7 ms·

The first 40 months of the AI era

216 points by jpmitchell 6mo ago

Adam_cipher 6mo ago
[flagged]
sudo_man 6mo ago
Bro but... you now are having a business is planned by a paid chatbot, they can shutdown anytime or make it more expensive, also it is imposiable to get something new, you are copying for somewhere else, maybe what claude is copying is having a copyrights on it, like a leaked code and etc, also your brain will slowly shutdown from thinking about 'business' so you will hevaly relays on claude in the future :) My friend is trying to do the same, the Docker stack he made for his SaaS is really amazing, it is following the standards from the ancient age.
- fnord77 6mo ago
  > you now are having a business is planned by a paid chatbot, they can shutdown anytime or make it more expensive Local models are about 25 months behind the current SOTA. If that holds, businesses won't need the paid models for many things.
  - hadlock 6mo ago
    I suspect you'll (a small-medium business) be able to buy a Claude 4.6-class rack mount device for $6000 by 2030 that does 100 t/s with 1 million token context, which honestly, is probably adequate for an office (front office, back office, executive tier etc) of 10-300 unless you've got more than 4 engineers on staff. That kind of offline device is going to push everyone to provide that kind of cloud-enabled baseline service at very low cost. The Qwen 3.5 series is already showing you can almost (but not quite) squeeze that kind of performance out of consumer hardware. 256/512gb consumer video cards will get us there, eventually, if capacity ever catches up with demand.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
twentyprsaday 6mo ago
[dead]
aidos 6mo ago
> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.
- maxbeech 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - KetoManx64 6mo ago
    100% Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust. Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
    - nextaccountic 6mo ago
      An idea is to have the AI ingest your templates, it might be useful
    - skydhash 6mo ago
      Cognitive overload? For me, it’s easier to construct a mental model of the thing than have a full (sometime complex) example which may not necessarily be valid and/or on point. And as I’ve been exploring some foundational ideas of computing, you can do away with a lot of complexity in modern development.
  - nunez 6mo ago
    basically readme driven development at that point.
- ares623 6mo ago
  And just like that, a new term has been coined.
H8crilA 6mo ago
Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?
- furyofantares 6mo ago
  My comment history is months of me pointing it out about articles here. You're just not noticing it, it's everywhere and is extremely obvious to me. It's possible I should envy you, I'm not sure.
- htnthrow11220 6mo ago
  I see it all the time in basically every form of text communication. What makes you think you are not seeing it?
  - bonoboTP 6mo ago
    I found that many people don't have a radar for this. They may know about delve, emdashes, tapestry, multifaceted or "not just X but y" and if these are not there they don't see it.
    - dag100 6mo ago
      They probably don't care enough to notice the tells. I think that it's generally those ambivalent, skeptical or opposed to AI who notice, while those who wholeheartedly support AI see no reason to differentiate between it and humans and so do not even try to.
      - bonoboTP 6mo ago
        I don't think it's that simple. I'm not blanket opposed to it. I'm more along the lines of the author of the article. Use it for what it's good at, sift through unstructured info, convert information from one format to another, implement things that are planned out well with iterations and feedback, etc, and generally mapping out the capabilities. I think those who are very opposed to AI often don't know much about the real limitations since they don't use it, and their complaints are often a year or more out of date. I think the ideal demographic for spotting these are people who use the frontier LLMs a lot and they also have worked with text in detail, such as copywriters, people who have learned foreign languages and grammar etc., have edited articles for language and generally have a more "wordsmith" look at language and are sensitive to flow and rhythm of language on a more technical level.
ivanjermakov 6mo ago
> 40 months Not counting from 1971s DARPA? Sorry I'm allegric when LLMs being called AI like nothing existed before it.
- KellyCriterion 6mo ago
  Could the "LLM" of 1971 DARPA produce working code that it translated from a legacy codebase to Java and this within a short timeframe? ;-)
- dr_dshiv 6mo ago
  Doesn’t it all look like child’s play though?
- CamperBob2 6mo ago
  You would need to go back to McCullough, Pitts and von Neumann in the 1940s if you wanted to talk about where it really got started. The 1970s were a long, dark AI winter, thanks to FUD spread by Minsky and Papert. A lot of recent work could have been done back then despite the lack of good hardware, as seen in the other HN story where the guy trained a transformer on a PDP-11. But the whole field was radioactive after their book came out.
insin 6mo ago
*LLM
tkgally 6mo ago
Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.
- 3abiton 6mo ago
  It's funny you mention that. The only difference is sometimes you need a functionality without doing the plumbing. At the end of the day if you're getting the output you need, the process doesn't matter. It's an interesting analogy but only works if the inspector is another expert dev.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    When I have such moment and I take a step back, there’s usually a strong hint that there’s a meta problem behind those instances. And while you have to chose when to take the time to solve such problem, it’s usually worth it.
    - 3abiton 6mo ago
      I wish I could always take the time to do things right, but in reality, time is extremely scarce resource. It's when these AI agent help the most.
