7 ms·

I find it even more sad when people come out of the woodwork on every LLM post to tell us that our positive experiences using LLMs are imagined and we just have

I find it even more sad when people come out of the woodwork on every LLM post to tell us that our positive experiences using LLMs are imagined and we just haven’t realized how bad they are yet.

on_the_train 1y ago
If LLMs were actually useful, there would be no need to scream it everywhere. On the contrary: it would be a guarded secret.
- hobs 1y ago
  I think many devs are guarding their secrets, but the last few decades have shown us that an open foundation can net huge benefits for everyone (and then you can put your secret sauce in the last mile.)
- neuronexmachina 1y ago
  In my experience, devs generally aren't secretive about tools they find useful.
  - fellowniusmonk 1y ago
    People are insane, you can artificially pine for the simpler betters times made up in your mind when you could give oracle all your money. But I would stake my very life on the fact that the movement by developers we call open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created. Of course it inherits from enlightenment and other thinking, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, but it is an extension of the ideologies that came before it. I challenge anyone to come up with any single modern subcultures that has tangibly generated more that touches more lives, moves more weight, travels farther, effects humanity more every single day from the moment they wake up than the open source software community (in the catholic sense obviously). Both in moral goodness and in measurable improvement in standard of living and understanding of the universe. Some people's memories are very short indeed, all who pine pine for who they imagined they were and are consumed by a memetic desire of their imagined selves.
    - badlibrarian 1y ago
      > open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created good lord.
- logsr 1y ago
  posting a plain text description of your experience on a personal blog isn't exactly screaming. in the noise of the modern internet this would be read by nobody if it wasn't coming from one of the most well known open source software creators of all time. people who believe in open source don't believe that knowledge should be secret. i have released a lot of open source myself, but i wouldn't consider myself a "true believer." even so, i strongly believe that all information about AI must be as open as possible, and i devote a fair amount of time to reverse engineering various proprietary AI implementations so that i can publish the details of how they work. why? a couple of reasons: 1) software development is my profession, and i am not going to let anybody steal it from me, so preventing any entity from establishing a monopoly on IP in the space is important to me personally. 2) AI has some very serious geopolitical implications. this technology is more dangerous than the atomic bomb. allowing any one country to gain a monopoly on this technology would be extremely destabilizing to the existing global order, and must be prevented at all costs. LLMs are very powerful, they will get more powerful, and we have not even scratched the surface yet in terms of fully utilizing them in applications. staying at the cutting edge of this technology, and making sure that the knowledge remains free, and is shared as widely as possible, is a natural evolution for people who share the open source ethos.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    If consumer "AI", and that includes programming tools, had real geopolitical implications it would be classified. The "race against China" is a marketing trick to convince senators to pour billions into "AI". Here is who is financing the whole bubble to a large extent: https://time.com/7280058/data-centers-tax-breaks-ai/ https://time.com/7280058/data-centers-tax-breaks-ai/
- alwillis 1y ago
  If LLMs were actually useful, there would be no need to scream it everywhere. On the contrary: it would be a guarded secret. LLMs are useful—but there’s no way such an innovation should be a “guarded secret” even at this early stage. It’s like saying spreadsheets should have remained a secret when they amplified what people could do when they became mainstream.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  If Internet was actually useful there would be no need to scream it everywhere. Guess that means the internet is totally useless?
- brokencode 1y ago
  So ironic that you post this on Hacker News, where there are regularly articles and blog posts about lessons from the industry, both good and bad, that would be helpful to competitors. This industry isn’t exactly Coke guarding its secret recipe.
- deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
halfmatthalfcat 1y ago
Could it not be that those positive experiences are just shining a light that the practices before using an LLM were inefficient? It’s more a reflection on the pontificator than anything.
- jstanley 1y ago
  Tautologically so! That doesn't show that LLMs are useless, it perfectly shows how they are useful.
- johnfn 1y ago
  Sure, but even then the perspective makes no sense. The common argument against AI at this point (e.g. OP) is that the only reason people use it is because they are intentionally trying to prop up high valuations - they seem unable to understand that other people have a different experience than they do. You’d think that just because there are some cases where it doesn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that 100% of it is a sham. At worst it’s just up to individual taste, but that doesn’t mean everyone who doesn’t share your taste is wrong. Consider cilantro. I’m happy to admit there are people out there who don’t like cilantro. But it’s like the people who don’t like cilantro are inventing increasingly absurd conspiracy theories (“Redis is going to add AI features to get a higher valuation”) to support their viewpoint, rather than the much simpler “some people like a thing I don’t like”.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    "Redis for AI is our integrated package of features and services designed to get your GenAI apps into production faster with the fastest vector database."
cratermoon 1y ago
We don't just tell you they were imagined, we can provide receipts. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
- nojito 1y ago
  Cursor is an old way of using LLMs. Not to mention in the study less than 1/2 have ever used it before the study.
  - roywiggins 1y ago
    The AI tooling churn is so fast that by the time a study comes out people will be able to say "well they were using an older tool" no matter what tool that the study used.
    - cratermoon 1y ago
      It's the eternal future. "AI will soon be able to...". There's an entire class of investment scammers that string along their marks, claiming that the big payoff is just around corner while they fleece the victim with the death of a thousand cuts.
    - nojito 1y ago
      Not really. Chatting with a llm was cutting edge for 3 years it’s only within the last 8-10 months with Claude code and Gemini cli do we have the next big change in how we interact with llms
      - roywiggins 1y ago
        Claude Code was released in May.
        nojito 1y ago
        Yup. But they are improvements over what cursor was releasing over the last year or so.
skippyboxedhero 1y ago
Some people got into coding to code, rather than build things. If the AI is doing the coding then that is a threat to some people. I am not sure why, LLMs can be good and you can enjoy coding...those things are unrelated. The logic seems to be that if LLMs are good then coding is less fun, lol.
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  Software jobs pay more than artist jobs because coding builds things. You can still be a code artist on your own time. Nobody is stopping you from writing in assembler.
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people didn't stop playing chess because computers were better at it than them
    - mumbisChungo 1y ago
      And chess players stream as their primary income, because there's no money in Chess unless you're exactly the best player in the world (and even then the money is coming from sponsors/partners, not from chess itself).

