4 ms·

There are two different crowds using "AI": - One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and

by manoDev 4mo ago

There are two different crowds using "AI": - One crowd is using to research algorithms, libraries, write boilerplate code, write test harnesses, introspect and integrate with APIs, do hands-off refactoring, and automating what would otherwise be boring tasks. They still think about architecture, best practices, understanding things in detail and the general shape of the solution is in their hands. - Another crowd is curating prompts, setting up autonomous agents, creating tooling and guardrails around it, anything else but getting actually involved in how the sausage is made. They are working on meta tasks around the problem, in the hope the solution will write itself. These two crowds are currently living in very different worlds, and getting very different results. We'll see what survives soon.

Ekami 4mo ago
True... I'm in the first crowd personally
- ozim 4mo ago
  For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd. This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills. I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd. But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”. I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.
darksim905 4mo ago
Are we including just technical people in these crowds? Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic. We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably. On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place. That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.
- yieldcrv 4mo ago
  I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading But can he sale? Yes Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
  - wiether 4mo ago
    I've also have to work with a guy like that. It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit. The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it. So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging. Two weeks during they told us daily how we were slowing everything down. After that we spent an hour explaining them how making something works on their computer, without tests, without thinking about edge cases... was not the same thing as deploying it and releasing it to actual users. We agreed on, next time, asking us for an estimate on how much it would take to move the POC to something that could be released, before signing on any engagement with a customer. Well, last week they came with a new deal they just signed on a completely new POC. Customer was expecting it for yesterday. To make it work, we have to setup a VPN between our infra and customer infra. Their internal process make it impossible to have this under a month. Now, my guy and the customer, are mad at me because I can't deliver. And the first POC? Customer wants new features. My guy don't want to deal with it because it's not their job.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Why not make him vibedeploy it, and then you hack it to prove your point?
bluegatty 4mo ago
I wouldn't say those are 'camps' without seeing some data in support of that.
aorloff 4mo ago
A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands" I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts
KaiserPro 4mo ago
I don't think thats really it. For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those. For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?" I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.
- skeledrew 4mo ago
  > I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along. They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.
  - KaiserPro 4mo ago
    > They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.
    - skeledrew 4mo ago
massung 4mo ago
I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to… …reads MRIs and video to detect cancer …analyze genomics for early target discovery …assisting surgeons …folding proteins And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI. Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have used it on occasion. And I’ll never understand someone using an LLM to write anything (especially a comment on a site like HN) intended for consumption by other people. Not because I think it’s subpar, but because the point - IMO - is to make human connections, learn, teach, and debate. That’s hard (impossible?) to do if you’re just typing a 30 second prompt and then copy/pasting the output.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  I thought the point of HN was to help venture capitalists find ~~marks~~ projects to fund
- 4k0hz 4mo ago
  This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
  - fasterik 4mo ago
    >This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig. A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."

by manoDev 4mo ago

Ekami 4mo ago

True... I'm in the first crowd personally

ozim 4mo ago
For me it is hard to invest too much time into being in first crowd. This space is moving too fast for me and I have current job to do that is paying my bills. I can invest time to watch/follow people from the first crowd. But no one is going to give you a medal and it is not a „better crowd”. I might need to pay for this expertise some day, but I guess it will be OpenAI or Anthropic that takes my money just like so far all the advances were introduced to frontier models or their own tooling.

darksim905 4mo ago

Are we including just technical people in these crowds? Because there's a third crowd: everyone else/the general public that are standing up vibe coded websites and don't give a hoot how things work in the background or know as long as money is coming in. There are people that are using AI and thinking less and less causing their brains over the long term to become more inelastic. We're in for a very, very painful future that will have mixed results. On one hand, you can boostrap things a lot quicker with less mental effort and it helps get up to speed without having to know some complex things (e.g. deep knowledge in coding). This can help us innovate on basic things faster, probably. On the other ... people aren't going to learn. If something breaks in that state where they don't know how something works, what, we're just going to ask another AI to fix it? I don't know how I feel or think about that. On a long enough timeline, there are people that won't know how any of this was designed in the first place. That's the world we actually live in. And that's what will survive despite crowd 1 and 2 that you mentioned above.