- heavyset_go 6mo ago
  An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad. Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc. I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We should honestly critique AI generated content, used either in-whole or in-part with human creations. If the inclusion of AI content botched your article, saying so should be socially acceptable. We saw some of this here on HN. It used to be that when AI content would be submitted here, it was a social faux pas to even mention it was LLM generated, same thing with LLM generated comments, no matter how obvious it was. Mentioning a comment was AI was socially verboten and you'd be finger-wagged at. Eventually, AI fatigue caused the community to discount Show HN entries, submissions and comments, and the signal to noise ratio could no longer be ignored. Now, turn on showdead. Those same comments, that users were expected to interact with as if they were made in good faith by real people, litter every submission's comment section. These comments objectively hurt discussion and it's a good thing they're shadowbanned. Culturally, I hope we can reach a point where critique of AI content, including code, doesn't brand critics as haters, Luddites, or worse, and stifle conversation about what our communities really value and want.
OrangePilled 6mo ago
This is a sound personal assessment. The section about being "glazed" into action resonates. Hidden within this concept I think is something profound about human motivation, innuendo and all. > AI generated prose is at best boring, and at worst genuinely unappealing. I’m continually tempted, because in theory it should work well. The AI has perfect spelling and grammar, has more than enough context to produce article-length content, and can do in seconds what takes me hours. I have a thesis in mind...that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own.
- lstodd 6mo ago
  > that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own. Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.
oceanplexian 6mo ago
> (The) Output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology. The style isn’t a limit of the technology, it’s a limit of the lobotomized models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.
- looshch 6mo ago
  > The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing. would you mind sharing some examples please?
pugchat 6mo ago
[dead]
theteapot 6mo ago
> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.
- LAC-Tech 6mo ago
  Yeah I get this impression too. AI feels like it's papering over overwrought and badly designed frameworks, tech stacks with far too many things in them, and also the decline of people creating or advocating for really expressive languages. Pragmatic sure, but we're building a tower of chairs here rather than building ladders like a real engineering field.
- jmalicki 6mo ago
  My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.
  - yks 6mo ago
    But that documentation itself is likely AI-generated
    - jmalicki 6mo ago
      At least it saves me from having to generate the docs myself!
  - MichaelZuo 6mo ago
    Why continue involvement with a project that clearly devalues their “customers” or “users” who care about documentation?
Hekkova 6mo ago
I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game changer for sure.
- andai 6mo ago
  Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Whereas my friends can just say... yeah add a phaser effect to the synth and it just does it.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.
    - conception 6mo ago
      I think that’s where software engineering is not quite getting what’s happening right now. People keep asking where are the apps?where all this great code? And the answer is becoming that people aren’t building apps to sell to other people. They’re building the apps that they themselves want to use. I’ve made dozens of apps that I have no interest in distributing or using outside of friends and family. The AI coding revolution is already here and it’s not in production software so much as it is in bespoke small group applications.
      - Bombthecat 6mo ago
mergeshield 6mo ago
[flagged]
_bernays_sauce 6mo ago
The Gartner hype cycle has 5 phases: tech trigger (6 months - 2 years), peak of inflated expectations (6 months - 2 years ), the slope of enlightenment (2 - 5 years), and the plateau of productivity (5+ years), and the slope of decline (Obsolescence which noone talks about). If we are in fact at the 40th month then we are either approaching the peak of inflated expectations, the slope of enlightenment, or the plateau of productivity. I would say we are probably approaching the peak of inflated expectations. We are constantly hearing the symptoms of the 'This Time is Different' Syndrome from people saying the old rules don’t apply which is the classic sign the peak is approaching. The average financial bubble bursts after 3 years, however the dot-com bubble burst 5 years after peak and the housing bubble took 3-4 years. We are probably in the “bubble mania” phase right now because of all the irrational exuberance. Ride the Lightning!
deadbabe 6mo ago
The stupid thing is that instead of using AI to give ourselves 1 hour work days, we’re just cramming more work into the same amount of time we’ve always worked.
- senfiaj 6mo ago
  Yeah, I think this is always the case. We get more powerful tools that do the same thing in 5th amount of time, now we are asked to do 5x more. Capitlalism.
  - Bombthecat 6mo ago
    Without this, we wouldn't had bigger apartments, houses etc.
    - deadbabe 6mo ago
      There is a housing shortage.
SloppyDrive 6mo ago
The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things. We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a distributed team, and for the worse with a skill-diverse team. Thats before you get into the cultural flaws of favored destinations like India. So we have been able to argue things like add one local + ai is better than about 20-100 Indians, depending on role and business structure needed to manage low-competence low-trust "developers". So we are planning to completely on-shore in the near future. The bean counters are happy, and the quality of the work is improving.
