I wouldn't want to have to review the output of an agent going wild for an hour.
Now that's the idea anyway. Of course they all will lie to each other and there's hallucinations every step of the way. If you want to see a great example look at the documentation for the TEMU marketplace API. The whole API system, docs, examples etc appears to be vibe coded and lots of nonsensical formatting, methods that don't work and parameters in example that just say "test" or "parameters", but they are presented as working examples with actual response examples (like a normal API) but it largely appears to just be made up!
It’s the worst kind of disposable software.
Both sides have valid observations in their experiences and circumstances. And perhaps this is simply another engineering "it depends" phenomenon.
My skepticism and intuition that AI innovations are not exponential, but sigmoid are not because I don't understand what gradient-descent, transformers, RAG, CoT, or multi-head attention are. My statement of faith is: the ROI economics are going to catch up with the exuberance way before AGI/ASI is achieved; sure, you're getting improving agents for now, but that's not going to justify the 12- or 13-digit USD investments. The music will stop, and improvements slow to a drip
Edit: I think at it's root, the argument is between folk who think AI will follow the same curve as past technological trends, and those who believe "It's different this time".
I did neither of these two things... :) I personally could not care about
- (over)hype
- 12/13/14/15 ... digit USD investment
- exponential vs. sigmoid
There are basically two groups of industry folk:
1. those that see technology as absolutely transformational and are already doing amazeballs shit with it
2. those that argue how it is bad/not-exponential/ROI/...
If I was a professional (I am) I would do everything in my power to learn everything there is to learn (and then more) and join the Group #1. But it is easier to be in Group #2 as being in Group #1 requires time and effort and frustrations and throwing laptop out the window and ... :)
>> ...there are people that are professionals and are willing to put the time in to learn and then there’s vast majority of others who don’t...
tl;dr version: having negative view of the industry is decoupled from one's familiarity with, and usage of the tools, or the willingness to learn.
I hack for a living. I could hardly give two hoots about “false promises” or “hucksters” or some “impeding economic reckoning…” I made a general comment that a whole lot of people simple discount technology on technical grounds (favorite here on HN)…
I’d make the distinction between these systems and what they’re used for. The systems themselves are amazing. What people do with them is pretty mundane so far. Doing the same work somewhat faster is nice, and it’s amazing that computers can do it, but the result is just a little more of the same output.
Your whole point isn't supported by anything but ... a guess?
If given the chance to work with an AI who hallucinates sometimes or a human who makes logical leaps like this
I think I know what I'd pick.
Seriously, just what even? "I can imagine a scenario where AI was involved, therefore I will treat my imagination as evidence."
Remember, a logistic curve is an exponential (so, roughly, a process whose outputs feed its growth, the classic example being population growth, where more population makes more population) with a carrying capacity (the classic example is again population, where you need to eat to be able to reproduce).
Singularity 2026 is open and honest, wearing its heart on its sleeve. It's a much more respectable wrong position.
Just in my office, I have seen “small tools” like Charles Proxy almost entirely disappear. Everyone writes/shares their AI-generated solutions now rather than asking cyber to approve a 3rd party envfile values autoloader to be whitelisted across the entire organization.
I do lower level operating systems work. My bread and butter is bit-packing shenanigans, atomics, large-scale system performance, occasionally assembly language. It’s pretty bad at those things. It comes up with code that looks like what you’d expect, but doesn’t actually work.
It’s good for searching code big codebases. “I’m crashing over here because this pointer has the low bit set, what would do that?” It’s not consistent, but it’s easy to check what it finds and it saves time overall. It can be good for making tests, especially when given an example to work from. And it’s really good for helper scripts. But so far, production code is a no-go for me.
But all the times I tried using LLMs to help me coding, the best it performs is when I give it a sample code (more or less isolated) and ask it for a certain modification that I want.
More often than not, it does make seemingly random mistakes and I have to be looking at the details to see if there’s something I didn’t catch, so the smallest scope there better.
If I ask for something more complex or more broad, it’s almost certain it will make many things completely wrong.
At some point, it’s such a hard work to detail exactly what you want with all context that it’s better to just do it yourself, cause you’re writing a wall of text to have a one time thing.
But anyway, I guess I remain waiting. Waiting until FreeBSD catches up with Linux, because it should be easy, right? The code is there in the Linux kernel, just tell an agent to port it to FreeBSD.