I find it even more sad when people come out of the woodwork on every LLM post to tell us that our positive experiences using LLMs are imagined and we just haven’t realized how bad they are yet.

on_the_train 1y ago

If LLMs were actually useful, there would be no need to scream it everywhere. On the contrary: it would be a guarded secret.

hobs 1y ago
I think many devs are guarding their secrets, but the last few decades have shown us that an open foundation can net huge benefits for everyone (and then you can put your secret sauce in the last mile.)
neuronexmachina 1y ago
In my experience, devs generally aren't secretive about tools they find useful.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  People are insane, you can artificially pine for the simpler betters times made up in your mind when you could give oracle all your money. But I would stake my very life on the fact that the movement by developers we call open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created. Of course it inherits from enlightenment and other thinking, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, but it is an extension of the ideologies that came before it. I challenge anyone to come up with any single modern subcultures that has tangibly generated more that touches more lives, moves more weight, travels farther, effects humanity more every single day from the moment they wake up than the open source software community (in the catholic sense obviously). Both in moral goodness and in measurable improvement in standard of living and understanding of the universe. Some people's memories are very short indeed, all who pine pine for who they imagined they were and are consumed by a memetic desire of their imagined selves.
  - badlibrarian 1y ago
    > open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created good lord.
logsr 1y ago
posting a plain text description of your experience on a personal blog isn't exactly screaming. in the noise of the modern internet this would be read by nobody if it wasn't coming from one of the most well known open source software creators of all time. people who believe in open source don't believe that knowledge should be secret. i have released a lot of open source myself, but i wouldn't consider myself a "true believer." even so, i strongly believe that all information about AI must be as open as possible, and i devote a fair amount of time to reverse engineering various proprietary AI implementations so that i can publish the details of how they work. why? a couple of reasons: 1) software development is my profession, and i am not going to let anybody steal it from me, so preventing any entity from establishing a monopoly on IP in the space is important to me personally. 2) AI has some very serious geopolitical implications. this technology is more dangerous than the atomic bomb. allowing any one country to gain a monopoly on this technology would be extremely destabilizing to the existing global order, and must be prevented at all costs. LLMs are very powerful, they will get more powerful, and we have not even scratched the surface yet in terms of fully utilizing them in applications. staying at the cutting edge of this technology, and making sure that the knowledge remains free, and is shared as widely as possible, is a natural evolution for people who share the open source ethos.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  If consumer "AI", and that includes programming tools, had real geopolitical implications it would be classified. The "race against China" is a marketing trick to convince senators to pour billions into "AI". Here is who is financing the whole bubble to a large extent: https://time.com/7280058/data-centers-tax-breaks-ai/ https://time.com/7280058/data-centers-tax-breaks-ai/
alwillis 1y ago
If LLMs were actually useful, there would be no need to scream it everywhere. On the contrary: it would be a guarded secret. LLMs are useful—but there’s no way such an innovation should be a “guarded secret” even at this early stage. It’s like saying spreadsheets should have remained a secret when they amplified what people could do when they became mainstream.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
If Internet was actually useful there would be no need to scream it everywhere. Guess that means the internet is totally useless?
brokencode 1y ago
So ironic that you post this on Hacker News, where there are regularly articles and blog posts about lessons from the industry, both good and bad, that would be helpful to competitors. This industry isn’t exactly Coke guarding its secret recipe.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

