6 ms·

I Remain a Skeptic

130 points by lproven 2mo ago

thataccount 2mo ago
>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Especially if you replace people with robots that don't need days off and have the people train their replacements.
smokedetector1 2mo ago
idk. I get more stuff done, faster, that I wouldn’t have been able to. You have to use it judiciously and with supervision - I can see how letting it get out of control would negate the benefits. But with good use, its undeniable.
- twelve40 2mo ago
  the decision i have to make dozens if not hundreds times a day: do i actually look at this crap or trust it blindly and let it slide? I'm honestly reading maybe 20% tops of what "I" produce (and what other people post for my review) I think you do lose skills and understanding that way. Sure, you can always ask the robot to do the tldr for you, but.... yeah, something is still lost, not in a good way.
  - smokedetector1 2mo ago
    my way of working is make sure I understand every bit of it. Something is still lost but I feel confident my ability to understand systems is not atrophied at all. And its actually improving because I can crunch through new systems rapidly and have a private tutor. Of course its best supplemented by human team members who actually know whats going on. Its not a panacea. But its incredibly useful
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  That’s been my experience, too. I’m in the final prep for ship phase of a project that started February. It’s a bottom-to-top rewrite of a project that’s been shipping for two years, and took two years to write, initially. I’m deliberately doing it all with the $20/month ChatGPT sub. After it ships, I’ll move to the $100/month sub; but I want to be able to say that the entire project was done on a low-tier LLM subscription.
- mistercheph 2mo ago
  your perception is that you get more stuff done faster, and that seems to be the conclusion that most using LLM's come to (including myself): but there are no productivity gains that are externally observable to show for it (yet). That might be because of some lag, but another explanation might be that the tools are really effective at increasing someone's perception of their productivity while net productivity gains measured over long time windows are low or zero. Another explanation might be that the incompetent/negligent users are causing enough harm to nearly neutralize the gains brought by proficient / effective users. I don't know what the explanation is, but there is a mystery in the divergence between users' perceptions of their own productivity, and the observed productivity gains in the economy.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    It would be a weird coincidence if a pretty different way of working turned out to be exactly as productive as the old way, no more and no less. I’m skeptical of these claims. Measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult.
    - mistercheph 2mo ago
      It might be weird, but it might be the result of forces in equilibrium: e.g. one explanation might be that time spent prompting is time spent not improving, or learning, so it would not be surprising then that the productivity gains might be similar in scale to the productivity lost from learning / improvement that never happens. another explanation might be that prompting just delays work that will have to be done later when fixing errors. When encountering an error that the LLM doesn't fix on the first attempt the human-in-the-loop doesn't understand the problem very well: they will either pull the slot machine for a while until they hit lucky, or grit their teeth and sit down to understand what the code is doing in the excruciating and boring detail required to find and solve bugs, which is exactly the work that they had offloaded onto the LLM earlier.
      - wat10000 2mo ago
        Sure, it’s possible. But I don’t see anything that could constrain those things to be of similar magnitude. If they just happen to cancel each other out by luck, that would be pretty strange.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  It takes some time to learn how to get these systems to work well, and learn what they’re good for. I think people who don’t see the benefits either haven’t dug in enough or haven’t used them for things they’re good at. Do coding agents help me with highly technical work where it’s some deep thought and discussion with coworkers and eventually I change five lines of code? Not really. But I can debug a weird kernel panic or optimizer bug from a standing start in an hour when it would have taken me all day without these tools.
  - smokedetector1 2mo ago
    Yeah theyre amazing at debugging. As long as you make sure you genuinely understand everything that comes out of it, and your domain has enough coverage in the LLM training data/context, its an incredible tool.
classictraffic 2mo ago
To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobs https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-not-10x/ https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...
- E-Reverance 2mo ago
  (March 2026)
  - lproven 2mo ago
    Five months ago does not make this some kind of historical document. Although the botlickers will find this hard to believe, nothing has happened this year to make we skeptics -- like me, and like the author of this piece, who is for clarity not me -- change our minds. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Linus and Greg K-H suddenly deciding they like it is not evidence.
    - E-Reverance 2mo ago
      >botlickers > Linus and Greg K-H suddenly deciding they like it is not evidence. You don't seem particularly interested in changing your mind
      - lproven 2mo ago
        I worked out where I stand and why I stand there. I have reasons. I want evidence to consider changing. Why should I? Because someone somewhere found a tool useful? Because they are big names? That's argument from authority. I don't buy it. I need compelling reasons. I have yet to see any. All I see is a lot of people jumping on bandwagons.
        E-Reverance 2mo ago
E-Reverance 2mo ago
I think the fundamental rebuttal to this is merely that, we’re still so early, the $1.5 trillion number is irrelevant for developing technologies in the same way two women can’t birth a baby in 4.5 months
- CoolestBeans 2mo ago
  The $1.5 trillion number is extremely relevant because it makes the revenue numbers the industry has to hit higher and there's an expectation to see progress sooner before funding starts getting pulled back.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    Given the advances since 2022 why would funding get pulled back? The endgame is replacing all office workers globally and so you get 10% of that market that's that's easily $1 trillion. A competent AI employee replaces a human the same way the car replaced the horse. Businesses will pay more for an AI employee that doesn't get sick or come in hung over over a human one and never goes to sleep. If OpenAI manages to crack that, and capture even 10% of the market globally, that's trillions.
    - CoolestBeans 2mo ago
      Total addressable market doesn't pay interest expenses. Even if this technology really did have the potential to be as revolutionary as the move from the horse to the car, if you can't get there with what the world economy's liquidity can provide then you can't get there. Free cash flow is drying up and data centers depreciate. This creates a limit and if that limit is hit before the profit starts coming in it doesn't matter what the potential could be. Paying back interest is financial gravity and it exists today. And this isn't an appeal to Wall Street's short term profit motive, there just is an economic limit to what the capital markets can spend on a bet this big and this risky.
  - worik 2mo ago
    >...it makes the revenue numbers the industry has to hit higher... Yes. But. Industry can miss its revenue targets, Oracle can go bankrupt (looking more and more likely) OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX might find "true value" at about 10% of current valuations (that feels right to me), all that can happen with the associated economic chaos... and still out of it comes world shaping new technology Both things can be true
