3 ms·

If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything.

nxpnsv 6mo ago
I think this correct it’s mediocre at a lot. It’s only 10x when you don’t know what you’re doing or doing something simple.
- danielbln 6mo ago
  It's also more often than not good enough, which for a specialist is bad, and for most everyone else is absolutely sufficient.
- tracker1 6mo ago
  I don't necessarily agree with that... I think that it's a matter of perspective. I find that AI tends to make a lot of the same errors I've seen from actual developers, especially when interacting or leading foreign dev teams. When I spend a lot of time in planning mode, I tend to get a lot more value out of the output and have to redirect far less. It also helps to establish your API interfaces, reference points, interactions, behaviors and even a lot of the test harnesses ahead of development cycles. You need to define a lot more ahead of letting it go. I would say that I'm getting maybe 2.5x the value and 5-10x the output from AI... by value, I mean what the end user/customer cares about... by 5-10x I'm including the increased documentation, testing, etc.
azangru 6mo ago
> If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything. Nah, just at that something :-)
- daveguy 6mo ago
  I think the point is, there's always someone good at what you are evaluating. Anyone with expertise in the domain will recognize how back it sucks in any given domain. Don't get me wrong, AI can definitely be used as a tool by someone who knows what they're doing to avoid boilerplate. But anyone using it in a domain they aren't already an expert in will unknowingly accept AI f ups.
  - lagrange77 6mo ago
    Exactly. And this seems more and more to be an inherent property of AI, which is kind of calming.
    - ejjer 6mo ago
      If we go one step further… this is why we buy stuff from other people and firms - because they specialise in stuff that we can then allocate resources on stuff that we are better at ourselves. Henceforth the idea that all these SaaS firms disappear due to firms replicating their products internally is stupid.
pyalwin 6mo ago
[flagged]
glouwbug 6mo ago
The majority of humans are average, as is the training set
- amelius 6mo ago
  They use a curated training set.
  - lagrange77 6mo ago
    Curated by average people in most domains.
TrackerFF 6mo ago
Before I switched over the a career in tech, I made my living from music - playing live, session work, etc. Honestly, I'm probably one of the biggest skeptics when it comes to GenAI - but at least for music, the recent models (as in the past year) do not suck. They are actually really, really good for what it is. I have yet to hear anything truly original produced by those models. They seem to converge to the mean, and end up sounding very commercial, very average sounding - but in the sense of average "professional music". Suno can generate music which would have taken real people years to learn, thousands of dollars of equipment to make / produce, and pretty much ready for airplay - most listeners will not bat an eye. Hell, these "AI artists" have been booked to festivals, since people can't hear the difference, and are enjoying the music. I figure it will go the same way in other fields. The average consumer loses track of what's human made and what's AI made, and frankly won't care. The people "left behind" are the artists, craftspeople, etc. that are frustrated it came to this point.
- cs02rm0 6mo ago
  > They seem to converge to the mean I think that was the point being made; if you're looking at it from the perspective of being really good at something, its tendency towards an averaged result is substandard.
- unfitted2545 6mo ago
  Rather than an existential threat, I could see it becoming it's own genre rather than infecting every other genre - when in the future people collectively realise it's kinda bad but has it's place as an almost retro aesthetic. Our idea of nostalgia was not that long ago. Also it could be generated on open weight local copyright free models that are super efficient in the future :P
  - dyauspitr 6mo ago
    There have been plenty of those is it AI or a real person music tests on the street you can find on YouTube. Almost no one knows which one is AI. There’s nothing there to be able to put them in different buckets.
tainttickler 6mo ago
[dead]
- mewpmewp2 6mo ago
  What is an example UI that AI would fail to create?
- dyauspitr 6mo ago
  Google Stitch is pretty awesome at front end layouts.
- sigseg1v 6mo ago
  You overestimate how good the average front-end developer PR is that gets merged. My experience developing on a fairly standard SAAS is that AI (Figma, Claude) has produced UIs which look better, are more accessible, and get through review and QA and product approval, faster and more reliably than any of the FE developers I've worked with recently can.
BoggleOhYeah 6mo ago
LLMs are just replacing consultants as the #1 generator of sloppy code.
- locknitpicker 6mo ago
  > LLMs are just replacing consultants as the #1 generator of sloppy code. The "consultants wrote sloppy code" is one of those memes that never die. The only thing that differentiates consultants from you is the contract type. All broad strokes accusations are just a consequence of in-house employees feeling threatened by their presence and having a vested interest in portraying themselves as infinitely better than any prospective replacement. You also see the same attitude in junior devs who complain that everyone else's code is shit, but the mess they themselves created is always justifiable and understandable. If you were moved from your project right now and you placed someone at your spot under probation, I will guarantee that your work would be extensively criticized for being an unmaintainable pile of hacks.
  - BoggleOhYeah 6mo ago
    No, it’s mainly because consulting firms love running their bait-and-switch scam and use their junior consultants to do the actual work while the seniors move on to butter up the next sucker.
    - nitwit005 6mo ago
      One of the interviews I had straight out of university was a firm that asked if I was willing to lie about my work experience for Java consultancy work (Kuber Infotech).
  - the_af 6mo ago
    > The "consultants wrote sloppy code" is one of those memes that never die. Your comment is one of those that feel intuitively right, because what you say makes sense... until faced with reality. Most consultants that most permanent employees are likely to find are those that will do a crappy job, then be gone when shit hits the fan. Source: anyone who's ever worked with them, myself included. Actually, both sides of the desk. They tend to do crappy jobs because those are the incentives they have. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but your theory cannot push aside the actual experience of many if not most of us. Of course, the occasional scenarios where the consultants are solid and doing top-notch work exist, but what matters is the majority of what happens... and it's not good. So the meme won't die, because it reflects reality.
adilkhanovkz 6mo ago
I cant even actually receive good essay from it and still writing each word myself.
codyswann 6mo ago
This doesn't make sense. I think you mean "If you are really good at something, you'll find AI might not be as good as the something you are really good at"
- alternatex 6mo ago
  I think they mean knowing that AI only looks to be good at something pulls back the curtain in a sense and afterwards all appearances of AI seeming good at something seem fake.
locknitpicker 6mo ago
> If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything. I think it's the other way around. AI amplifies your software development skills. If you suck at software development, AI will follow your prompts and feedback and of course it will output an unmaintainable mess that barely works. Here we are, listening to people who can barely put together a working website complaining that AI can barely put together a working website.
sph 6mo ago
Corollary: if you are bad at everything, you’ll find AI to be the greatest invention in the history of mankind
- nik282000 6mo ago
  I am seeing this a lot. The people I work with who find "AI" makes every part of their life easier were just bad at everything to begin with. The people who find "AI" making specific tasks easier have specialized skills and were previously relying on less specialized people for some support.
mock-possum 6mo ago
I’ve had the opposite experience. At the things I’m good at, AI is a huge boon. At the things I’m bad at, AI has little to offer. For me, for Frontend, AI is great, because I know exactly what to do, so it’s very easy to talk it into doing it for me. I know what the problem is, I know what the solution is, and I have the language to communicate both. All that’s left is the trivialities of the implementation, I’ve already done all the hard work in my head.

