innovations from them, and yet progress has largely maintained the same momentum. Am I expecting too much, too soon?
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    Hey, why doesn't the pricing for google workspace go DOWN if it's become so cheap to maintain it because of "AI" "agents" ?

IncreasePosts 9mo ago

Writing code is the easiest thing to do at Google. Getting past layers of hierarchy and nailing down what the code will actually do and who gets credit for it will take years for a major project.

ahmetomer 9mo ago

The original post by Jaana made 8.4 million impressions, while the follow-up that included the previously/deliberately omitted context and some important information, such as "what I built is a toy version", has 277K impressions as of right now. I respect Jaana and have been following her for years. I'd expect she ought to know how that claim would have been understood. But I guess that's the only way to go viral nowadays. Also, this incident goes to show how the self-proclaimed AI influencer, Rohan Paul, puts a lot of thought and importance into sharing "news" about AI. As if it were not enough to share Jaana's bold claim without hesitation, he also emphasized it with an illustrious commentary: "Dario Amodei was so right about AI taking over coding." Slop, indeed.

yoz-y 9mo ago

This is an inverse fitness influencer. Claiming the steroids they’re taking are doing all the work and they don’t need to put in work anymore.

aeneas_ory 9mo ago

Thank you for calling this out, we are being gaslit by attention seeking influencers. The algorithmic brAInrot is propagated by those we thought we can trust, just like the instagram and youtube stars we cared about who turned out to be monsters. I sincerely hope those people become better or wane into meaninglessness. Rakyll seems to spend more time on X than working on advancing good software these days, a shame given her past accomplishments.

charles_f 9mo ago

This is well written. There is proof that AI isn't what they all make it to be, in the acquisitions of these companies. Why would Anthropic need Bun or OpenAI need windsurf for billions, if agents are all knowing and ready to replace devs? This is a modern marketing, based on FUD and sensationalism

jagoff 9mo ago

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williamcotton 9mo ago

Can someone please explain to me how I was able to construct this DSL in as short a time as I did? https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe-lsp Fully featured LSP (take a look at the GIFs in the repo), step debugger, BDD-testing framework built into the language and runtime itself (novel!), asynchronous/join in pipelines (novel!), middleware for postgres, jq, javascript, lua, graphql (with data loaders), etc. It does quite a bit. Take a look at my GitHub timeline for an idea of how long this took to build. It is 100% an experiment in language and framework design. Why would I otherwise spend years of my life handcrafting something where I just want to see how my harebrained ideas play out when actualized? I would absolutely love to talk about the language itself rather than how it was made but here we are. And I wrote my own blog in my own DSL. Tell me that's not just good old fashioned fun.

kranner 9mo ago
> Why would I otherwise spend years of my life handcrafting something where I just want to see how my harebrained ideas play out when actualized? If you're sure that's all you wanted out of it. If this were more a path-vs-destination kind of project for you, you might have gotten deep insights about programming language design and implementation over those years which the efficient route deprives you of.
- williamcotton 9mo ago
  Thanks for your perspective and taking the time to lecture me!
  - kranner 9mo ago
    I did miss the sarcasm you pointed out in the separate mail to me (I should have paid more attention to the word "otherwise", I guess). I did not mean to lecture at you at all. I thought it was something you built very quickly with LLMs, but clearly this was a passion project, whether or not you used LLMs. My apologies.

bravetraveler 9mo ago

Influentists: LLM or get left behind! Also Influentists: surprisingly, not suggesting some friendly bioterrorism for the upper hand... or is this the real motivation for RTO? I wouldn't know. Anyway, I'll worry when the dead weight disappears and ceases to be replaced. Shields and energy reserves are critical, etc.

thegrim000 9mo ago

You know, there's a number of different competing propaganda battles going on: 1) There's the people and companies that stand to make money and build up companies by convincing people to buy their ai projects, hyping up ai, etc. 2) There's companies and nation states trying to destroy competitor's / other country's ai efforts, turn citizens against them, in order to gain an advantage/lead in the race. 3) There's, conversely, nation states that want to boost up and promote their ai industry in order to win the race rather than other countries winning (assuming there's a "win" at the end, like AGI, which I don't believe there is). 4) Normal citizens that have been ideologically brainwashed one way or the other, and so are going online to argue in a culture war for their beliefs / "side". 5) People posting crazy takes on ai, one way or the other, to get clicks / money on their articles. The whole topic is awash in serious propaganda. Effectively the only path forward is believing what you yourself know for sure, from your direct experience / knowledge.

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mylittlebrain 9mo ago

Off topic, but AI hype is appearing in hardware and consumer electronics. I just bought a rechargeable hand warmer that claims to have an "... Have Intelligent AI Temperature Control Chips That Can Accurately Control the Temperature," At least in the early days the Transistor, radios did have them.

AIorNot 9mo ago

I mean this is just how social media works these days for anything Our social hypemeter is broken beyond exaggeration The single karpathy tweet launched hundreds of linkedin, youtube, substack thinkpieces, business articles- sometimes more than actual model releases These days anything that gets our social attention is driven to 11