8note 2mo ago
are open ai, anthropic, zai, deepseek, cursor etc not new players? that benchmark seems like one defined to never be good enough
hexasquid 2mo ago
"Well, actually, vim doesn't make you faster"
rhelz 2mo ago
AI skeptics hate him. Here's how he doubled his productivity using AI with one simple trick. You have to stop thinking like an employee or a worker bee, and start thinking like a boss. Guess what, the work you give your boss isn't 100% gold either. And sometimes you are preoccupied, or tired, so what you deliver isn't the best of all possible deliverables. Sometimes you hallucinate, i.e. you are dead wrong when you think you are dead right. This is the job of a boss: take fallible employees and turn what they produce into something actually valuable. The boss lets the grunts do the grunt work, and then they combine the output together, and do the due diligence, etc etc. It's an entirely new skillset. But learning the new skillset isn't the real blocker--the real blocker is that you've got to stop thinking like a grunt and start thinking like an executive. WHAT is it that you really want to do? Frame that question as clearly and as concretely as you can. Then farm out thee work to human or AI grunts, and be prepared to do your due diligence on the result.
- jgord 2mo ago
  ... theres a lot of anecdotal evidence executives aren't good thinkers. Why not replace all mid-execs with LLMs trained on every MBA textbook and linked-in blog post ? why stop at grunt coders, graphic designers and phone marketeers ? Can we reduce the role of CEO to the following prompt : "make money, by any legal means"
Grombobulous 2mo ago
The last bullet point is the most important. The industry is most hyped about AI so that they can pay software developers $70k instead of paying them $200k. I don’t really agree that AI can’t make development faster, though. What the author describes as the negative AI outcome is blind vibecoding. There are many other ways to use it, and even the basic “enhanced autocomplete” is a net benefit, especially since that functionality is dirt cheap or free.
- pydry 2mo ago
  Not really. The other bullet points are the reality. The last one is the MBA wet dream. We have been programmed to believe that MBA wet dreams are inevitable because "$x hundreds of billions invested can't be wrong" but they very often are.
  - Grombobulous 2mo ago
    I’ll keep in mind how unrealistic that MBA wet dream is while I decide whether to tip my Waymo driver.
    - pydry 2mo ago
      "We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven [autonomously] within three years." - 2013
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
andy99 2mo ago
> Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur. Doesn’t really support the rest of the argument. If you’re a skeptic and think it’s all hype, there’s nothing to worry about.
- Barrin92 2mo ago
  that'd only be true if you have a lot of trust that people care about quality. It's wrong to think of industrialization as only affecting producers. Fast fashion is a good example of this. There's studies on the quality of for example jeans and they've declined over decades. Mid 20th century cotton denim was a lot better than what you can buy now. Animation is another one as many people have noticed, you have movies that have somehow managed to decline in quality but nobody cares because you can churn out ten times as many. The nutritional quality of food has declined for 60 years as ultra-processed and industrially produced foods have taken over. The worst scenario isn't actually that machines are intelligent and you lose your job, it's that they're stupid and you lose your job because in our quantitative glutton culture qualitative judgement is entirely gone to begin with
hax0ron3 2mo ago
>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur. I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.
- jerf 2mo ago
  A "guild field" is not a well-defined matter, but I think it's still the easiest engineering field to sit at home on your personal gear and learn skills that can get you hired in a real job with a future without attending any professional school for the field. In fact the four-year degree you'll get from school is getting increasingly distant from the skills I actually want out of a new grad. It's not impossible to bridge the gap or anything but my transition into the commercial realm in the early 2000s was a cakewalk compared to the sheer number of things I'm asking a new grad to learn as soon as they're settled in at their desk... source control, CI/CD, bug trackers, devops, and that's just the beginning of that list not the end.
  - fwip 2mo ago
    New grads have learnt git and issue trackers as part of standard coursework. Not sure about CI or devops.
  - skydhash 2mo ago
    > In fact the four-year degree you'll get from school is getting increasingly distant from the skills I actually want out of a new grad Those skills are easily taught. But in every run of the mill project I’ve been on, I’ve been really happy about all the maths and other science stuff I’ve been taught at college. It’s easier to grasp the web DOM, React, and git when you already know about trees and the related algorithms. Easier to learn SQL after opening some books on relational theory (basically the first chapter on database theory) and learning about projections. And definitely easier to learn the nature of distributed systems. Learning how to use Bash and Ansible is a walk in the park after that.
wolttam 2mo ago
I think an argument can be made that some software has gotten more secure. I don’t think it can be denied that the models do show an ability to find security vulnerabilities that may have otherwise been missed
hingler36 2mo ago
I have started using AI a bit, but I'm still trying to be careful in that if I ever lose access I can still perform my job at pre-AI ability. My understanding is that tokens are still heavily subsidized, and when that well runs dry I don't want it to be some nightmare to go back to the way I was doing my work in like 2022.
- elgertam 2mo ago
  From my reading on the topic, the tokens are subsidized when considering average cost, but are profitable at marginal cost. Basically, they're super expensive when considering the training cost, but aren't super expensive when doing inference. Since AGI is quite unlikely now, my guess is that we'll see consolidation and will see frontier models released at a slower clip, such that they can pay for training for from the profits from prediction tokens themselves. There may be slight increases in token prices, but there's sufficient competition between Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and X alongside the open weights providers that I don't see huge price increases happening. Even if OpenAI is absorbed into one of the others (which I think is most likely), that would still make token price collusion difficult.
  - lokar 2mo ago
    People keep saying that, but there are no real confirmed numbers. And an incredibly high incentive to lie.
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
rushabh 2mo ago
I agreed right upto the last quote. That made the post political, similar to the ones being written by the AI evangelists. The thing about complex systems is that they are not predictable. Right now the answer is whatever you think is right, and a lot of scenarios seem plausible. It is a fun intellectual moment trying to make sense, but maybe only time will tell how the dynamics work out.
- whateveracct 2mo ago
  it is a political issue though
jansport123 2mo ago
the way i see, LLM's in their current shape are neither good enough to replace software engineers but they have become a necessary part of everyone tool kit. ergo, actual companies themselves aren't getting much benefit because their competitors are using the same tools and they can't fire their human labor either just it's just an extra cost. At my org, i see good engineers use LLM's in wise ways and bad engineers just let it write slop for them. What gets to me is the verbosity and noise though, i consider brevity, and curation to be hallmarks of intelligence but most people at work just spit out so many words in their design docs or code comment these days.