I’m waiting for the explosion of open source software that aren’t bloated and that can run optimized, because I guess agents should be able to optimize code? I’m waiting for my operating system to get better over time instead of worse.
Instead I noticed the last move from WhatsApp was to kill the desktop app to keep a single web wrapper. I guess maintaining different codebases didn’t get cheaper with the rise of LLMs? Who knows. Now Windows releases updates that break localhost. Ever since the rise of LLMs I haven’t seen software release features any faster, or any Cambrian explosion of open source software copying old commercial leaders.
The usefulness of your comment, on the other hand, is beyond any discussion.
"Anyone who disagrees with me is dishonest" is some kindergarten level logic.
Ridiculous statement. Is Google also not good for humanity as a whole? Is Internet not good for humanity as a whole? Wikipedia?
It seems pretty clear to me that culture, politics and relationships are all objectively worse.
Even remote work, I am not completely sure I am happier than when I use to go to the office. I know I am certainly not walking as much as I did when I would go to the office.
Amazon is vastly more efficient than any kind of shopping in the pre-internet days but I can remember shopping being far more fun. Going to a store and finding an item I didn't know I wanted because I didn't know it existed. That experience doesn't exist for me any longer.
Information retrieval has been made vastly more efficient so I instead of spending huge amounts of time at the library, I get that all back in free time. What I would have spent my free time doing though before the internet has largely disappeared.
I think we want to take the internet for granted because the idea that the internet is a long term, giant mistake is unthinkable to the point of almost having a blasphemous quality.
Childhood? Wealth inequality?
It is hard to see how AI as an extension of the internet makes any of this better.
It's a defensible claim I think. Things that people want are not always good for humanity as a whole, therefore things can be useful and also not good for humanity as a whole.
I don't think it's because the audience is different but because the moderators are asleep when Europeans are up. There are certain topics which don't really survive on the frontpage when moderators are active.
This would mean it is because the audience is different.
This fru-fru about how "we all play a part" is only serving to obscure the reality.
There's dang who I've seen edit headlines to match the site rules. Then there's the army of users upvoting and flagging stories, voting (up and down) and flagging comments. If you have some data to backup your sentiments, please do share it - we'd certainly like to evaluate it.
My email exchanges with Dang, as part of the moderation that happens around here, have all been positive
1. I've been moderated, got a slowdown timeout for a while
2. I've emailed about specific accounts, (some egregious stuff you've probably never seen)
3. Dang once emailed me to ask why I flagged a story that was near the top, but getting heavily flagged by many users. He sought understanding before making moderation choices
I will defend HN moderation people & policies 'til the cows come home. There is nothing close to what we have here on HN, which is largely about us being involved in the process and HN having a unique UX and size
Emphasis mine. The question is does the paid moderation team disappear unfavorable posts and comments, or are they merely downranked and marked dead (which can still be seen by turning on showdead in your profile).
When paul graham was more active and respected here, I spoke negatively about how revered he was. I was upvoted.
I also think VC-backed companies are not good for society. And have expressed as much. To positive response here.
We shouldn't shit on one of the few bastions of the internet we have left.
I regret my negativity around pg - he was right about a lot and seems to be a good guy.
The by far more common action is for the mods to restore a story which has been flagged to oblivion by a subset of the HN community, where it then lands on the front page because it already has sufficient pointage
What I'm pointing out is just that moderation isn't the same at different times of the day and that this sometimes can explain what content you see during EU and US waking hours. If you're active during EU daytime hours and US morning hours, you can see the pattern yourself. Tools like hnrankings [1] make it easy to watch how many top-10 stories fall off the front page at different times of day over a few days.
This is what you said. There has only been one until this year, so now we have two.
The moderation patterns you see are the community and certainly have significant time factors that play into that. The idea that someone is going into the system and making manual changes to remove content is the conspiracy theory
These last few years, I've noticed that the tone around AI on HN changes quite a bit by waking time zone.
EU waking hours have comments that seem disconnected from genAI. And, while the US hours show a lot of resistance, it's more fear than a feeling that the tools are worthless.
It's really puzzling to me. This is the first time I noticed such a disconnect in the community about what the reality of things are.
To answer your question personally, genAI has changed the way I code drastically about every 6 months in the last two years. The subtle capability differences change what sorts of problems I can offload. The tasks I can trust them with get larger and larger.
It started with better autocomplete, and now, well, agents are writing new features as I write this comment.