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You can generally understand your AWS cloud usage, and waste can be self evident with their existing tools. Not at all with llms. A postgres index post is unli

by mhitza 1mo ago

You can generally understand your AWS cloud usage, and waste can be self evident with their existing tools. Not at all with llms. A postgres index post is unlikely to reach front page. It's already part if the docs, and should include more context to be read worthy. They are not equal comparison. This before the fact that there is no guarantee that a model follows your agent instructions (plenty of easy to reach for research on it), and you also get suggestions by devs at these companies to wipe parts of your model's instructions because the model is better now tm. If cloud providers change their billing quasi monthly, and if you'd need to fiddle with your indexes every couple of days. I'm not sure we'd be using them as much. There is interesting information about the inference pipeline, but almost too late to the party (by at least a year), and for which audience? Techies understand in broad strokes the tech if they are interested, normies will definitely not read it. All that to say, that yes, it's worth having a laugh. If for nothing else, as a release valve for all the problems they create in the real non-VC world. Anthropic is IPOing in October according to news, you might be interested in investing.

dist-epoch 1mo ago
I thought that software engineers were supposed to do, you know, engineering - solving hard problems, dealing with uncertainty. But you might be right, engineering around the difficult LLM primitive might be a task which is just too hard for your typical software engineer, as you said, they want predictability, hand holding, determinism, most are unable to deal with the real world which is not a spherical cow in a vacuum. So I guess they can stick to simple very well understood primitives like EC2 or Postgres and leave dealing with LLMs for others.
- mhitza 1mo ago
  I'm a pleb developer, don't have the smarts, the prestige or the salary of those working at BigTech. When AI firms ate more than half of global VC private investment in 2025 https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/02/ai-firms-capture-61-percent-of-global-venture-capital-in-2025.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/02/ai-... I would expect better results than what we have today. The most well paid people in the industry brought us here. And "here" is very much as fuzzy as last year with better harnessing towards the local optima. And I say local optima because even the perceived capabilities have slowed down, nevermind the benchmark numbers which are in aggrement. The best paid engineers in the world, with almost no practical budget limit, still deliver shoddy quality software with AI. Is that not fact? And if it is what does that say for the rest of us. You are allowed to believe. I'm still waiting for the beneficial results, not only those that benefit griefters, hackers and scammers. AI has been a huge boon there. Reality will materialize and markets will redress hopefully once they go public. Which they very much seem to be hesitant to do right now.
  - dist-epoch 1mo ago
    > I would expect better results than what we have today. Not sure what your baseline was, if you said 10 years ago "in 2026 you'll be able to describe an app into the microphone, and the computer will write by itself in one day 50k lines of code to implement it, in a language and tech stack of your choosing, costing $200, and it will sort-of-work, and it will be at least as good as a junior-level programmer writing it from the same requirements in 3 months", most people would have said "implausible, that's at least 50 years away"
    - skydhash 1mo ago
      So where’s the value in that description? Something that can justify the mania and size of investment we have currently?
    - mhitza 1mo ago
      Yes, it is very impressive what they can do by recycling copyrighted material. They are more impressive for me when they are not used in agentic contexts. Though that doesn't sell hype anymore to inflate valuation. For more than a year now I was renting a limited GPU server for ~300$/month to learn, experiment, research and build internal tooling around open weight models. Thinking they are tools with potential and buying the exaggerated marketing are different things. My history of comments on HN lands often on both providing what I believe to be my insights working with LLMs and calling out exaggerations, stupid terms of service, and the other mishaps in the field. You are free to browse them if you'd like to see my broader opinion.
focxle 29d ago
[flagged]

by mhitza 1mo ago

dist-epoch 1mo ago

I thought that software engineers were supposed to do, you know, engineering - solving hard problems, dealing with uncertainty. But you might be right, engineering around the difficult LLM primitive might be a task which is just too hard for your typical software engineer, as you said, they want predictability, hand holding, determinism, most are unable to deal with the real world which is not a spherical cow in a vacuum. So I guess they can stick to simple very well understood primitives like EC2 or Postgres and leave dealing with LLMs for others.

mhitza 1mo ago
I'm a pleb developer, don't have the smarts, the prestige or the salary of those working at BigTech. When AI firms ate more than half of global VC private investment in 2025 https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/02/ai-firms-capture-61-percent-of-global-venture-capital-in-2025.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/02/ai-... I would expect better results than what we have today. The most well paid people in the industry brought us here. And "here" is very much as fuzzy as last year with better harnessing towards the local optima. And I say local optima because even the perceived capabilities have slowed down, nevermind the benchmark numbers which are in aggrement. The best paid engineers in the world, with almost no practical budget limit, still deliver shoddy quality software with AI. Is that not fact? And if it is what does that say for the rest of us. You are allowed to believe. I'm still waiting for the beneficial results, not only those that benefit griefters, hackers and scammers. AI has been a huge boon there. Reality will materialize and markets will redress hopefully once they go public. Which they very much seem to be hesitant to do right now.
- dist-epoch 1mo ago
  > I would expect better results than what we have today. Not sure what your baseline was, if you said 10 years ago "in 2026 you'll be able to describe an app into the microphone, and the computer will write by itself in one day 50k lines of code to implement it, in a language and tech stack of your choosing, costing $200, and it will sort-of-work, and it will be at least as good as a junior-level programmer writing it from the same requirements in 3 months", most people would have said "implausible, that's at least 50 years away"
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    So where’s the value in that description? Something that can justify the mania and size of investment we have currently?
  - mhitza 1mo ago
    Yes, it is very impressive what they can do by recycling copyrighted material. They are more impressive for me when they are not used in agentic contexts. Though that doesn't sell hype anymore to inflate valuation. For more than a year now I was renting a limited GPU server for ~300$/month to learn, experiment, research and build internal tooling around open weight models. Thinking they are tools with potential and buying the exaggerated marketing are different things. My history of comments on HN lands often on both providing what I believe to be my insights working with LLMs and calling out exaggerations, stupid terms of service, and the other mishaps in the field. You are free to browse them if you'd like to see my broader opinion.

focxle 29d ago

[flagged]