spl757 2mo ago
All AI hallucinates, and therefore is unpredictable and unreliable. 1.5 trillion dollars to prove the obvious. It has no place in production use. IMHO at least. They want so badly to get rid of all of us, and replace us with something that doesn't complain, doesn't have kids, or outside lives or want ick, vacations. Most of you are paycheck to paycheck, statistically speaking, so you have a vested interest in how this all turns out. edit: I get it, it's not a popular opinion. But am I wrong? If the problem of hallucination in AI has been solved, maybe I missed it?
- reverius42 2mo ago
  The "problem" of hallucination has not been solved, and never will be fully solved, because that's just how LLMs work. They're "hallucinating" 100% of the time but we only call it a hallucination when they're wrong. But they're right much more often than they used to be. If you haven't tried a near-Frontier model lately (say, Claude Opus or ChatGPT Sol) you probably need to update your priors for just how often they can be right.
  - spl757 2mo ago
    I only run models I can run locally. Perhaps I'm framing my question incorrectly. AI is being used in contexts that involve life and death. Being right more often is not good enough in that context. If we are going to put AI in drones and have them autonomously acquire and fire on enemies, perhaps the fact that all AI hallucinates at all makes it morally and ethically unusable for purposes in which the stakes are very high, such as life and death. This is what scares me about it. And also what I was able to accomplish air-gapped with a Ryzen 7 and RTX 3060 12GB scared me. This is not the kind of thing we should all have to speculate about, someone should have solid answers. Perhaps the fact that some, and maybe most, AI models are black boxes even to those that trained them, should have been the first red flag and that was years ago.
    - TiredOfLife 2mo ago
      Cars are generally useless. I am using only the ones i make at my house from paper, but it can't be that different.
honeybadger1 2mo ago
it's not as good as the hype, but it's definitely revolutionary. i am still blown away at what I can achieve in 20 minutes with a couple of agents
j45 2mo ago
The reality is new technology that works, will get used for what it best works for. There are things that LLMs remain uniquely suited for, while the echo chambers go for everything. There's no requirement to use new technology. Maybe what you do, or how you do it is just fine, and that's OK. Skepticism today can remind me of someone who went into a cave for 3-4 years with a dated take of LLMs on day 1 and not remember software improves, and LLMs are software. There are no shortage of uniquely working solutions with LLMs if sone seeks to find them, and also the self-validating echo chamber that says that it doesn't if that's desired. Which parts of software development, or how software development may better happen differently with the involvement of AI remains to be seen.
andai 2mo ago
>productivity I recently experienced some cognitive decline due to chronic health issues. This is unfortunate timing because I am shipping a game with online multiplayer for the first time. So "brain works properly" is kind of a basic job requirement! But you work with what you got... Some day I have the energy to do programming "manually", but on many days, the difference between "tasks get done" and "I am just staring at the screen reading the same code over and over again" is "ask the LLM to do it." So I have had to shift my identity from "the guy who does the thing" to "the guy who ensures the thing has been done." That being said, I do check the diffs carefully. (I tried a more hands-off approach a few months ago, and that was a pretty bad idea.) And I've learned to make the diffs as small as possible: more digestible for me, and less room for the AI to go off the rails. Nice bonus to small, well defined changes is that small, fast, cheap models can handle them. (Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all.)
- vogelke 2mo ago
  By checking the diffs carefully, you're showing how to use an LLM to add value instead of creating a 17000-line PR that nobody with any sense will read. LLMs are really good at making it harder to ignore ignorant people, and you've demonstrated that you're NOT part of the problem.
- microflash 2mo ago
  My story is a bit similar. Recently, I broke my wrist due to a fall and have also been suffering from eye strain. I couldn’t spend much time “working” on screen as much as I need. And so I ask LLMs to do a major chunk of work, review and test the changes, course correct things to align with architecture that I’ve outlined and get things done as if I were working normally.
qarl2 2mo ago
The author claims that software has become no more secure - despite the avalanche of security fixes appearing for all software everywhere. Never mind the more subtle issues.
- lproven 2mo ago
  No. "Bots found lots of issues and we fixed those issues" does not mean anyone was exploiting those issues. They may have remained buried forever. The result is not "it's now more secure". The result is at best "it is theoretically more secure."
  - qarl2 2mo ago
    No. Issues don't need to be exploited to exist. As long as the exploit is possible security is impaired. This is not controversial. In the least.
andai 2mo ago
>We should all know by now that code is an input to the software development process and not an output: yet even the most forward-looking organisations still tactitly treat lines of code as a productivity metric What exactly is this referring to? My thinking here is "code is a hypothesis", and you don't know if it's solid or not until it contacts the real world. (And ideally tests, and maybe a proof or two.) And what we're seeing lately is that the hypotheses often get disproven decades later (longstanding kernel bugs etc.)
- skydhash 2mo ago
  Maybe because the actual work is done by the process, which may not even be the code itself, just its compiled form. In this code the code is both a communication tool (between humans) and the input that leads to the process. It's like a group of musicians collaborating on a music sheet. The final valuable form is a concert. The audience won't care about the music sheet. The comments here gush about how they can write more code, but they don't say anything about the quality of the software being built and if they have improved on some points with it (cheaper maintenance, faster reaction to feedback, less bugs overall). Very much like a musician clamoring how he can write a lot more music sheets, but there's no concert in sight to listen to his music.
  - andai 2mo ago
    After reading the code of some of the most beloved games of all time, I think it's pretty safe to say that nobody in the real world actually cares about code quality. (Except modders. Modders will be sad.)
socalgal2 2mo ago
> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. Software has not improved in quality, Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. So this assertion that Software as not improved in quality is arguably if not provably false. There are 1000s of other examples. I have my own. Personal projects that were stopped because of dependency rot, having 100s of bugs fixed, nearly all dependencies removed, and lots of tests added just by asking. I know tons of others with similar experiences > I do not feel like I’m falling behind by not using them Obviously you are correct about "how you feel". But, this argument to me is more like a horse owner claming they don't feel like they're failling behind to trucks that can carry 10x, 100x, 1000x more than their horse. Sure, maybe the horse can go places the truck can't. For most uses the truck is better than the horse. > The LLM-generated PRs I get are still rubbish. I can't argue with that. I haven't seed the LLM-generated PRs "you" get. I can say though the LLM-generated bug reports I've seen are 1000x better than human ones. Human bug report "your software breaks, fix it!". LLM bug report "There is a bug in this specfic part of the code for these specific reasons and here's a repo I wrote to demonstrate the bug. Here's instructions on how to run the repo. There's the code to fix the bug. And, here's a test to show the bug is fixed." Is it perfect? No, sometimes the bug isn't real because the code can only be reached in situtations that can never happen. But still, 7 of 8 times it's a real bug and the bug report are the best I've ever received. you can go through this list: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/150.0/releasenotes/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/150.0/releasenotes/ and for those very few issues not still blocked you can read the examples