yieldcrv 4mo ago
I’m working with an ideas guy, no skills and no capital but for the first time can deliver code He wants my tech expertise, his code is spaghetti, he is making all the mistakes, he is experiencing AI psychosis, his AI makes md files warning him that its all going to burn him which he forwards to me lackadaisically without reading But can he sale? Yes Its tempting for me to proselytize that he isnt using feature branches or project tickets or even deploying with committed code But I bite my tongue and tell him to focus on the MVP since he wants to prompt Claude Code for 48 hour sessions without there being any indication of how other devs could contribute Because he has clients that wants what he described, and because he has no capital I get a huge cut of that I’m fine with that, I’ll clean up the project very quickly
- wiether 4mo ago
  I've also have to work with a guy like that. It could be okay if it wasn't for the fact that they have a high esteem of themselves and don't learn shit. The first POC they vibecoded and managed to sell was a pile of trash that we couldn't realistically deploy as it. So we spent two weeks to make it something decent enough to have the minimum confidence of the thing being reliable and safe enough to reach staging. Two weeks during they told us daily how we were slowing everything down. After that we spent an hour explaining them how making something works on their computer, without tests, without thinking about edge cases... was not the same thing as deploying it and releasing it to actual users. We agreed on, next time, asking us for an estimate on how much it would take to move the POC to something that could be released, before signing on any engagement with a customer. Well, last week they came with a new deal they just signed on a completely new POC. Customer was expecting it for yesterday. To make it work, we have to setup a VPN between our infra and customer infra. Their internal process make it impossible to have this under a month. Now, my guy and the customer, are mad at me because I can't deliver. And the first POC? Customer wants new features. My guy don't want to deal with it because it's not their job.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Why not make him vibedeploy it, and then you hack it to prove your point?

bluegatty 4mo ago

I wouldn't say those are 'camps' without seeing some data in support of that.

aorloff 4mo ago

A lot of people doing the latter camp are people with the knowledge of the former camp, and who are sufficiently happy with the speed and guard rails to no longer worry about "molding the solution in their hands" I'm not speaking from personal experience, this is what friends are doing at their startups But I am not surprised at all, because the building blocks of major applications are all out there as boilerplate code - heck half the time AWS has the example you need for you, assuming you know what you want to stitch together and why If you know the major AWS tool chains and how and why to use them and how to design a product in microservices, then theoretically Claude has no idea what the whole shebang is up to but happily writes all the parts

KaiserPro 4mo ago

I don't think thats really it. For me personally I am vaguely indifferent to programmers using LLMs to make more shitty code. My worry is the second and third order effects For work currently, as an SRE, I'm being asked to maintain and look after slop as if its properly built and instrumented. Our platform has clear rules and conventions, and AI isn't following those. For the wider world, I fucking hate that image/video generation is evaporating what is "real". For memes sure its great, but for bad actors it gives a brilliant way to say "its AI wasn't me" and then the debate moves away from "did person do bad thing" to "is it wrong to say that things are AI?" I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along.

skeledrew 4mo ago
> I also worry about the debasement of value of human work. Looking at history, say of the weavers, it didn't work out to well for them when the powered loom came along. They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. And the world is better with the power loom. It's scary but we still have to embrace that eventually pretty much all valuable labour will be automated, and by then our society and economy needs to have been restructured for supporting humans providing 0 economic value.
- KaiserPro 4mo ago
  > They eventually moved on to other things, because that was the only option. Yes, but then whole swathes of the English countryside (and then the Indian countryside) was plunged into destitution for generations and it took rebellions, massacres and revolutions to get something like comfortable living.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    It's like climate change: Earth will survive. I and my family won't. Therefore we get wars.
  - skeledrew 4mo ago

massung 4mo ago

I know LLMs are getting the majority of the attention of late, but there are others of us training and using AI to… …reads MRIs and video to detect cancer …analyze genomics for early target discovery …assisting surgeons …folding proteins And the list goes on in other fields as well. Just hoping the recent AI counterculture doesn’t stigmatize other uses of AI. Am I a fan of Claude code? Not particularly, but I have used it on occasion. And I’ll never understand someone using an LLM to write anything (especially a comment on a site like HN) intended for consumption by other people. Not because I think it’s subpar, but because the point - IMO - is to make human connections, learn, teach, and debate. That’s hard (impossible?) to do if you’re just typing a 30 second prompt and then copy/pasting the output.

trumpdong 4mo ago
I thought the point of HN was to help venture capitalists find ~~marks~~ projects to fund
4k0hz 4mo ago
This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". I see it as a double edged sword. People that want the category of AI to succeed can claim a victory when someone uses it to approximate protien folding and invent new drugs. But that also means the entire field is constantly being dragged down by low quality vibe coded sites, slop videos on social media, whatever horrific thing Grok is doing this week, etc.
- fasterik 4mo ago
  >This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig. A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."