- trenchgun 6mo ago
  Yes this + also APIs! Due to LLMs needing APIs suddenly things that were strictly behind GUI can easily opened up for programmatic use. Double edged sword, due to infosec etc concerns, but sure is nice for personal productivity automation.
- dyauspitr 6mo ago
  But 3 Indians + AI means they don’t need any of you at all. This won’t go well in the long run.
  - SloppyDrive 6mo ago
    Perhaps in the long run there will be very few developers globally; but in the short term, I see less and less use for the whole idea of low-cost outsourcing. The historical value of a low cost region is get crap work for few dollars. "Just barely good enough". AI can do this by itself. If you add AI to poor work, you get more extremely shit work for less dollars. If you add AI to a skilled worker you get a large volume of OK to poor work. Basically my suspicion is as the tools improve they make low skill regions obsolete first.
    - dyauspitr 6mo ago
gobdovan 6mo ago
Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks. Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the request, it feels more personal. It is also very interesting that most LLMs respond like a normal person when you talk to them directly, but suddenly adopt the more annoying blogger speech patterns when you tell them 'create content'.
- scared_together 6mo ago
  > I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. Why not read the original news? Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large. Why has it become more appealing to have a "content creator" turn 5 phrases of news into a 12 minute video and then have an LLM convert it back, rather than reading the 5 phrases?
  - gobdovan 6mo ago
    It's not that it's appealing. For example, I wanted to learn how to bend notes on harmonica, but it wasn't working. That's not something you can really understand without video, yet most tutorials are 5-15 minutes long and only show the actual technique at some random point in ~30 seconds (just search 'how to bend on harmonica' and see). So I take the transcript t check whether it's a method I've already tried or something new worth watching, and I also get an extra explainer of the technique in text. Also, with videos like "what X said about situation Y in discourse Z". Sometimes you're just curious, and you can't realistically extract that efficiently from a full one-hour speech on a geolocked, untranscribed mass-media website, so it's easier to summarize the transcript of the 12 min video directly. As for why everything is 12 minutes long, it's most likely because content creation isn't optimized to teach you anything or be useful, it's optimized to maximize watch time so platforms can serve more ads to you. The pattern is: I got you intrigued in something; you want the answer? pay me your time.
jofzar 6mo ago
> I remember the first time I vibe-coded a small project. It was an app that generated placeholder cards for my MTG collection. I prompted the bot (now Claude, not ChatGPT)..... I would be interested what date this was? I am surprised if it's been recent that Claude didn't 1 shot this.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
A solution looking for a problem Marketers present a list of potential problems The smallest success stories are marketed as indicators of future success, but to verify this, one must wait patiently for the future to arrive
maxbeech 6mo ago
[flagged]
Devasta 6mo ago
A big part of the benefit of AI has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with leading point haired bosses around. They won't approve needed refactorings but promise to integrate AI and suddenly budget is no problem, just add an easily removable chatbot afterward and you're golden. I think we'll find that for most AI stuff.
jeremie_strand 6mo ago
[dead]
holoduke 6mo ago
The internet as we know it is dead. Websites will seize to exist in 2 years from now. On the fly UIs will be generated. Tailored exactly to your ad profile. Content will be either AI slop that's better than humans can ever make or products that are a perfect fit for your spendable part of your wallet
- k33d 6mo ago
  what a load of nonsense
mergeshield 6mo ago
[flagged]
dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago
I basically agree with the practical conclusion: > For now at least I’m keeping my Claude Pro subscription, but given the persistant rumors of undisclosed rate limiting, and ever improving performance of local LLMs, I can easily imagine that I’ll cancel my subscription before the end of the year.
Amekedl 6mo ago
I worry about just becoming a product user. Some people push Claude and Claude Code at work, weights are closed, even Claude Code is completely closed and proprietary. If terms, which Anthropic controls, ever change, all work and time spent on these products will be for naught. No, I don’t think any skills or knowledge is acquired by the use of these tools can be reliably translated to another tool / model. Hence I firmly think it’s utter nonsense rubbish to engage with that, and even Qwen3.5-Coder-Next plus OpenCode spits out working apps. Really, do better product users.
sdevonoes 6mo ago
All my colleagues that feel super productive pushing code written by LLMs share the same traits: they never really cared much about quality. And nowadays nobody wants to review their code/docs because it’s just painful. Heck, not even they are reviewing their supposedly own stuff. PRs with dozens of changes the author doesn’t even understand? Won’t touch that. An RFC of 30 pages of which the author didn’t write a single line? Won’t read that And they write hundreds of MD files (for skills) that never break. No sense of accountability.
justonepost2 6mo ago
shortly after humans are economically irrelevant (unemployable), they will be existentially irrelevant (dead) a system that can allocate all the atoms / energy better than all of mankind won't eternally exist to coddle hairless apes
vanessafriedman 6mo ago
[dead]