- gr_norm 2mo ago
  LLMs are very helpful as a debugging aid, yes, but in large part because the fixes tend to be small and verifiable. That this does not carry over to many other use cases is the crux of the problem. I myself use them to accelerate programming tasks, so I'm not anywhere near as pessimistic as the author, but the claimed multiples of productivity definitely haven't materialized for me.
- qsera 2mo ago
  >Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. A hidden metric here is the number of new bugs created by these fixes. If an LLM creates 10x bugs but create 5x more new bugs, then it is not really an improvement. Because that is 5x more bugs that the user has to observe and report (unless it is a security vulnerability, which the LLMs might detect) before it can be fixed.
wbkang 2mo ago
This is equally as biased as those who claim AI can just code all night autonomously for you. You don't have to use it to generate "fully LLM-generated PRs". It's true GitHub is flooded with poor-quality LLM slop, but that is not the only way to use it. It's ironic the author links to Naur's paper because I use LLMs to dig through code faster, question my assumptions, review my drafts, or generate drafts for my review. It's not because I am bad at it, I used to be very proud of being able to do this better than others. Anyway, this does not lead to more "lines of code" as the author suggests and instead it can lead to higher quality code. FWIW, I also don't believe you can let LLMs make critical judgement by somehow stringing together more LLMs. And I am also not making a claim on whether the $1.5T investment is proportional to its benefits. But to say "industry has nothing to show for it", or to bring up strawmen like "LLM-generated PRs" and "lines of code", makes me question whether the author has tried studying the applications of LLMs.
mrdomino- 2mo ago
> The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur. This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.
wewewedxfgdf 2mo ago
>> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong. This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them. "That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."
- deleted 2mo ago
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- wewewedxfgdf 2mo ago
  And when you show them evidence of the incredible things that can be done they stick their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening. I'm not listening. looping ad infinitum. OR they start saying "Oh yeah, prove it with hard numbers." when nothing about software productivity has ever been able to be proven with hard numbers. It becomes a semantic word game that you cannot win because nothing you say will get them to believe because they don't want to believe. The LLM haters are the most dogmatic of unbelievers. Which I find weird - the greatest fun for me is making a computer do something awesome. I learned to program because I want that outcome. I respect if you love the art and craft of hand programming but it's something else entirely to simply deny that LLM's are what they are - which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year. If you're a hand programmer forever then fine, just don't make a fool of yourself by saying that everyone is lying about LLMs, to justify your choices.
  - glimshe 2mo ago
    > which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year. We've normalized science fiction. Go back 5-10 years and ask anyone whether we'd soon have something like LLMs. If you step back and try to look at LLMs without emotions and politics, you will be blown away by what this thing can do. We're talking to a machine, folks. I just can't believe that LLM haters really like computers or technology, because we haven't seen anything this interesting in decades.
iammrpayments 2mo ago
I have a similar experience that I expected several competitors to popup in my app niche, and so far only one has come up, and after some digging, they already had 8+ apps in another niche that had some overlap, so they would be able to complete the competing one without AI. My apps are also not super complicated.
youre-wrong3 2mo ago
Seems like a lot of people who aren’t very good remain skeptical.
vivzkestrel 2mo ago
- you forgot the biggest and most important point of all! - Everyone and their mother using an LLM is slowly and steadily destroying their brain cells and abilities in the process while creating a learned dependence - Give it about 5 yrs, mark my words. The studies ll come out saying "95% programmers cannot write a hello world without an LLM now" - Now someone smart ll hop in on my comment and bring calculators into the argument and I have answer waiting for them that those do (not able to put a direct link here for some reason)
gitaarik 2mo ago
I wonder how much AI was used by the human submission PRs. Maybe they also just use AI, but just in the way you should: as a tool and not a replacement. And the people that use it in the wrong way are of course much more, making it harder to see the people who are actually benefitting from it.
err4nt 2mo ago
Anecdotally, I've had an iPhone for 15 years, and that whole time I've dreamed of apps - some silly, some useful, that I would tell people "Imagine if there was an app that did x…". In those 15 years I learned to program and built websites and web apps, and built very basic web apps to use on my phone but shipped zero iOS apps. Thanks to Claude, as a hobby, I've built and shipped 4 iOS apps in the last month. None of them are world-changing, but that's 4 in the last month thanks to Claude and zero in the 15 years before it. I'm clearly getting my subscription's worth out of Claude and squeezing more juice out of my own devices. It's a fun hobby! (And I'm sure if I used Android I could do more and customize my own device even more!)
- lookACamel 2mo ago
  > It's a fun hobby! This is what skeptics are missing. The strongest answer to what AI has delivered to society so far is the new, fulfilling hobby of vibecoding. Their disparagement is like being skeptical of the routine, regular investment into iterative improvements in smartphone cameras purely on the basis that you can't pinpoint a specific lump of business process value. The vibecoding is the point. That's what people want and what they are willing to pay for. People like OP have frivolously wasted large chunks of their life writing and maintaining open source code that no valuable businesses really care about, just because they have this dumb hobby of typing out code and thinking about logic. (I'm saying this tongue in cheek.) They, of all people, should be to understand the unlock that AI is for a large swath of humanity.
  - sashank_1509 2mo ago
    Why not pick a hobby like painting or music rather than something ridiculous like VibeCoding. Vicodin as a hobby is like claiming scrolling TikTok or playing the slot machine is a hobby.
deleted 2mo ago
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spicyusername 2mo ago
Its wild people still have this attitude. Like... have you used these tools at all? You don't have to go full vibe coding to see the clear value they provide and its order of magnitude leap over the tools we had before...
The_GreatWorks 2mo ago
LLMs have not improved the output quality of high level engineers — may have increased volume, though. One of the biggest things it has done however is given nontechnical people the ability to code MVPs in a very short amount of time. Yes, the code is ugly, nonsensical, and weird to look at. Can you build quick and dirty prototypes in a few hours? Yes.

