4 ms·
what value do we get from AI?
by inigyou 3mo ago
what value do we get from AI?
- post-it 3mo agoIt's really good at writing code.
- aaronblohowiak 3mo agoIt’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc
- wegwerf17377382 3mo agoThis will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing
- gosub100 3mo agoRote classification doesn't require AI. You described a SELECT statement that was developed half a century ago
- skydhash 3mo agoPseudo SQL select l.id, l.name from locations as l where l.type = 'amusement_park' and exists ( select id from locations as l2 where l2.type = 'rv_parking' and distance(l2.geo, l.geo) < $nearby_distance ) But what we should have is a good map software where you could filter by type and distance (How many amusement parks can be in that circle?) and quickly check if there's a RV parking nearby. The hard job is collecting the data.
- champagnepapi 3mo agoEhhhhh it’s faster at typing code. Writing in a full agentic mode, we’ve only experienced slop.
- inigyou 3mo agoIf typing is the bottleneck you're working in too low-level of a language. Use more abstraction.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoIt’s really good at writing bad code - something that superficially works but is badly architected, abstracted, or wrong in a subtle way. Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.
- bashwizard 3mo agoSkill issue. No pun intended.
- rnd33 3mo agoFor well-scoped tasks I wouldn't say the code is bad, not brilliant for sure, but definitively good enough. For a lot of problems "quick and good enough" is all that is required. I've used it a lot for managing my Home Assistant setup. Has saved me countless of hours. In principle I could've done it myself, but I never would have, the time investment required to learn it wouldn't have been worth the value I get from it.
- sneak 3mo agoI’ve been programming professionally for 29 years and with the right constraints (strongly typed language, strict linting, adversarial review styleguide, test coverage, clearly defined spec or requirements) it does indeed regularly write good code. All of the other stuff required is either set-once-and-forget or is also AI, and it does require supervision, but it writes good code the vast majority of the time. Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoI’ve been programming professionally for 31 years. With all those guardrails it writes functional code - but I would still not call it good. But hey to each their own.
- ff317 3mo agoI think of the distinction here is about the domains we're coding within. If your software projects are product-y CRUD apps/sites... well, LLMs will tend to perform decently at that, because it's fundamentally pretty trivial work anyways, and there are so many examples to draw from. All CRUD apps are essentially isomorphic, with just some rules to plug in about data validation, business logic, etc. On the other hand, if your software projects involve more-difficult subject matter, you're going to find it struggles a lot more.
- bigstrat2003 3mo agoNo, it very much is not.
- gsinclair 3mo agoAnswers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.
- andrepd 3mo agobreadth, depth and nuance If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...
- AdamN 3mo agoOh the text definitely has breadth, depth, and nuance ... just not sure how correct it is.
- malfist 3mo agoDo not mistake confidence and verbosity with breadth, depth and nuance
- baubino 3mo agoThis only matters if the answer is correct.
- joenot443 3mo agoLast month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.
- wpietri 3mo agoI'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.
- SadErn 3mo ago[dead]
- joenot443 3mo ago> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.
- wpietri 3mo agoFor sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums. Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.
- 3mo ago
- AussieWog93 3mo agoI installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too. Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too. Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).
- FloatArtifact 3mo agoIt can be very exhausting to receive a lot of PRs. especially when they're LLMs. We have to read what people don't often even read themselves. They're often very wordy. Then it hurts all the more when it's wrong.
- AussieWog93 3mo agoI've had negative responses to small, isolated submissions that I've heavily QA'd and semi-positive responses to longer ones. I think it has less to do with the "realpolitik" of the code itself and more to do with the maintainer's viewpoints about whether AI as a whole is a positive or negative thing. I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs in a good month.
- FloatArtifact 3mo agoI tend to value person-to-person interaction. I've received a lot of purely automated responses, which shows low value to me as a person, and ultimately the project. I'm not disagreeing that code matters, but we're losing person-to-person discourse and the community that comes with it. Thinking it through a little bit is probably coming from having bounties on a few issues that might be contributing to my negative experience.
- dgroshev 3mo agoHere are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build
- chrisjj 3mo ago> Apparently it’s capable And apparently is more than adequate to its gulled users.
- wookmaster 3mo agoThere's plenty of value from LLMs, if you treat them as an advanced search engine and auto complete machine like they are. I've used them quite heavily to research things...but these are done best in the hands of skeptical people. The problem as usual is the mass of rich people trying to profit off of them, not the technology itself.
- cyanmoonx 3mo ago[flagged]