As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it
I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?
Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?
They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.
or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes.
(edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)
Of course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're doing a moral good, or is their mind just a nonstop stream of "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"?
I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.
I wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces.
Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.
There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics are subcategories of marketing. It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something for money.
To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it should be highly regulated.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
The difference being that this site is built for this kind of exchange, and parent poster is engaging exactly in the way it is designed for.
A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.
it's true. persuasion is the immoral core of marketing. personally i believe everyone should hate persuasion too but nobody will listen to me when i try to compel them!
Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.
Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!
"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.
Yes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing.
But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.
I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.
Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.
All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
Just to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."
you just replied to a comment with an unsolicited advert of your website less than 2 weeks ago. you are running a banner with a discount on your website where you also solicit testimonials. you have a dedicated youtube channel and facebook for your company. you advertise yourself on gearspace. your HN username is even an advertisement for your company.
outreach, discount sales, testimonials, business pages are all marketing. "purest form of evil" unless you're doing it i guess.
(or, perhaps, there's some nuance to be had instead of proclaiming marketing in general to be one of the "purest forms of evil in existence"...? )
There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation
Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.
There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.
But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.
I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.
In which they put a bold faced text overlay across the thumbnail and make sure to include at least one algospeak self-censorship asterisk („sh*t“). Bonus points if the word wasn’t even a curse word.
I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.
Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.
let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.
I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).
It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.
I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.
But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.
The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.
The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).
But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.
Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.
I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.
If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.
> Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?
There are several other examples that come to mind, of prolific and respected developers turning to AI-based workflow and ever since then just constantly producing mediocre content and code. The spark is gone, the taste, the genius - whatever you call it, the human quality that made them interesting in the first place. Sure they may be more "productive" superficiallly, but they all sound the same now. Any other decent dev with access to a corporate code-generation service can get basically the same result.
False dichotomy much? The tools can be force multiplying without being “100x productivity boosting,” which I’ve never once heard claimed except from critics.
This is a good observation. Antirez is one my favorite authors and software developers. I'm 100% sure he could have made the same Redis PR and ds4 (or something else) without LLMs in about the same time with the same quality or higher.
> They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code
If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?
Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.
The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.
If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.
> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.
I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.
My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.
I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.
I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.
i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
as a note, i found this particularly funny:
"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.
> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
>i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.
The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.
I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.
Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.
FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.
LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012
- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around
- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)
- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)
- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)
That's just off the top of my head.
I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Surely you're kidding right?
You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.
My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right.
While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down.
Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do.
It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.
I tried to have multiple models convert a simple textmate grammar to a vim one, and none of them could do it. They couldn't even use the right names between the regex matches and the color definitions. I tried for about 30 minutes. It took me about 5
I tried having them work on a LSP. The fact I got a one shot half working autocomplete based on my existing work was cool, but again, they flailed on incredibly simple things like file path normalization / converting from a URI and I had to rewrite a decent amount of code. I don't think I saved any time
People keep throwing this out there but I keep wondering where are the receipts? I am seeing less interesting software released, anecdotally I know, since AI has taken hold, than before.
Did you try providing it documentation for the respective formats (via browsing/tool use or input to the prompt)? And were you using a modern thinking model from Anthropic or OpenAI?
The crucial breakdown here sounds like either lack of proper context/harness or insufficiently capable model (there's a huge gulf between GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8/Fable class models and anything not from the big three) or both.
You know, people could just put their money where their mouth is. IE go build something amazing instead of talking endlessly about how they're going to build amazing stuff. That's why this feels like so much theatre.
That's exactly what the people in my orbit and whom I'm watching are doing, and some of their outputs are fueling the excitement.
If you aren't seeing remarkable things being done with this tech, I'd argue you aren't looking hard enough. I understand there's a lot of noise obscuring the signal, but that's always the case with a "big thing."
Also this is a remarkable (and realistic) evaluation of where these systems are for general work which speaks to both the room to grow as well as the pace: https://www.remotelabor.ai/
The first link is openai, who uh, might be a little biased.
The second link looks lab-sponsored.
The third link is a blog post of a lot of hype and little substance. (I tried fable twice and I was unimpressed)
I'd love to see an example of something someone made that is not affiliated with these corporations.