130 points by lproven 2mo ago

>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Especially if you replace people with robots that don't need days off and have the people train their replacements.

smokedetector1 2mo ago

idk. I get more stuff done, faster, that I wouldn’t have been able to. You have to use it judiciously and with supervision - I can see how letting it get out of control would negate the benefits. But with good use, its undeniable.

twelve40 2mo ago
the decision i have to make dozens if not hundreds times a day: do i actually look at this crap or trust it blindly and let it slide? I'm honestly reading maybe 20% tops of what "I" produce (and what other people post for my review) I think you do lose skills and understanding that way. Sure, you can always ask the robot to do the tldr for you, but.... yeah, something is still lost, not in a good way.
- smokedetector1 2mo ago
  my way of working is make sure I understand every bit of it. Something is still lost but I feel confident my ability to understand systems is not atrophied at all. And its actually improving because I can crunch through new systems rapidly and have a private tutor. Of course its best supplemented by human team members who actually know whats going on. Its not a panacea. But its incredibly useful
ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
That’s been my experience, too. I’m in the final prep for ship phase of a project that started February. It’s a bottom-to-top rewrite of a project that’s been shipping for two years, and took two years to write, initially. I’m deliberately doing it all with the $20/month ChatGPT sub. After it ships, I’ll move to the $100/month sub; but I want to be able to say that the entire project was done on a low-tier LLM subscription.
mistercheph 2mo ago
your perception is that you get more stuff done faster, and that seems to be the conclusion that most using LLM's come to (including myself): but there are no productivity gains that are externally observable to show for it (yet). That might be because of some lag, but another explanation might be that the tools are really effective at increasing someone's perception of their productivity while net productivity gains measured over long time windows are low or zero. Another explanation might be that the incompetent/negligent users are causing enough harm to nearly neutralize the gains brought by proficient / effective users. I don't know what the explanation is, but there is a mystery in the divergence between users' perceptions of their own productivity, and the observed productivity gains in the economy.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  It would be a weird coincidence if a pretty different way of working turned out to be exactly as productive as the old way, no more and no less. I’m skeptical of these claims. Measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult.
  - mistercheph 2mo ago
    It might be weird, but it might be the result of forces in equilibrium: e.g. one explanation might be that time spent prompting is time spent not improving, or learning, so it would not be surprising then that the productivity gains might be similar in scale to the productivity lost from learning / improvement that never happens. another explanation might be that prompting just delays work that will have to be done later when fixing errors. When encountering an error that the LLM doesn't fix on the first attempt the human-in-the-loop doesn't understand the problem very well: they will either pull the slot machine for a while until they hit lucky, or grit their teeth and sit down to understand what the code is doing in the excruciating and boring detail required to find and solve bugs, which is exactly the work that they had offloaded onto the LLM earlier.
    - wat10000 2mo ago
      Sure, it’s possible. But I don’t see anything that could constrain those things to be of similar magnitude. If they just happen to cancel each other out by luck, that would be pretty strange.
wat10000 2mo ago
It takes some time to learn how to get these systems to work well, and learn what they’re good for. I think people who don’t see the benefits either haven’t dug in enough or haven’t used them for things they’re good at. Do coding agents help me with highly technical work where it’s some deep thought and discussion with coworkers and eventually I change five lines of code? Not really. But I can debug a weird kernel panic or optimizer bug from a standing start in an hour when it would have taken me all day without these tools.
- smokedetector1 2mo ago
  Yeah theyre amazing at debugging. As long as you make sure you genuinely understand everything that comes out of it, and your domain has enough coverage in the LLM training data/context, its an incredible tool.

classictraffic 2mo ago

To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobs https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-not-10x/ https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...

E-Reverance 2mo ago
(March 2026)
- lproven 2mo ago
  Five months ago does not make this some kind of historical document. Although the botlickers will find this hard to believe, nothing has happened this year to make we skeptics -- like me, and like the author of this piece, who is for clarity not me -- change our minds. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Linus and Greg K-H suddenly deciding they like it is not evidence.
  - E-Reverance 2mo ago
    >botlickers > Linus and Greg K-H suddenly deciding they like it is not evidence. You don't seem particularly interested in changing your mind
    - lproven 2mo ago
      I worked out where I stand and why I stand there. I have reasons. I want evidence to consider changing. Why should I? Because someone somewhere found a tool useful? Because they are big names? That's argument from authority. I don't buy it. I need compelling reasons. I have yet to see any. All I see is a lot of people jumping on bandwagons.
      - E-Reverance 2mo ago

E-Reverance 2mo ago

I think the fundamental rebuttal to this is merely that, we’re still so early, the $1.5 trillion number is irrelevant for developing technologies in the same way two women can’t birth a baby in 4.5 months

CoolestBeans 2mo ago
The $1.5 trillion number is extremely relevant because it makes the revenue numbers the industry has to hit higher and there's an expectation to see progress sooner before funding starts getting pulled back.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Given the advances since 2022 why would funding get pulled back? The endgame is replacing all office workers globally and so you get 10% of that market that's that's easily $1 trillion. A competent AI employee replaces a human the same way the car replaced the horse. Businesses will pay more for an AI employee that doesn't get sick or come in hung over over a human one and never goes to sleep. If OpenAI manages to crack that, and capture even 10% of the market globally, that's trillions.
  - CoolestBeans 2mo ago
    Total addressable market doesn't pay interest expenses. Even if this technology really did have the potential to be as revolutionary as the move from the horse to the car, if you can't get there with what the world economy's liquidity can provide then you can't get there. Free cash flow is drying up and data centers depreciate. This creates a limit and if that limit is hit before the profit starts coming in it doesn't matter what the potential could be. Paying back interest is financial gravity and it exists today. And this isn't an appeal to Wall Street's short term profit motive, there just is an economic limit to what the capital markets can spend on a bet this big and this risky.
- worik 2mo ago
  >...it makes the revenue numbers the industry has to hit higher... Yes. But. Industry can miss its revenue targets, Oracle can go bankrupt (looking more and more likely) OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX might find "true value" at about 10% of current valuations (that feels right to me), all that can happen with the associated economic chaos... and still out of it comes world shaping new technology Both things can be true