I think this correct it’s mediocre at a lot. It’s only 10x when you don’t know what you’re doing or doing something simple.

danielbln 6mo ago
It's also more often than not good enough, which for a specialist is bad, and for most everyone else is absolutely sufficient.
tracker1 6mo ago
I don't necessarily agree with that... I think that it's a matter of perspective. I find that AI tends to make a lot of the same errors I've seen from actual developers, especially when interacting or leading foreign dev teams. When I spend a lot of time in planning mode, I tend to get a lot more value out of the output and have to redirect far less. It also helps to establish your API interfaces, reference points, interactions, behaviors and even a lot of the test harnesses ahead of development cycles. You need to define a lot more ahead of letting it go. I would say that I'm getting maybe 2.5x the value and 5-10x the output from AI... by value, I mean what the end user/customer cares about... by 5-10x I'm including the increased documentation, testing, etc.

azangru 6mo ago

> If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything. Nah, just at that something :-)

daveguy 6mo ago
I think the point is, there's always someone good at what you are evaluating. Anyone with expertise in the domain will recognize how back it sucks in any given domain. Don't get me wrong, AI can definitely be used as a tool by someone who knows what they're doing to avoid boilerplate. But anyone using it in a domain they aren't already an expert in will unknowingly accept AI f ups.
- lagrange77 6mo ago
  Exactly. And this seems more and more to be an inherent property of AI, which is kind of calming.
  - ejjer 6mo ago
    If we go one step further… this is why we buy stuff from other people and firms - because they specialise in stuff that we can then allocate resources on stuff that we are better at ourselves. Henceforth the idea that all these SaaS firms disappear due to firms replicating their products internally is stupid.

pyalwin 6mo ago

[flagged]

glouwbug 6mo ago

The majority of humans are average, as is the training set

amelius 6mo ago
They use a curated training set.
- lagrange77 6mo ago
  Curated by average people in most domains.