The thing is, I imagine there ARE examples, AI isn't completely useless, but the amount of signal around this vs the hype noise is out of control. My guess is 99% of what's built with AI is useful to approximately one person. When I hear AI boosters talk it sounds like there's an entire economy of billion dollar corporations I never noticed, and then I usually found out someone got excited because they prompted Claude to make a flight simulator (where the plane flies sideways)
It’s very subjective, so there’ll be endless debates about this. It’s a speed boost, to some that is amazing to others it’s bleh.
All my examples are private which also probably applies to many other folks here. In my personal projects and friends stealth startups that are greenfield, the boost is 5-10x for coding. For my midsized enterprise employer, we have tracking of over a hundred diverse projects and the average reduction in dev years to completion is about 50%. Not 10x, but not chump change either.
You know, even before AI whenever I heard someone be like "my business idea is so revolutionary I MUST KEEP IT A SECRET" my eyes would roll out of my head. I promise you, your ideas are not nearly as amazing as you think they are and absolutely nobody wants to steal them.
I find that thinking/agent mode sometimes makes it worse/comes up with the same thing and just takes a long time. But I’m sure it’ll be different with fable for a few months until that hype blows over
Something a lot of folks struggling with these systems don't get is that the instruction and management of them is often quite important - just because they're capable doesn't mean they're mind readers.
Most of the skepticism I encounter on this front is due to lack of proper direction, process involving planning and review before execution, and appropriate attention given to evaluation and feedback loops.
If you asked the smartest person in the world to YOLO a task with the sort of instruction the average denier uses to evaluate an LLM, you'd likely find they wouldn't get back what they were expecting either - and if you're evaluating on subpar models/tools, you shouldn't be surprised to get subpar results.
I asked Qwen 3.7 pro to create a C# project that takes a string and reverses it, with a single file WASM target. It spun wheels for over 30 minutes and got nothing.
I use LLMs all the time to help me diagnose bugs and work through my designs, but again and again, I am super unimpressed by their coding abilities. I can see how in some cases with a proper harness they probably do a decent job at certain tasks, but almost everything I try to do, they flail.
Qwen is a lightweight locally hosted model that's many months behind the SoTA available from the big three - while the crowd here (myself included) is excited for locally hosted models to catch up to the usable baseline, regardless of what benchmarks you based that selection on they aren't there yet.
This seems to be a very generic/common response to any ai critique. It kind of reinforces my point there’s a lot of situations where the appropriate harness isn’t some agent that’s set to ultra high thinking mode. Chat mode gives the better response and answers the question more quickly
That's fair, I do agree that you don't need a harness or ultra-high thinking mode for many problems. Many folks evaluate without those things on a task that would benefit from them leading to the sort of attitudes in this article and its comments section, which is where my comment was coming from.
If you're just saying different tools are best suited for different problems, apologies - that's my take as well.
The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines."
I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
Offline models are becoming increasingly more capable - merely a few years ago it would've been unthinkable to run the LLM I have on my phone even on my MacBook Pro.
Are you suggesting that losing electricity in the modern age (entirely absent AI) doesn't upend one's world?
You seem to be saying "we should avoid this thing because we'll become dependent on it," but we're highly dependent on all manners of technology for all sorts of things and would seem to be better for it.
> "I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it."
While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.
I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.
I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.
Totally agree that the lack of a common base of evaluation is terrible for the discussion, and benchmaxing only contributes to this.
The only way to get a sense for these systems is to use them on things you know well, and everyone knows different things at different levels.
People also tend to underestimate how fast this is moving and base their take on dated and subpar systems for a variety of reasons, a key one being that the firehose is too big for any one person to have a proper focus on all of it.
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" and met with "try the new model!" Then, once level heads actually put the claims to the test and find it wanting, criticism is met with "you're just not using it right, you have to learn how to prompt/context/loop engineer for best results" until the next model comes out and this argument repeats.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the baseline for "best" shifts as better tech comes out, but that doesn't make dated models any less capable than they were when they came out.
Skeptics continue to move the goalposts on what constitutes this mattering, but the fact that frontier systems are making novel maths & sciences discoveries and I can run an LLM on my phone for simple tasks that would've been unthinkable a few years ago are testaments to the directionality of the tech.
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 and lingering addiction and psychosis. The most flexible will bounce back just fine, but many will never recover from this damage.