8note 2mo ago

are open ai, anthropic, zai, deepseek, cursor etc not new players? that benchmark seems like one defined to never be good enough

hexasquid 2mo ago

"Well, actually, vim doesn't make you faster"

rhelz 2mo ago

AI skeptics hate him. Here's how he doubled his productivity using AI with one simple trick. You have to stop thinking like an employee or a worker bee, and start thinking like a boss. Guess what, the work you give your boss isn't 100% gold either. And sometimes you are preoccupied, or tired, so what you deliver isn't the best of all possible deliverables. Sometimes you hallucinate, i.e. you are dead wrong when you think you are dead right. This is the job of a boss: take fallible employees and turn what they produce into something actually valuable. The boss lets the grunts do the grunt work, and then they combine the output together, and do the due diligence, etc etc. It's an entirely new skillset. But learning the new skillset isn't the real blocker--the real blocker is that you've got to stop thinking like a grunt and start thinking like an executive. WHAT is it that you really want to do? Frame that question as clearly and as concretely as you can. Then farm out thee work to human or AI grunts, and be prepared to do your due diligence on the result.

jgord 2mo ago
... theres a lot of anecdotal evidence executives aren't good thinkers. Why not replace all mid-execs with LLMs trained on every MBA textbook and linked-in blog post ? why stop at grunt coders, graphic designers and phone marketeers ? Can we reduce the role of CEO to the following prompt : "make money, by any legal means"

Grombobulous 2mo ago

The last bullet point is the most important. The industry is most hyped about AI so that they can pay software developers $70k instead of paying them $200k. I don’t really agree that AI can’t make development faster, though. What the author describes as the negative AI outcome is blind vibecoding. There are many other ways to use it, and even the basic “enhanced autocomplete” is a net benefit, especially since that functionality is dirt cheap or free.

pydry 2mo ago
Not really. The other bullet points are the reality. The last one is the MBA wet dream. We have been programmed to believe that MBA wet dreams are inevitable because "$x hundreds of billions invested can't be wrong" but they very often are.
- Grombobulous 2mo ago
  I’ll keep in mind how unrealistic that MBA wet dream is while I decide whether to tip my Waymo driver.
  - pydry 2mo ago
    "We should be able to do 90 percent of miles driven [autonomously] within three years." - 2013
deleted 2mo ago
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andy99 2mo ago

> Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur. Doesn’t really support the rest of the argument. If you’re a skeptic and think it’s all hype, there’s nothing to worry about.

Barrin92 2mo ago
that'd only be true if you have a lot of trust that people care about quality. It's wrong to think of industrialization as only affecting producers. Fast fashion is a good example of this. There's studies on the quality of for example jeans and they've declined over decades. Mid 20th century cotton denim was a lot better than what you can buy now. Animation is another one as many people have noticed, you have movies that have somehow managed to decline in quality but nobody cares because you can churn out ten times as many. The nutritional quality of food has declined for 60 years as ultra-processed and industrially produced foods have taken over. The worst scenario isn't actually that machines are intelligent and you lose your job, it's that they're stupid and you lose your job because in our quantitative glutton culture qualitative judgement is entirely gone to begin with

hax0ron3 2mo ago

>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur. I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.

jerf 2mo ago
A "guild field" is not a well-defined matter, but I think it's still the easiest engineering field to sit at home on your personal gear and learn skills that can get you hired in a real job with a future without attending any professional school for the field. In fact the four-year degree you'll get from school is getting increasingly distant from the skills I actually want out of a new grad. It's not impossible to bridge the gap or anything but my transition into the commercial realm in the early 2000s was a cakewalk compared to the sheer number of things I'm asking a new grad to learn as soon as they're settled in at their desk... source control, CI/CD, bug trackers, devops, and that's just the beginning of that list not the end.
- fwip 2mo ago
  New grads have learnt git and issue trackers as part of standard coursework. Not sure about CI or devops.
- skydhash 2mo ago
  > In fact the four-year degree you'll get from school is getting increasingly distant from the skills I actually want out of a new grad Those skills are easily taught. But in every run of the mill project I’ve been on, I’ve been really happy about all the maths and other science stuff I’ve been taught at college. It’s easier to grasp the web DOM, React, and git when you already know about trees and the related algorithms. Easier to learn SQL after opening some books on relational theory (basically the first chapter on database theory) and learning about projections. And definitely easier to learn the nature of distributed systems. Learning how to use Bash and Ansible is a walk in the park after that.

wolttam 2mo ago

I think an argument can be made that some software has gotten more secure. I don’t think it can be denied that the models do show an ability to find security vulnerabilities that may have otherwise been missed

hingler36 2mo ago

I have started using AI a bit, but I'm still trying to be careful in that if I ever lose access I can still perform my job at pre-AI ability. My understanding is that tokens are still heavily subsidized, and when that well runs dry I don't want it to be some nightmare to go back to the way I was doing my work in like 2022.

elgertam 2mo ago
From my reading on the topic, the tokens are subsidized when considering average cost, but are profitable at marginal cost. Basically, they're super expensive when considering the training cost, but aren't super expensive when doing inference. Since AGI is quite unlikely now, my guess is that we'll see consolidation and will see frontier models released at a slower clip, such that they can pay for training for from the profits from prediction tokens themselves. There may be slight increases in token prices, but there's sufficient competition between Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and X alongside the open weights providers that I don't see huge price increases happening. Even if OpenAI is absorbed into one of the others (which I think is most likely), that would still make token price collusion difficult.
- lokar 2mo ago
  People keep saying that, but there are no real confirmed numbers. And an incredibly high incentive to lie.

aaron695 2mo ago

[dead]

rushabh 2mo ago

I agreed right upto the last quote. That made the post political, similar to the ones being written by the AI evangelists. The thing about complex systems is that they are not predictable. Right now the answer is whatever you think is right, and a lot of scenarios seem plausible. It is a fun intellectual moment trying to make sense, but maybe only time will tell how the dynamics work out.

whateveracct 2mo ago
it is a political issue though

jansport123 2mo ago

the way i see, LLM's in their current shape are neither good enough to replace software engineers but they have become a necessary part of everyone tool kit. ergo, actual companies themselves aren't getting much benefit because their competitors are using the same tools and they can't fire their human labor either just it's just an extra cost. At my org, i see good engineers use LLM's in wise ways and bad engineers just let it write slop for them. What gets to me is the verbosity and noise though, i consider brevity, and curation to be hallmarks of intelligence but most people at work just spit out so many words in their design docs or code comment these days.

