4 ms·

These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author

• danesparza 3mo ago
  "These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all" So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article) I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?
  • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
    The part that says > AI will just be turned off.
    • hsuduebc2 3mo ago
      I had the same reaction. It is the same kind of argument people use to claim that computer science is useless because, “What would you do if the electricity went out?” The same thing as you, man. Die in the chaos.
    • bwat49 3mo ago
      I've been seeing a lot of this in online discourse where people are like "the bubble's gonna pop and then this will all be over!" it's a combination of wishlful thinking and straightup delusion to think that AI will just poof and disappear (maybe the specific LLM approach eventually, but not the general idea of AI/the industry/product as a whole)
    • danesparza 3mo ago
      Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it. So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?
      • sho 3mo ago
        Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?
        • danesparza 3mo ago
          Not at all. And to be honest, I don't hear the original author asserting that all AI will go away. But if you have a ChatGPT plan and OpenAI is bought by another company (because they are insolvent) ... do you honestly think you will be able to continue using your service without a significant price increase?
          • sho 3mo ago
            I suppose that would be up to the new owner? How would I know what happens to their services? You shouldn't conflate AI-the-technology with OpenAI-the-company. I'm super bullish about the tech, couldn't care less about a specific company. I mean, I hate Oracle like any other sane person, but that doesn't mean I hate databases. I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths. AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.
        • watwut 3mo ago
          Internet existed before dot com bubble.
          • sho 3mo ago
            And AI existed before, and will continue after, the rise and/or fall of any particular company.
            • 3mo ago
    • kalkin 3mo ago
      > I'm quite influenced by Ed Zitron's reporting Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells them what they want to hear. Useful: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
      • danesparza 3mo ago
        Revenue and profit are not the same. And you didn't even mention the debt these companies have accrued in the last 3 years. References: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/ai-tech-companies-have-hidden-debt-worth-around-usd1-65-trillion-report-claims-amount-is-122-percent-of-debt-reflected-on-the-balance-sheets-of-alphabet-amazon-meta-microsoft-and-oracle https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/ai-tech-... https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/techs-ai-debt-boom-in-one-chart-143849995.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/techs-ai-debt-b... https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/17/bond-investors-push-back-as-ai-debt-heads-toward-570-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/17/bond-...
        • kalkin 3mo ago
          Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt. The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.
  • dcow 3mo ago
    The entire thing is an AI skeptic saying “I’m skeptical I found some outdated anecdata that supports my point”. Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day. It’s not reasonable to point at a chatgpt subscription and say “look the entire industry isn’t sustainable”. We all know those are subsidized just like uber was. And there are plenty of people paying API rates for tokens and getting along just fine. Further, if there was a single point in history where an environmental concern killed an entire industry please point me to it. What happens in reality is that humans compromise and innovate under new sets of constraints.
    • krupan 3mo ago
      "Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day." Lol! Feynman's quote is in fact for everyone. Refusing to consider that it might apply to yourself is proof of that!
      • dcow 3mo ago
        It’s not a consideration. I am more productive with AI. Period. Maybe that’s not the reality for you, but it is for me. I don’t need a study to prove it.
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
  • Jtarii 3mo ago
    Using LLMs in a similar way to already existing IDE features like refactor, find/replace, search is unambiguously a productivity increase. Whether using them for actual task completion purposes is good or not is unknown. But imagine that Ctrl+F was just introduced as a feature and you had a bunch of people saying "All these people saying Ctrl+F is increasing their productivity are fooling themselves", it's just a silly thing to say.
  • dilyevsky 3mo ago
    "do not fool yourself" proceeds to fool himself... if you are honest about your bias that's still fooling yourself if your conclusions are just demonstrably wrong.
    • louwrentius 3mo ago
      Where’s your proof? No anecdotes plz.
      • dilyevsky 3mo ago
        Here is a TCP simulator I built using Fable 5 to reproduce BBR paper results: https://ccsim.apoxy.dev https://ccsim.apoxy.dev It took it ~4 hours to bang out initial version which was slightly broken then it took me another day to fix some bugs. A year ago this would take me more than a month of dedicated work, probably longer. A 50x productivity boost on pure coding tasks easily. Try pointing Fable 5 to almost any CS paper - it can reproduce results in mere hours using maybe couple hundred bucks in retail token prices. This has been obvious to anyone caring to spent even just 30 mins for months now and the writing has been on the wall for more than a year.