Seriously I've been on a sabbatical and have no pressure to use AI. I keep trying on my compiler and for coding they flail so hard every time. I love how good they are at helping me diagnose bugs, it's so much better than scouring google like I used to hoping for some result that matches what I'm seeing. Even then, they hallucinate all the time and just say odd things that don't make sense. As soon as you ask them something obscure they just.... merp
This sounds like you may be using subpar models and/or tools - have you had this experience using Codex with GPT-5.5 on at least "high" reasoning or on Claude Code using Opus 4.8 (both with ability to browse web and sufficient context for your project)?
They're literally doing novel research. The smartest mathematicians in the world couldn't solve Erdős' planar unit distance problem for 80 years, and OpenAI's models knocked that out a couple months ago.
This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.
I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical.
The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.
As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com .
Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights).
----
My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er).
I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin.
Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.
Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM.
The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.
Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.
> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).
Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.
> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.
> The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy.
This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.
Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.
I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap:
interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project.
I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.
Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you.
For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.
Same here. Little side projects and convenience tooling for $day_job that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten built for lack of time. Doesn’t need to be perfect, beautiful code for an audience of one. It just needs to work.
There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.
I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
Elena is one of those people who was loudest about AI on other channels and now she writes this when, as you say, there’s a demand for articles like this.
Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products.
For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is).
To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.
from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.
llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.
> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day.
Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one.
Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later:
> And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.
I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence.
I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.).
We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.
I did find the bit about ChatGPT's crappy prose amusing because while that may feel like it's a good benchmark for the state of AI, the quality of prose doesn't necessarily correlate with the major progress made over the last few years which is in post-training.
"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH."
Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.
She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss.
Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist.
No one is working on changing that. Anyone?
Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard?
We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
- I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them
- I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore
- I don't try to debug
The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.
Just today I wanted to add to my nvim setup some validation for Kubernetes YAML. Asked Claude why it wasn’t looking at schemas correctly. After 30 minutes of prompts and nudges, during which it went on multiple wild goose chases, I just gave up and did it myself.
Other times I did have more success but it’s not rare to encounter this infinite loop style drill-down, which ultimately wastes more time than if I did it myself from the beginning.
>>> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart
>> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow
> So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
That's ungracious, at best. Your interpretation is something close to the
death of the position, while theirs is the moderate interpretation of "causes chaos".
It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha".
The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day".
Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?
I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool.
And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.
As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it.
That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul.
AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh.
Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.
I have watched people interact with chatbots. It's like watching someone pulling a guinea worm out of their leg. I don't know where all that confidence come from.
Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?
Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.
What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.
Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.
AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.
In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.
This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!
Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years.
The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude.
This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.
AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.
Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.
It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory.
Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.
This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
That's good to hear. I do think you should benefit more from the increased value created, but it sounds like it's actually made a significant difference to you.
People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.
Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.
No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.
Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.
> What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic.
Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days.
Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end.
First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point.
Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.
It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.
First, we have this section:
But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Then immediately after:
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.
> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.
But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it
I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?
Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
People seek out services when a need arises. Marketers' job to invent new needs that didn't exist before
Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?
They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
>I wonder how most of them sleep at night.
i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.
or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes.
(edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)
Of course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're doing a moral good, or is their mind just a nonstop stream of "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"?
8 hours a day, 5 days a week is a pretty significant chunk of your life. It is a part of your identity, if the word identity means anything.
Unless you are severed, of course.
They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins
Marketing salaries are not high at all
Makes sense—what’s their address?
I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.
I wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces.
Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.
There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
I love this observation and this thread in general.
100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.
Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics are subcategories of marketing. It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something for money.
To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think it should be highly regulated.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
The difference being that this site is built for this kind of exchange, and parent poster is engaging exactly in the way it is designed for.
A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.
it's true. persuasion is the immoral core of marketing. personally i believe everyone should hate persuasion too but nobody will listen to me when i try to compel them!
Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.
Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...
"We have this thing that's awesome that we can convince people to buy" eventually becomes "We can convince people to buy". It's unfortunate that "convince people to buy" can be successfully used independently of the quality or appropriateness of the item being sold.
Yes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing.
But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.
I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.
Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.
All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
I'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.
I literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.
Just to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."
you just replied to a comment with an unsolicited advert of your website less than 2 weeks ago. you are running a banner with a discount on your website where you also solicit testimonials. you have a dedicated youtube channel and facebook for your company. you advertise yourself on gearspace. your HN username is even an advertisement for your company.
outreach, discount sales, testimonials, business pages are all marketing. "purest form of evil" unless you're doing it i guess.