216 points by jpmitchell 6mo ago

[flagged]

Bro but... you now are having a business is planned by a paid chatbot, they can shutdown anytime or make it more expensive, also it is imposiable to get something new, you are copying for somewhere else, maybe what claude is copying is having a copyrights on it, like a leaked code and etc, also your brain will slowly shutdown from thinking about 'business' so you will hevaly relays on claude in the future :) My friend is trying to do the same, the Docker stack he made for his SaaS is really amazing, it is following the standards from the ancient age.

fnord77 6mo ago
> you now are having a business is planned by a paid chatbot, they can shutdown anytime or make it more expensive Local models are about 25 months behind the current SOTA. If that holds, businesses won't need the paid models for many things.
- hadlock 6mo ago
  I suspect you'll (a small-medium business) be able to buy a Claude 4.6-class rack mount device for $6000 by 2030 that does 100 t/s with 1 million token context, which honestly, is probably adequate for an office (front office, back office, executive tier etc) of 10-300 unless you've got more than 4 engineers on staff. That kind of offline device is going to push everyone to provide that kind of cloud-enabled baseline service at very low cost. The Qwen 3.5 series is already showing you can almost (but not quite) squeeze that kind of performance out of consumer hardware. 256/512gb consumer video cards will get us there, eventually, if capacity ever catches up with demand.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

twentyprsaday 6mo ago

[dead]

aidos 6mo ago

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

maxbeech 6mo ago
[flagged]
- KetoManx64 6mo ago
  100% Over the years I've amassed hundreds of code boilerplate snippets/templates that I would copy and paste and the modify, and now they're all just sitting in Obsidian gathering dust. Why would I waste my time copying and pasting when I can just have Claude generate me basic ansible playbooks on the spot in 30 seconds.
  - nextaccountic 6mo ago
    An idea is to have the AI ingest your templates, it might be useful
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    Cognitive overload? For me, it’s easier to construct a mental model of the thing than have a full (sometime complex) example which may not necessarily be valid and/or on point. And as I’ve been exploring some foundational ideas of computing, you can do away with a lot of complexity in modern development.
- nunez 6mo ago
  basically readme driven development at that point.
ares623 6mo ago
And just like that, a new term has been coined.