halfmatthalfcat 1y ago

Could it not be that those positive experiences are just shining a light that the practices before using an LLM were inefficient? It’s more a reflection on the pontificator than anything.

jstanley 1y ago
Tautologically so! That doesn't show that LLMs are useless, it perfectly shows how they are useful.
johnfn 1y ago
Sure, but even then the perspective makes no sense. The common argument against AI at this point (e.g. OP) is that the only reason people use it is because they are intentionally trying to prop up high valuations - they seem unable to understand that other people have a different experience than they do. You’d think that just because there are some cases where it doesn’t work doesn’t necessarily mean that 100% of it is a sham. At worst it’s just up to individual taste, but that doesn’t mean everyone who doesn’t share your taste is wrong. Consider cilantro. I’m happy to admit there are people out there who don’t like cilantro. But it’s like the people who don’t like cilantro are inventing increasingly absurd conspiracy theories (“Redis is going to add AI features to get a higher valuation”) to support their viewpoint, rather than the much simpler “some people like a thing I don’t like”.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  "Redis for AI is our integrated package of features and services designed to get your GenAI apps into production faster with the fastest vector database."

cratermoon 1y ago

We don't just tell you they were imagined, we can provide receipts. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

nojito 1y ago
Cursor is an old way of using LLMs. Not to mention in the study less than 1/2 have ever used it before the study.
- roywiggins 1y ago
  The AI tooling churn is so fast that by the time a study comes out people will be able to say "well they were using an older tool" no matter what tool that the study used.
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    It's the eternal future. "AI will soon be able to...". There's an entire class of investment scammers that string along their marks, claiming that the big payoff is just around corner while they fleece the victim with the death of a thousand cuts.
  - nojito 1y ago
    Not really. Chatting with a llm was cutting edge for 3 years it’s only within the last 8-10 months with Claude code and Gemini cli do we have the next big change in how we interact with llms
    - roywiggins 1y ago
      Claude Code was released in May.
      - nojito 1y ago
        Yup. But they are improvements over what cursor was releasing over the last year or so.

skippyboxedhero 1y ago

Some people got into coding to code, rather than build things. If the AI is doing the coding then that is a threat to some people. I am not sure why, LLMs can be good and you can enjoy coding...those things are unrelated. The logic seems to be that if LLMs are good then coding is less fun, lol.

Cheer2171 1y ago
Software jobs pay more than artist jobs because coding builds things. You can still be a code artist on your own time. Nobody is stopping you from writing in assembler.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people didn't stop playing chess because computers were better at it than them
  - mumbisChungo 1y ago
    And chess players stream as their primary income, because there's no money in Chess unless you're exactly the best player in the world (and even then the money is coming from sponsors/partners, not from chess itself).