(or, perhaps, there's some nuance to be had instead of proclaiming marketing in general to be one of the "purest forms of evil in existence"...? )
Why does your username contain “APU”?
There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
Funny, the video is on a service of the biggest advertiser in the world.
there would be nobody in his audience without some sort of marketing ...
One of the few times the video is easier to digest than text is comedy like this.
Ah, the plea for sanity dollar! Huge Market!
Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
Incredible, Bill Hicks on HN. My life has come full circle.
Ironically Bill smoked like a chimney and for that we can also largely thank marketers.
Sounds very much like the South Park bit when they call the guy selling jewellery to the elderly via teleshopping!
Drink Coke
The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation
Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.
There is a guy on YouTube who did very thorough and well-done presentations on airliner crashes and mishaps and one of the reasons they were so good was that he was a very experienced pilot himself. He was able to give deep insight into the technical details, the industry, and the challenges that pilots face. He always talked at length about those in the context of the incident he was covering, which was how his videos were so much more interesting compared to your typical "accident documentaries" thrown together by outside amateurs which are frankly the majority of videos in this space on YouTube.
But since the last year or so, I can't watch him anymore. He sold his channel (and his brand, literally himself) to some kind of YouTube content company and the videos he puts out now are just not watchable. From what I can tell, he mainly does only the presentation now, with only a minor amount of editorializing. Other people seem to do everything else. The visualizations are impressive but the video title/thumbnails are pure click-bait (to the point of being factually false), the videos are WAY longer than they need to be, and he'll repeat the SAME information multiple times just to stretch the time out to 45 minutes to an hour.
I like a good story, but it's really hard to pad out most disaster videos into that amount of time unless you have something more to offer than say, "well, the official crash investigation said this and that." His videos now feel a lot more like those old Discovery Channel documentaries that were basically surface-level filler content in between the ads.
The good thing is that it's steadily ruining shorts.
“But first, we need to understand how we got here.”
In which they put a bold faced text overlay across the thumbnail and make sure to include at least one algospeak self-censorship asterisk („sh*t“). Bonus points if the word wasn’t even a curse word.
I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.
Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.
Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende
It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.
1) cool people do cool things, start a scene
2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word
3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass
4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.
5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs
Burning Man?
sort of, the same people that ruined tech also ruined burning man.
You should have just said quick example: Windows
I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.
It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.
Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.
Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.
Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?
Marketeers sounds like a great word for the worst of them. The ones that take over a functioning market and burn it for profit
let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.
> how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies [..]
Trigger warning. Could not finish that sentence.
Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.
I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).
It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.
I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.
But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.
The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.
The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).
But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.
Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.
I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.
If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.
This is also the dichotomy I'm seeing. This meme sums it up https://fixupx.com/danhockenmaier/status/2021617680525172840
I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.
> Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.
You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.
Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?
There are several other examples that come to mind, of prolific and respected developers turning to AI-based workflow and ever since then just constantly producing mediocre content and code. The spark is gone, the taste, the genius - whatever you call it, the human quality that made them interesting in the first place. Sure they may be more "productive" superficiallly, but they all sound the same now. Any other decent dev with access to a corporate code-generation service can get basically the same result.
False dichotomy much? The tools can be force multiplying without being “100x productivity boosting,” which I’ve never once heard claimed except from critics.
This is a good observation. Antirez is one my favorite authors and software developers. I'm 100% sure he could have made the same Redis PR and ds4 (or something else) without LLMs in about the same time with the same quality or higher.
> They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code
If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?
Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.
The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.
If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.
> their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs
You think this a clever gotcha but it's not because no one was generating PRs before LLMs.
> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing
There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.
In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.
That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work.
Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.
The problem is that these people are left untreated because that is what people at power can exploit.
This is social collapse.
I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.
My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.
I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.
I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.
>Show me something truly life changing.
i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
as a note, i found this particularly funny:
"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.
> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
>how people tell them AI changed their life
yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.
People are chucking trillions into data centers and AI. It’s the end of work, or that they don’t write code anymore.
Every week there is some new method to make LLMs produce code, ranging from Langchain, MCP, Agents, Ralph loops, gas town, just loops.
You are stating its hyperbole, when people are walking around without closing their laptops, or are awake all night running agents.
>i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.
AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate
Yes. However this one is a bit weird.
Every software purchase process I have been involved in I have asked the vendor to demonstrate their claims against our requirements.
With AI, I am expected to defend myself from claims that my requirements are wrong.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.
The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.
I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.
Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing",
I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.
I think this is very domain-specific.
FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.
LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!
It's held to that standard because of the hype. Literally the boosters can't stop saying "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"
- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012
- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around
- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)
- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)
- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)
That's just off the top of my head.
I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?
> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
Surely you're kidding right?
You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.
Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.
I don’t consider myself a wizard.
You seem a little full of yourself. (That’s putting it charitably. You seem full of shit.)
Blender was life changing for me, both when I first discovered it and still today.
> It’s doing more harm than good.
For context
Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right.
While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down.
Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do.
It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.
I tried to have multiple models convert a simple textmate grammar to a vim one, and none of them could do it. They couldn't even use the right names between the regex matches and the color definitions. I tried for about 30 minutes. It took me about 5
I tried having them work on a LSP. The fact I got a one shot half working autocomplete based on my existing work was cool, but again, they flailed on incredibly simple things like file path normalization / converting from a URI and I had to rewrite a decent amount of code. I don't think I saved any time
People keep throwing this out there but I keep wondering where are the receipts? I am seeing less interesting software released, anecdotally I know, since AI has taken hold, than before.
Did you try providing it documentation for the respective formats (via browsing/tool use or input to the prompt)? And were you using a modern thinking model from Anthropic or OpenAI?
The crucial breakdown here sounds like either lack of proper context/harness or insufficiently capable model (there's a huge gulf between GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8/Fable class models and anything not from the big three) or both.
You know, people could just put their money where their mouth is. IE go build something amazing instead of talking endlessly about how they're going to build amazing stuff. That's why this feels like so much theatre.
That's exactly what the people in my orbit and whom I'm watching are doing, and some of their outputs are fueling the excitement.
If you aren't seeing remarkable things being done with this tech, I'd argue you aren't looking hard enough. I understand there's a lot of noise obscuring the signal, but that's always the case with a "big thing."
Can you share concrete examples of the outputs that are fueling your excitement?
This was pretty cool, knocking out a problem that the best minds in maths couldn't for 80 years: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...
Also this is a remarkable (and realistic) evaluation of where these systems are for general work which speaks to both the room to grow as well as the pace: https://www.remotelabor.ai/
For some practical examples of what the leading consumer grade AI can do, Ethan Mollick consistently has great writeups with demos: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-...
The first link is openai, who uh, might be a little biased.
The second link looks lab-sponsored.
The third link is a blog post of a lot of hype and little substance. (I tried fable twice and I was unimpressed)
I'd love to see an example of something someone made that is not affiliated with these corporations.
The thing is, I imagine there ARE examples, AI isn't completely useless, but the amount of signal around this vs the hype noise is out of control. My guess is 99% of what's built with AI is useful to approximately one person. When I hear AI boosters talk it sounds like there's an entire economy of billion dollar corporations I never noticed, and then I usually found out someone got excited because they prompted Claude to make a flight simulator (where the plane flies sideways)
It’s very subjective, so there’ll be endless debates about this. It’s a speed boost, to some that is amazing to others it’s bleh.
All my examples are private which also probably applies to many other folks here. In my personal projects and friends stealth startups that are greenfield, the boost is 5-10x for coding. For my midsized enterprise employer, we have tracking of over a hundred diverse projects and the average reduction in dev years to completion is about 50%. Not 10x, but not chump change either.
You know, even before AI whenever I heard someone be like "my business idea is so revolutionary I MUST KEEP IT A SECRET" my eyes would roll out of my head. I promise you, your ideas are not nearly as amazing as you think they are and absolutely nobody wants to steal them.
I find that thinking/agent mode sometimes makes it worse/comes up with the same thing and just takes a long time. But I’m sure it’ll be different with fable for a few months until that hype blows over
Something a lot of folks struggling with these systems don't get is that the instruction and management of them is often quite important - just because they're capable doesn't mean they're mind readers.
Most of the skepticism I encounter on this front is due to lack of proper direction, process involving planning and review before execution, and appropriate attention given to evaluation and feedback loops.
If you asked the smartest person in the world to YOLO a task with the sort of instruction the average denier uses to evaluate an LLM, you'd likely find they wouldn't get back what they were expecting either - and if you're evaluating on subpar models/tools, you shouldn't be surprised to get subpar results.