H8crilA 6mo ago

Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?

furyofantares 6mo ago
My comment history is months of me pointing it out about articles here. You're just not noticing it, it's everywhere and is extremely obvious to me. It's possible I should envy you, I'm not sure.
htnthrow11220 6mo ago
I see it all the time in basically every form of text communication. What makes you think you are not seeing it?
- bonoboTP 6mo ago
  I found that many people don't have a radar for this. They may know about delve, emdashes, tapestry, multifaceted or "not just X but y" and if these are not there they don't see it.
  - dag100 6mo ago
    They probably don't care enough to notice the tells. I think that it's generally those ambivalent, skeptical or opposed to AI who notice, while those who wholeheartedly support AI see no reason to differentiate between it and humans and so do not even try to.
    - bonoboTP 6mo ago
      I don't think it's that simple. I'm not blanket opposed to it. I'm more along the lines of the author of the article. Use it for what it's good at, sift through unstructured info, convert information from one format to another, implement things that are planned out well with iterations and feedback, etc, and generally mapping out the capabilities. I think those who are very opposed to AI often don't know much about the real limitations since they don't use it, and their complaints are often a year or more out of date. I think the ideal demographic for spotting these are people who use the frontier LLMs a lot and they also have worked with text in detail, such as copywriters, people who have learned foreign languages and grammar etc., have edited articles for language and generally have a more "wordsmith" look at language and are sensitive to flow and rhythm of language on a more technical level.

ivanjermakov 6mo ago

> 40 months Not counting from 1971s DARPA? Sorry I'm allegric when LLMs being called AI like nothing existed before it.

KellyCriterion 6mo ago
Could the "LLM" of 1971 DARPA produce working code that it translated from a legacy codebase to Java and this within a short timeframe? ;-)
dr_dshiv 6mo ago
Doesn’t it all look like child’s play though?
CamperBob2 6mo ago
You would need to go back to McCullough, Pitts and von Neumann in the 1940s if you wanted to talk about where it really got started. The 1970s were a long, dark AI winter, thanks to FUD spread by Minsky and Papert. A lot of recent work could have been done back then despite the lack of good hardware, as seen in the other HN story where the guy trained a transformer on a PDP-11. But the whole field was radioactive after their book came out.

insin 6mo ago

*LLM

tkgally 6mo ago

Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.

3abiton 6mo ago
It's funny you mention that. The only difference is sometimes you need a functionality without doing the plumbing. At the end of the day if you're getting the output you need, the process doesn't matter. It's an interesting analogy but only works if the inspector is another expert dev.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  When I have such moment and I take a step back, there’s usually a strong hint that there’s a meta problem behind those instances. And while you have to chose when to take the time to solve such problem, it’s usually worth it.
  - 3abiton 6mo ago
    I wish I could always take the time to do things right, but in reality, time is extremely scarce resource. It's when these AI agent help the most.
heavyset_go 6mo ago
An important aspect of comparison is that nobody is going to tell you that your surgery is noticeable or looks bad. Your friends, family, partners, coworkers, aren't going to say anything, neither are people you meet casually, certainly not service workers, strangers aren't going to pull you aside to tell you the truth about your nose job, etc. I hope the same social taboo doesn't transfer over to AI content. We should honestly critique AI generated content, used either in-whole or in-part with human creations. If the inclusion of AI content botched your article, saying so should be socially acceptable. We saw some of this here on HN. It used to be that when AI content would be submitted here, it was a social faux pas to even mention it was LLM generated, same thing with LLM generated comments, no matter how obvious it was. Mentioning a comment was AI was socially verboten and you'd be finger-wagged at. Eventually, AI fatigue caused the community to discount Show HN entries, submissions and comments, and the signal to noise ratio could no longer be ignored. Now, turn on showdead. Those same comments, that users were expected to interact with as if they were made in good faith by real people, litter every submission's comment section. These comments objectively hurt discussion and it's a good thing they're shadowbanned. Culturally, I hope we can reach a point where critique of AI content, including code, doesn't brand critics as haters, Luddites, or worse, and stifle conversation about what our communities really value and want.