spl757 2mo ago

All AI hallucinates, and therefore is unpredictable and unreliable. 1.5 trillion dollars to prove the obvious. It has no place in production use. IMHO at least. They want so badly to get rid of all of us, and replace us with something that doesn't complain, doesn't have kids, or outside lives or want ick, vacations. Most of you are paycheck to paycheck, statistically speaking, so you have a vested interest in how this all turns out. edit: I get it, it's not a popular opinion. But am I wrong? If the problem of hallucination in AI has been solved, maybe I missed it?

reverius42 2mo ago
The "problem" of hallucination has not been solved, and never will be fully solved, because that's just how LLMs work. They're "hallucinating" 100% of the time but we only call it a hallucination when they're wrong. But they're right much more often than they used to be. If you haven't tried a near-Frontier model lately (say, Claude Opus or ChatGPT Sol) you probably need to update your priors for just how often they can be right.
- spl757 2mo ago
  I only run models I can run locally. Perhaps I'm framing my question incorrectly. AI is being used in contexts that involve life and death. Being right more often is not good enough in that context. If we are going to put AI in drones and have them autonomously acquire and fire on enemies, perhaps the fact that all AI hallucinates at all makes it morally and ethically unusable for purposes in which the stakes are very high, such as life and death. This is what scares me about it. And also what I was able to accomplish air-gapped with a Ryzen 7 and RTX 3060 12GB scared me. This is not the kind of thing we should all have to speculate about, someone should have solid answers. Perhaps the fact that some, and maybe most, AI models are black boxes even to those that trained them, should have been the first red flag and that was years ago.
  - TiredOfLife 2mo ago
    Cars are generally useless. I am using only the ones i make at my house from paper, but it can't be that different.

honeybadger1 2mo ago

it's not as good as the hype, but it's definitely revolutionary. i am still blown away at what I can achieve in 20 minutes with a couple of agents

j45 2mo ago

The reality is new technology that works, will get used for what it best works for. There are things that LLMs remain uniquely suited for, while the echo chambers go for everything. There's no requirement to use new technology. Maybe what you do, or how you do it is just fine, and that's OK. Skepticism today can remind me of someone who went into a cave for 3-4 years with a dated take of LLMs on day 1 and not remember software improves, and LLMs are software. There are no shortage of uniquely working solutions with LLMs if sone seeks to find them, and also the self-validating echo chamber that says that it doesn't if that's desired. Which parts of software development, or how software development may better happen differently with the involvement of AI remains to be seen.

andai 2mo ago

>productivity I recently experienced some cognitive decline due to chronic health issues. This is unfortunate timing because I am shipping a game with online multiplayer for the first time. So "brain works properly" is kind of a basic job requirement! But you work with what you got... Some day I have the energy to do programming "manually", but on many days, the difference between "tasks get done" and "I am just staring at the screen reading the same code over and over again" is "ask the LLM to do it." So I have had to shift my identity from "the guy who does the thing" to "the guy who ensures the thing has been done." That being said, I do check the diffs carefully. (I tried a more hands-off approach a few months ago, and that was a pretty bad idea.) And I've learned to make the diffs as small as possible: more digestible for me, and less room for the AI to go off the rails. Nice bonus to small, well defined changes is that small, fast, cheap models can handle them. (Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all.)

vogelke 2mo ago
By checking the diffs carefully, you're showing how to use an LLM to add value instead of creating a 17000-line PR that nobody with any sense will read. LLMs are really good at making it harder to ignore ignorant people, and you've demonstrated that you're NOT part of the problem.
microflash 2mo ago
My story is a bit similar. Recently, I broke my wrist due to a fall and have also been suffering from eye strain. I couldn’t spend much time “working” on screen as much as I need. And so I ask LLMs to do a major chunk of work, review and test the changes, course correct things to align with architecture that I’ve outlined and get things done as if I were working normally.

qarl2 2mo ago

The author claims that software has become no more secure - despite the avalanche of security fixes appearing for all software everywhere. Never mind the more subtle issues.

lproven 2mo ago
No. "Bots found lots of issues and we fixed those issues" does not mean anyone was exploiting those issues. They may have remained buried forever. The result is not "it's now more secure". The result is at best "it is theoretically more secure."
- qarl2 2mo ago
  No. Issues don't need to be exploited to exist. As long as the exploit is possible security is impaired. This is not controversial. In the least.

andai 2mo ago

>We should all know by now that code is an input to the software development process and not an output: yet even the most forward-looking organisations still tactitly treat lines of code as a productivity metric What exactly is this referring to? My thinking here is "code is a hypothesis", and you don't know if it's solid or not until it contacts the real world. (And ideally tests, and maybe a proof or two.) And what we're seeing lately is that the hypotheses often get disproven decades later (longstanding kernel bugs etc.)

skydhash 2mo ago
Maybe because the actual work is done by the process, which may not even be the code itself, just its compiled form. In this code the code is both a communication tool (between humans) and the input that leads to the process. It's like a group of musicians collaborating on a music sheet. The final valuable form is a concert. The audience won't care about the music sheet. The comments here gush about how they can write more code, but they don't say anything about the quality of the software being built and if they have improved on some points with it (cheaper maintenance, faster reaction to feedback, less bugs overall). Very much like a musician clamoring how he can write a lot more music sheets, but there's no concert in sight to listen to his music.
- andai 2mo ago
  After reading the code of some of the most beloved games of all time, I think it's pretty safe to say that nobody in the real world actually cares about code quality. (Except modders. Modders will be sad.)