        • louwrentius 3mo ago
          1. Does this make money 2. Does this warrant the unsubsidized cost of AI? 3. Does this justify the harmful externalities of AI? I don't need personal anecdotes. I want evidence that organisations make more money, get more efficient (and so on) due to AI. Please cite a paper.
          • dilyevsky 3mo ago
            A lot of software projects don't make money directly. Our company makes money. This would have cost thousands of dollars paid to a contractor previously with unclear results so yes it's 100% justified. You're citing a paper that does not reproduce in the year 2026 and a guy who built a following on doom&gloom projections with zero actual verifiable sources and demanding proof. SMH
  • sho 3mo ago
    There is no longer, in my opinion, any scope for reasonable debate that AI models like Fable 5 are net productivity increases for many, if not most, if not ALL, programming tasks. Anyone can, or should be able to, prove this to themselves in about 5 minutes. And so if someone like the author is trying to argue the contrary, that leads me to believe they either: (1) have not bothered to spend even 5 minutes validating their belief or (2) do not care to test their beliefs against reality, for whatever reason. Either one is a bit of a red flag.
    • krupan 3mo ago
      I just attempted to verify this myself, but they want my hard earned dollars first. I didn't see any satisfaction guarantee or anything. That already feels like a scam.
      • sho 3mo ago
        You know, if I held an important opinion about something, and there was a fairly easy way to conclusively validate or falsify it one way or the other, and all it was going to take was a couple of bucks, I'd just pay it. Having good info about the world I live in is important to me. Just saying.
        • krupan 3mo ago
          So you'll buy the supplements I'm selling? They'll cure everything that ails you, I promise ;-)
          • sho 3mo ago
            Let's try another tack. What would it take to change your mind?
    • eudamoniac 3mo ago
      Why do you think so many people who have used the same models you do, who are otherwise intelligent, and who should be able to prove to themselves your position in five minutes, don't? I'm somewhat agnostic about the whole thing, and I find the utter confidence you display strange and arrogant. Some really good devs say AI is not that great. Some other really good devs say it is great. Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?
• johngoode 3mo ago
  I stopped reading at the productivity comment, it's just deeply unserious stuff.
  • amarant 3mo ago
    Citing a study published in '25, and thus conducted before that, basically before AI got good. Yeah this article is safe to ignore
• p2detar 3mo ago
  From the article: > This is why I'm not using AI. I'm not using AI on moral, ethical grounds. The funny thing is - they are using AI and they will be using even more AI as it soaks into world economy even more; they just won‘t be using it directly. Well, not for a while at least, until practicality overcomes subjective morals.
• sgallant 3mo ago
  I appreciate how the author is explicit about their bias. This opinion piece is more what he wants to happen rather than what's actually happening on the ground
• zobzu 3mo ago
  id say they're not 100% wrong: - a lot of folks use ai poorly and innudate you with slop, reducing your own efficiency - because you can just prompt it doesn't mean you should. many let the machine crank out tokens until it works, rather than thinking about the problem first. of course, if AI solves my second point automatically, it'll solve the first as well, and we'll call that AGI. But we don't have that yet.
• sho 3mo ago
  I find it fascinating how humans search for meaning in the unlikeliest of places, and how ancient tribal instincts will turn anything, anything at all, into an excuse for an in-group, an out-group, and a search for kinship on the most ridiculous little hill. This "Anti AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point. It's a very human thing really.
  • podgorniy 3mo ago
    I find it fascinating how humans search for meaning in the unlikeliest of places, and how ancient tribal instincts will turn anything, anything at all, into an excuse for an in-group, an out-group, and a search for kinship on the most ridiculous little hill. This "Pro AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point. It's a very human thing really.
    • sho 3mo ago
      Cute, but I'm not the one who wrote the blog post.
• podgorniy 3mo ago
  > These articles are so off from reality Which ones? That there is no evidence (not personal anecdotes but the numbers) of productivity increase? Or that our subscriptions are heavy subsidized (then try to compare produced value against real price of tokens)? Or that AI companies are burning tonn of cash without clear plan for monetization? Article has good points which are worth discussing rather than discarding. We need to bring arguments from both sides of the fense.