OrangePilled 6mo ago

This is a sound personal assessment. The section about being "glazed" into action resonates. Hidden within this concept I think is something profound about human motivation, innuendo and all. > AI generated prose is at best boring, and at worst genuinely unappealing. I’m continually tempted, because in theory it should work well. The AI has perfect spelling and grammar, has more than enough context to produce article-length content, and can do in seconds what takes me hours. I have a thesis in mind...that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own.

lstodd 6mo ago
> that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own. Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

oceanplexian 6mo ago

> (The) Output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology. The style isn’t a limit of the technology, it’s a limit of the lobotomized models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.

looshch 6mo ago
> The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing. would you mind sharing some examples please?

pugchat 6mo ago

[dead]

theteapot 6mo ago

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.

LAC-Tech 6mo ago
Yeah I get this impression too. AI feels like it's papering over overwrought and badly designed frameworks, tech stacks with far too many things in them, and also the decline of people creating or advocating for really expressive languages. Pragmatic sure, but we're building a tower of chairs here rather than building ladders like a real engineering field.
jmalicki 6mo ago
My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.
- yks 6mo ago
  But that documentation itself is likely AI-generated
  - jmalicki 6mo ago
    At least it saves me from having to generate the docs myself!
- MichaelZuo 6mo ago
  Why continue involvement with a project that clearly devalues their “customers” or “users” who care about documentation?

Hekkova 6mo ago

I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game changer for sure.

andai 6mo ago
Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Whereas my friends can just say... yeah add a phaser effect to the synth and it just does it.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  Have they shipped anything that people are using? The concerns are different and creating something usable by people is why software engineering exists.
  - conception 6mo ago
    I think that’s where software engineering is not quite getting what’s happening right now. People keep asking where are the apps?where all this great code? And the answer is becoming that people aren’t building apps to sell to other people. They’re building the apps that they themselves want to use. I’ve made dozens of apps that I have no interest in distributing or using outside of friends and family. The AI coding revolution is already here and it’s not in production software so much as it is in bespoke small group applications.
    - Bombthecat 6mo ago

mergeshield 6mo ago

[flagged]

_bernays_sauce 6mo ago

The Gartner hype cycle has 5 phases: tech trigger (6 months - 2 years), peak of inflated expectations (6 months - 2 years ), the slope of enlightenment (2 - 5 years), and the plateau of productivity (5+ years), and the slope of decline (Obsolescence which noone talks about). If we are in fact at the 40th month then we are either approaching the peak of inflated expectations, the slope of enlightenment, or the plateau of productivity. I would say we are probably approaching the peak of inflated expectations. We are constantly hearing the symptoms of the 'This Time is Different' Syndrome from people saying the old rules don’t apply which is the classic sign the peak is approaching. The average financial bubble bursts after 3 years, however the dot-com bubble burst 5 years after peak and the housing bubble took 3-4 years. We are probably in the “bubble mania” phase right now because of all the irrational exuberance. Ride the Lightning!

deadbabe 6mo ago

The stupid thing is that instead of using AI to give ourselves 1 hour work days, we’re just cramming more work into the same amount of time we’ve always worked.

senfiaj 6mo ago
Yeah, I think this is always the case. We get more powerful tools that do the same thing in 5th amount of time, now we are asked to do 5x more. Capitlalism.
- Bombthecat 6mo ago
  Without this, we wouldn't had bigger apartments, houses etc.
  - deadbabe 6mo ago
    There is a housing shortage.

SloppyDrive 6mo ago

The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things. We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a distributed team, and for the worse with a skill-diverse team. Thats before you get into the cultural flaws of favored destinations like India. So we have been able to argue things like add one local + ai is better than about 20-100 Indians, depending on role and business structure needed to manage low-competence low-trust "developers". So we are planning to completely on-shore in the near future. The bean counters are happy, and the quality of the work is improving.

trenchgun 6mo ago
Yes this + also APIs! Due to LLMs needing APIs suddenly things that were strictly behind GUI can easily opened up for programmatic use. Double edged sword, due to infosec etc concerns, but sure is nice for personal productivity automation.
dyauspitr 6mo ago
But 3 Indians + AI means they don’t need any of you at all. This won’t go well in the long run.
- SloppyDrive 6mo ago
  Perhaps in the long run there will be very few developers globally; but in the short term, I see less and less use for the whole idea of low-cost outsourcing. The historical value of a low cost region is get crap work for few dollars. "Just barely good enough". AI can do this by itself. If you add AI to poor work, you get more extremely shit work for less dollars. If you add AI to a skilled worker you get a large volume of OK to poor work. Basically my suspicion is as the tools improve they make low skill regions obsolete first.
  - dyauspitr 6mo ago

gobdovan 6mo ago

Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks. Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the request, it feels more personal. It is also very interesting that most LLMs respond like a normal person when you talk to them directly, but suddenly adopt the more annoying blogger speech patterns when you tell them 'create content'.