TrackerFF 6mo ago

Before I switched over the a career in tech, I made my living from music - playing live, session work, etc. Honestly, I'm probably one of the biggest skeptics when it comes to GenAI - but at least for music, the recent models (as in the past year) do not suck. They are actually really, really good for what it is. I have yet to hear anything truly original produced by those models. They seem to converge to the mean, and end up sounding very commercial, very average sounding - but in the sense of average "professional music". Suno can generate music which would have taken real people years to learn, thousands of dollars of equipment to make / produce, and pretty much ready for airplay - most listeners will not bat an eye. Hell, these "AI artists" have been booked to festivals, since people can't hear the difference, and are enjoying the music. I figure it will go the same way in other fields. The average consumer loses track of what's human made and what's AI made, and frankly won't care. The people "left behind" are the artists, craftspeople, etc. that are frustrated it came to this point.

cs02rm0 6mo ago
> They seem to converge to the mean I think that was the point being made; if you're looking at it from the perspective of being really good at something, its tendency towards an averaged result is substandard.
unfitted2545 6mo ago
Rather than an existential threat, I could see it becoming it's own genre rather than infecting every other genre - when in the future people collectively realise it's kinda bad but has it's place as an almost retro aesthetic. Our idea of nostalgia was not that long ago. Also it could be generated on open weight local copyright free models that are super efficient in the future :P
- dyauspitr 6mo ago
  There have been plenty of those is it AI or a real person music tests on the street you can find on YouTube. Almost no one knows which one is AI. There’s nothing there to be able to put them in different buckets.

tainttickler 6mo ago

[dead]

mewpmewp2 6mo ago
What is an example UI that AI would fail to create?
dyauspitr 6mo ago
Google Stitch is pretty awesome at front end layouts.
sigseg1v 6mo ago
You overestimate how good the average front-end developer PR is that gets merged. My experience developing on a fairly standard SAAS is that AI (Figma, Claude) has produced UIs which look better, are more accessible, and get through review and QA and product approval, faster and more reliably than any of the FE developers I've worked with recently can.

BoggleOhYeah 6mo ago

LLMs are just replacing consultants as the #1 generator of sloppy code.

locknitpicker 6mo ago
> LLMs are just replacing consultants as the #1 generator of sloppy code. The "consultants wrote sloppy code" is one of those memes that never die. The only thing that differentiates consultants from you is the contract type. All broad strokes accusations are just a consequence of in-house employees feeling threatened by their presence and having a vested interest in portraying themselves as infinitely better than any prospective replacement. You also see the same attitude in junior devs who complain that everyone else's code is shit, but the mess they themselves created is always justifiable and understandable. If you were moved from your project right now and you placed someone at your spot under probation, I will guarantee that your work would be extensively criticized for being an unmaintainable pile of hacks.
- BoggleOhYeah 6mo ago
  No, it’s mainly because consulting firms love running their bait-and-switch scam and use their junior consultants to do the actual work while the seniors move on to butter up the next sucker.
  - nitwit005 6mo ago
    One of the interviews I had straight out of university was a firm that asked if I was willing to lie about my work experience for Java consultancy work (Kuber Infotech).
- the_af 6mo ago
  > The "consultants wrote sloppy code" is one of those memes that never die. Your comment is one of those that feel intuitively right, because what you say makes sense... until faced with reality. Most consultants that most permanent employees are likely to find are those that will do a crappy job, then be gone when shit hits the fan. Source: anyone who's ever worked with them, myself included. Actually, both sides of the desk. They tend to do crappy jobs because those are the incentives they have. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but your theory cannot push aside the actual experience of many if not most of us. Of course, the occasional scenarios where the consultants are solid and doing top-notch work exist, but what matters is the majority of what happens... and it's not good. So the meme won't die, because it reflects reality.

adilkhanovkz 6mo ago

I cant even actually receive good essay from it and still writing each word myself.

codyswann 6mo ago

This doesn't make sense. I think you mean "If you are really good at something, you'll find AI might not be as good as the something you are really good at"

alternatex 6mo ago
I think they mean knowing that AI only looks to be good at something pulls back the curtain in a sense and afterwards all appearances of AI seeming good at something seem fake.

locknitpicker 6mo ago

> If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything. I think it's the other way around. AI amplifies your software development skills. If you suck at software development, AI will follow your prompts and feedback and of course it will output an unmaintainable mess that barely works. Here we are, listening to people who can barely put together a working website complaining that AI can barely put together a working website.

sph 6mo ago

Corollary: if you are bad at everything, you’ll find AI to be the greatest invention in the history of mankind

nik282000 6mo ago
I am seeing this a lot. The people I work with who find "AI" makes every part of their life easier were just bad at everything to begin with. The people who find "AI" making specific tasks easier have specialized skills and were previously relying on less specialized people for some support.

mock-possum 6mo ago

I’ve had the opposite experience. At the things I’m good at, AI is a huge boon. At the things I’m bad at, AI has little to offer. For me, for Frontend, AI is great, because I know exactly what to do, so it’s very easy to talk it into doing it for me. I know what the problem is, I know what the solution is, and I have the language to communicate both. All that’s left is the trivialities of the implementation, I’ve already done all the hard work in my head.