  • simonw 3mo ago
    > Which ones? The ones that shout about that one METR study, use it to imply that millions of developers are deceiving themselves in believing that tools they use every day are useful, then admit that they don't like and don't use the tools themselves.
  • Aurornis 3mo ago
    > That there is no evidence (not personal anecdotes but the numbers) of productivity increase? The blog tries to cite a 2025 METR study as evidence of no productivity increase, but they ignored the newer 2026 study by the same group that did show a productivity increase with the newer tools. I also think it's funny that there have become these hard demands for studies and proof of increased productivity. We never saw the same standard of evidence applied to previous advancements like different programming languages or using git for version control. We don't argue with people when they say they're personally more productive in emacs than in VS Code or vice versa. It's only when the topic of AI comes up that the bar for evidence gets raised to the sky
    • eudamoniac 3mo ago
      Because those tools were adopted organically by users because they were obviously good. AI is pushed from leaders onto users despite the users not thinking they are good. If my boss decides the whole company is switching to emacs I think he should have some evidence to support that decision, yes.
      • Aurornis 3mo ago
• somenameforme 3mo ago
  I think there's a simple dichotomy based on use cases. For things you're already highly skilled at LLMs can be handy but the overall gains, after all is accounted for, are not so clear. But for things you aren't good at, they're zomg amazing. So for somebody evaluating things based on what they do at work (where they're probably quite competent) or on personal projects well within their own domain, then it's 'hey what's all the hype about?' But if you're doing things outside your domain then it's a revolutionary game-changer. This also explains why an independent dev can proclaim a 10x productivity boost or whatever, and actually seem to be showing that - while major companies dumping obscene amounts of $$$ on tokens don't seem to be have much to show for it.
  • jimmaswell 3mo ago
    > For things you're already highly skilled at LLMs can be handy but the overall gains, after all is accounted for, are not so clear. Preposterous. I can tell 5.6 Sol to do something like "optimize this entire subsystem to have no ongoing memory allocations, fix these 5 bugs, implement these 2 features" and go work on other code or do something else entirely, and it does it all flawlessly. All things I could have done myself but nowhere near as fast and right the first time with such thorough test cases. We've reached the point where the AI is usually faster and always less effort overall compared to the old days, even if you have to send a few followup prompts.
    • layer8 3mo ago
      > it does it all flawlessly Serious question: How do you assess this? It seems to me that it would take very significant time to establish that conclusion.
      • Lord-Jobo 3mo ago
        Validation is really hard and requires a great understanding of the entire relevant code. So to answer your question, they don’t know or asked the AI to do that too which has very obvious problems. I find it hard to believe they would spend the effort and money making an AI do tasks like that, but are ALSO willing to spend the effort and time to properly validate the changes. I’m sure many do… but probably not a large percentage.
• solumunus 3mo ago
  I feel sorry for anyone who isn’t experiencing the gains I’m experiencing. I can see why AI could suck in massive teams, or software with very messy and inconsistent architecture. As a 2 man developer team working on a mono repo with clear and simple architecture, consistent schema conventions, and heavy context available, it’s becoming ludicrous how fast we can pump out stable features. We must be 3-4x faster at this point. I had estimated that I would have to take on at least 2 or 3 more developers at X customers, now it seems at even double that quantity of customers we’ll be absolutely fine with just 2 developers. It’s been a tremendous boon for my small business, beyond any possible imagination. And then all the time I hear the claim that there’s no productivity gain to be had. I guess me and my customers are living some kind of mass delusion. Just the other day there was data corruption discovered and a relatively urgent fix required. Just a few years ago I would have been working deep into the night to make sure everything was fixed for the morning. Within an hour Fable had it all wrapped up neatly and the fix deployed…
  • eudamoniac 3mo ago
    >pump out stable features >data corruption...urgent fix required Do you people hear yourselves?
    • solumunus 3mo ago
      Are you claiming you’ve never been responsible for a bug that caused data corruption? Perhaps not, but it’s hardly a novel post-LLM bug. It’s regular stuff and obviously you know that.
      • eudamoniac 3mo ago
        As a 2 man developer team working on a mono repo with clear and simple architecture, no I have never caused urgent data corruption or seen it happen. That is more something that happens in codebases that are too big and complex to fully grasp. That it has already happened to you in this scenario does not bode well for the future stability of your codebase, in my opinion.
• greygoo222 3mo ago
  Downright delusional.