lowsong

6 ms·

31.
by lowsong 3mo ago
I don’t think “I know plenty of people who commit fraud anyway so who cares if it’s right” is the ringing endorsement of AI you think it is.
32.
by lowsong 3mo ago
> I think close to 100% of new ambitious projects are going to leverage AI at least to some degree. Once the free money dries up that number will rapidly tend towards 0%. > So how much AI usage does it make it an “AI rewrite”? Any amo
33.
by lowsong 3mo ago
That "nearly" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. It doesn't matter if your AI model is 99% or 99.99% accurate. For a tax return it has to be perfect every time or someone is at best getting a fine or at worst going to
34.
by lowsong 3mo ago
Ironically it is you who is most at risk from the direction this is taking. When this house of cards collapses, AI research dries up, and companies pivot to the next hype cycle there will be a generation of people left with atrophied skills
35.
by lowsong 3mo ago
Why do all arguments from AI boosters boil down to this same cycle: A new model is released, AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time, and all criticism is shrugged off as "not up to date&quot
36.
by lowsong 3mo ago
It's obvious to more people every day that "AI" has never delivered on what it promised. Until now nobody cared because the costs were cheap and it pays to appear cutting edge. Now the price is rising, and the delayed cost of
37.
by lowsong 3mo ago
> we thank ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok for tirelessly traversing the combinatorial space of this manuscript. This is a premise so fanciful this might as well start with "assume a goose that lays golden eggs" that's t
38.
by lowsong 3mo ago
Tried what? Using LLMs to produce software? I'd say the industry has collectively "tried" to do this for a while now and the results have been an unmitigated disaster. Yes, we should "give up" on using LLMs, but cer
39.
by lowsong 3mo ago
What AI does is the exact polar opposite of "democratizing". We're going from a world where high-quality learning content is plastered all over the internet for free, where open-source projects are desperate for contributors
40.
by lowsong 3mo ago
> They don’t even need to be deterministic checks - a shell script that wraps a `claude -p` - and maybe fetches some online resources to stuff into the context - can do your agent’s legal check for it. No. It can't. If you think tha
41.
by lowsong 4mo ago
Yes connect the 3rd party company with a vested interest to capture as much of your data as possible with a direct pipe into all your internal sensitive discussions about your product, business, and market positioning in real time. Has ever
42.
by lowsong 5mo ago
> outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself > I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before With respect, this is what makes me worry. If someone is a user
43.
by lowsong 6mo ago
So? The research on AI is showing again and again that people that use AI are losing their skills not just in the specific task but more generally. This isn't a "change of skills" it's a fundamental reduction in the skil
44.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> With my newly-acquired superpowers I could knock out the last two pieces in a few days’ work From the linked post:[0] > I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March,
45.
by lowsong 6mo ago
We're not talking about replacing "writing code", we're talking about replacing your ability to think about the problems critically at all.
46.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> None of this requires new technology. It requires treating the database as a defensive layer that assumes the caller might be wrong, might retry, and might not be watching the results. This is one of those takes that is so close to u
47.
by lowsong 6mo ago
Any company that has become dependant on AI will struggle to survive from here on. By the time many teams realise it'll be too late.
48.
by lowsong 6mo ago
At least it'll make it easy to audit and replace it all in a few years.
49.
by lowsong 6mo ago
I'm going to take your comment at face value, and I'm also going to assume that you're US-based. You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-payche
50.
by lowsong 6mo ago
The median per capita income in the United States is $37,683/year.[0] Depending on your state, after taxes, that's something like ~$2,600/month. You're asking almost 10% of their post-tax income to this just for the opp
51.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening
52.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites." Your definition only supports my point. The transfer o
53.
by lowsong 6mo ago
AI has none of these things. 1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better. 2. This is only true if it act
54.
by lowsong 6mo ago
On a SWE salary maybe. If the baseline cost of doing business is a $5k GPU you've excluded like a quarter of the US working population immediately.
55.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the
56.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> What you're missing is that fewer and fewer projects are going to need a ton of technical depth. > I have friends who'd never written a line of code in their lives who now use multiple simple vibe-coded apps at work daily.
57.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> However, code quality is becoming less and less relevant in the age of AI coding, and to ignore that is to have our heads stuck in the sand. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. It's the opposit
58.
by lowsong 6mo ago
> agents aren’t going away Why not? Once the true cost of token generation is passed on to the end user and costs go up by 10 or 100 times, and once the honeymoon delusion of "oh wow I can just prompt the AI to write code" fade
59.
by lowsong 6mo ago
I worry people are lacking context about how SaaS products are purchased if they think LLMs and "vibe coding" are going to replace them. It's almost never the feature set. Often it's capex vs opex budgeting (i.e., it&#x2
60.
by lowsong 7mo ago
There's little to no evidence that companies are actually doing layoffs to focus on "AI-enabled" work. All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI"

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