scared_together 6mo ago
> I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. Why not read the original news? Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large. Why has it become more appealing to have a "content creator" turn 5 phrases of news into a 12 minute video and then have an LLM convert it back, rather than reading the 5 phrases?
- gobdovan 6mo ago
  It's not that it's appealing. For example, I wanted to learn how to bend notes on harmonica, but it wasn't working. That's not something you can really understand without video, yet most tutorials are 5-15 minutes long and only show the actual technique at some random point in ~30 seconds (just search 'how to bend on harmonica' and see). So I take the transcript t check whether it's a method I've already tried or something new worth watching, and I also get an extra explainer of the technique in text. Also, with videos like "what X said about situation Y in discourse Z". Sometimes you're just curious, and you can't realistically extract that efficiently from a full one-hour speech on a geolocked, untranscribed mass-media website, so it's easier to summarize the transcript of the 12 min video directly. As for why everything is 12 minutes long, it's most likely because content creation isn't optimized to teach you anything or be useful, it's optimized to maximize watch time so platforms can serve more ads to you. The pattern is: I got you intrigued in something; you want the answer? pay me your time.

jofzar 6mo ago

> I remember the first time I vibe-coded a small project. It was an app that generated placeholder cards for my MTG collection. I prompted the bot (now Claude, not ChatGPT)..... I would be interested what date this was? I am surprised if it's been recent that Claude didn't 1 shot this.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

A solution looking for a problem Marketers present a list of potential problems The smallest success stories are marketed as indicators of future success, but to verify this, one must wait patiently for the future to arrive

maxbeech 6mo ago

[flagged]

Devasta 6mo ago

A big part of the benefit of AI has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with leading point haired bosses around. They won't approve needed refactorings but promise to integrate AI and suddenly budget is no problem, just add an easily removable chatbot afterward and you're golden. I think we'll find that for most AI stuff.

jeremie_strand 6mo ago

[dead]

holoduke 6mo ago

The internet as we know it is dead. Websites will seize to exist in 2 years from now. On the fly UIs will be generated. Tailored exactly to your ad profile. Content will be either AI slop that's better than humans can ever make or products that are a perfect fit for your spendable part of your wallet

k33d 6mo ago
what a load of nonsense

mergeshield 6mo ago

[flagged]

dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago

I basically agree with the practical conclusion: > For now at least I’m keeping my Claude Pro subscription, but given the persistant rumors of undisclosed rate limiting, and ever improving performance of local LLMs, I can easily imagine that I’ll cancel my subscription before the end of the year.

Amekedl 6mo ago

I worry about just becoming a product user. Some people push Claude and Claude Code at work, weights are closed, even Claude Code is completely closed and proprietary. If terms, which Anthropic controls, ever change, all work and time spent on these products will be for naught. No, I don’t think any skills or knowledge is acquired by the use of these tools can be reliably translated to another tool / model. Hence I firmly think it’s utter nonsense rubbish to engage with that, and even Qwen3.5-Coder-Next plus OpenCode spits out working apps. Really, do better product users.

sdevonoes 6mo ago

All my colleagues that feel super productive pushing code written by LLMs share the same traits: they never really cared much about quality. And nowadays nobody wants to review their code/docs because it’s just painful. Heck, not even they are reviewing their supposedly own stuff. PRs with dozens of changes the author doesn’t even understand? Won’t touch that. An RFC of 30 pages of which the author didn’t write a single line? Won’t read that And they write hundreds of MD files (for skills) that never break. No sense of accountability.

justonepost2 6mo ago

shortly after humans are economically irrelevant (unemployable), they will be existentially irrelevant (dead) a system that can allocate all the atoms / energy better than all of mankind won't eternally exist to coddle hairless apes

vanessafriedman 6mo ago

[dead]