socalgal2 2mo ago

> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. Software has not improved in quality, Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. So this assertion that Software as not improved in quality is arguably if not provably false. There are 1000s of other examples. I have my own. Personal projects that were stopped because of dependency rot, having 100s of bugs fixed, nearly all dependencies removed, and lots of tests added just by asking. I know tons of others with similar experiences > I do not feel like I’m falling behind by not using them Obviously you are correct about "how you feel". But, this argument to me is more like a horse owner claming they don't feel like they're failling behind to trucks that can carry 10x, 100x, 1000x more than their horse. Sure, maybe the horse can go places the truck can't. For most uses the truck is better than the horse. > The LLM-generated PRs I get are still rubbish. I can't argue with that. I haven't seed the LLM-generated PRs "you" get. I can say though the LLM-generated bug reports I've seen are 1000x better than human ones. Human bug report "your software breaks, fix it!". LLM bug report "There is a bug in this specfic part of the code for these specific reasons and here's a repo I wrote to demonstrate the bug. Here's instructions on how to run the repo. There's the code to fix the bug. And, here's a test to show the bug is fixed." Is it perfect? No, sometimes the bug isn't real because the code can only be reached in situtations that can never happen. But still, 7 of 8 times it's a real bug and the bug report are the best I've ever received. you can go through this list: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/150.0/releasenotes/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/150.0/releasenotes/ and for those very few issues not still blocked you can read the examples

gr_norm 2mo ago
LLMs are very helpful as a debugging aid, yes, but in large part because the fixes tend to be small and verifiable. That this does not carry over to many other use cases is the crux of the problem. I myself use them to accelerate programming tasks, so I'm not anywhere near as pessimistic as the author, but the claimed multiples of productivity definitely haven't materialized for me.
qsera 2mo ago
>Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. A hidden metric here is the number of new bugs created by these fixes. If an LLM creates 10x bugs but create 5x more new bugs, then it is not really an improvement. Because that is 5x more bugs that the user has to observe and report (unless it is a security vulnerability, which the LLMs might detect) before it can be fixed.

wbkang 2mo ago

This is equally as biased as those who claim AI can just code all night autonomously for you. You don't have to use it to generate "fully LLM-generated PRs". It's true GitHub is flooded with poor-quality LLM slop, but that is not the only way to use it. It's ironic the author links to Naur's paper because I use LLMs to dig through code faster, question my assumptions, review my drafts, or generate drafts for my review. It's not because I am bad at it, I used to be very proud of being able to do this better than others. Anyway, this does not lead to more "lines of code" as the author suggests and instead it can lead to higher quality code. FWIW, I also don't believe you can let LLMs make critical judgement by somehow stringing together more LLMs. And I am also not making a claim on whether the $1.5T investment is proportional to its benefits. But to say "industry has nothing to show for it", or to bring up strawmen like "LLM-generated PRs" and "lines of code", makes me question whether the author has tried studying the applications of LLMs.

mrdomino- 2mo ago

wewewedxfgdf 2mo ago

>> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong. This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them. "That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
wewewedxfgdf 2mo ago
And when you show them evidence of the incredible things that can be done they stick their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening. I'm not listening. looping ad infinitum. OR they start saying "Oh yeah, prove it with hard numbers." when nothing about software productivity has ever been able to be proven with hard numbers. It becomes a semantic word game that you cannot win because nothing you say will get them to believe because they don't want to believe. The LLM haters are the most dogmatic of unbelievers. Which I find weird - the greatest fun for me is making a computer do something awesome. I learned to program because I want that outcome. I respect if you love the art and craft of hand programming but it's something else entirely to simply deny that LLM's are what they are - which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year. If you're a hand programmer forever then fine, just don't make a fool of yourself by saying that everyone is lying about LLMs, to justify your choices.
- glimshe 2mo ago
  > which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year. We've normalized science fiction. Go back 5-10 years and ask anyone whether we'd soon have something like LLMs. If you step back and try to look at LLMs without emotions and politics, you will be blown away by what this thing can do. We're talking to a machine, folks. I just can't believe that LLM haters really like computers or technology, because we haven't seen anything this interesting in decades.

iammrpayments 2mo ago

I have a similar experience that I expected several competitors to popup in my app niche, and so far only one has come up, and after some digging, they already had 8+ apps in another niche that had some overlap, so they would be able to complete the competing one without AI. My apps are also not super complicated.

youre-wrong3 2mo ago

Seems like a lot of people who aren’t very good remain skeptical.

vivzkestrel 2mo ago

- you forgot the biggest and most important point of all! - Everyone and their mother using an LLM is slowly and steadily destroying their brain cells and abilities in the process while creating a learned dependence - Give it about 5 yrs, mark my words. The studies ll come out saying "95% programmers cannot write a hello world without an LLM now" - Now someone smart ll hop in on my comment and bring calculators into the argument and I have answer waiting for them that those do (not able to put a direct link here for some reason)

gitaarik 2mo ago

I wonder how much AI was used by the human submission PRs. Maybe they also just use AI, but just in the way you should: as a tool and not a replacement. And the people that use it in the wrong way are of course much more, making it harder to see the people who are actually benefitting from it.

err4nt 2mo ago

Anecdotally, I've had an iPhone for 15 years, and that whole time I've dreamed of apps - some silly, some useful, that I would tell people "Imagine if there was an app that did x…". In those 15 years I learned to program and built websites and web apps, and built very basic web apps to use on my phone but shipped zero iOS apps. Thanks to Claude, as a hobby, I've built and shipped 4 iOS apps in the last month. None of them are world-changing, but that's 4 in the last month thanks to Claude and zero in the 15 years before it. I'm clearly getting my subscription's worth out of Claude and squeezing more juice out of my own devices. It's a fun hobby! (And I'm sure if I used Android I could do more and customize my own device even more!)

lookACamel 2mo ago
> It's a fun hobby! This is what skeptics are missing. The strongest answer to what AI has delivered to society so far is the new, fulfilling hobby of vibecoding. Their disparagement is like being skeptical of the routine, regular investment into iterative improvements in smartphone cameras purely on the basis that you can't pinpoint a specific lump of business process value. The vibecoding is the point. That's what people want and what they are willing to pay for. People like OP have frivolously wasted large chunks of their life writing and maintaining open source code that no valuable businesses really care about, just because they have this dumb hobby of typing out code and thinking about logic. (I'm saying this tongue in cheek.) They, of all people, should be to understand the unlock that AI is for a large swath of humanity.
- sashank_1509 2mo ago
  Why not pick a hobby like painting or music rather than something ridiculous like VibeCoding. Vicodin as a hobby is like claiming scrolling TikTok or playing the slot machine is a hobby.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

spicyusername 2mo ago

Its wild people still have this attitude. Like... have you used these tools at all? You don't have to go full vibe coding to see the clear value they provide and its order of magnitude leap over the tools we had before...

The_GreatWorks 2mo ago

LLMs have not improved the output quality of high level engineers — may have increased volume, though. One of the biggest things it has done however is given nontechnical people the ability to code MVPs in a very short amount of time. Yes, the code is ugly, nonsensical, and weird to look at. Can you build quick and dirty prototypes in a few hours? Yes.