I asked Qwen 3.7 pro to create a C# project that takes a string and reverses it, with a single file WASM target. It spun wheels for over 30 minutes and got nothing.
I use LLMs all the time to help me diagnose bugs and work through my designs, but again and again, I am super unimpressed by their coding abilities. I can see how in some cases with a proper harness they probably do a decent job at certain tasks, but almost everything I try to do, they flail.
Qwen is a lightweight locally hosted model that's many months behind the SoTA available from the big three - while the crowd here (myself included) is excited for locally hosted models to catch up to the usable baseline, regardless of what benchmarks you based that selection on they aren't there yet.
This seems to be a very generic/common response to any ai critique. It kind of reinforces my point there’s a lot of situations where the appropriate harness isn’t some agent that’s set to ultra high thinking mode. Chat mode gives the better response and answers the question more quickly
That's fair, I do agree that you don't need a harness or ultra-high thinking mode for many problems. Many folks evaluate without those things on a task that would benefit from them leading to the sort of attitudes in this article and its comments section, which is where my comment was coming from.
If you're just saying different tools are best suited for different problems, apologies - that's my take as well.
> no brainer
An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!
The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines."
I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
And if you can’t see the difference between those things, you’ll probably never know.
> I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.
But does your world stop when the phone is out of power? And does every task require a roundtrip to the internet?
Offline models are becoming increasingly more capable - merely a few years ago it would've been unthinkable to run the LLM I have on my phone even on my MacBook Pro.
Are you suggesting that losing electricity in the modern age (entirely absent AI) doesn't upend one's world?
You seem to be saying "we should avoid this thing because we'll become dependent on it," but we're highly dependent on all manners of technology for all sorts of things and would seem to be better for it.
> "I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it."
While I think the person you are responding to has made a low quality comment, I will say that it is very, very revealing that so many AI advocates actually seem proud of their absence of basic math skills.
Never said I was bad at math, but I am aware of the fact that computers can do math better and faster than me - and with our powers combined...
lol, they literally said nothing about their math skills
I should use it to read and vote on HN comments so that I don't have to waste time doing that myself.
You’re absolutely right! This would save so much time.
Sent from my Claude Code
I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.
I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.
Totally agree that the lack of a common base of evaluation is terrible for the discussion, and benchmaxing only contributes to this.
The only way to get a sense for these systems is to use them on things you know well, and everyone knows different things at different levels.
People also tend to underestimate how fast this is moving and base their take on dated and subpar systems for a variety of reasons, a key one being that the firehose is too big for any one person to have a proper focus on all of it.
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" and met with "try the new model!" Then, once level heads actually put the claims to the test and find it wanting, criticism is met with "you're just not using it right, you have to learn how to prompt/context/loop engineer for best results" until the next model comes out and this argument repeats.
> AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time
Hint: Those are not AI fans. (See the top comment for context.)
It shouldn't be a surprise that the baseline for "best" shifts as better tech comes out, but that doesn't make dated models any less capable than they were when they came out.
Skeptics continue to move the goalposts on what constitutes this mattering, but the fact that frontier systems are making novel maths & sciences discoveries and I can run an LLM on my phone for simple tasks that would've been unthinkable a few years ago are testaments to the directionality of the tech.
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 and lingering addiction and psychosis. The most flexible will bounce back just fine, but many will never recover from this damage.
Sincerely, I hope you're in the former category.
Or they aren’t building a SaaS with React or a TUI with Typecript, which is about the only thing that LLMs have “solved”.
Seriously I've been on a sabbatical and have no pressure to use AI. I keep trying on my compiler and for coding they flail so hard every time. I love how good they are at helping me diagnose bugs, it's so much better than scouring google like I used to hoping for some result that matches what I'm seeing. Even then, they hallucinate all the time and just say odd things that don't make sense. As soon as you ask them something obscure they just.... merp
This sounds like you may be using subpar models and/or tools - have you had this experience using Codex with GPT-5.5 on at least "high" reasoning or on Claude Code using Opus 4.8 (both with ability to browse web and sufficient context for your project)?
They're literally doing novel research. The smartest mathematicians in the world couldn't solve Erdős' planar unit distance problem for 80 years, and OpenAI's models knocked that out a couple months ago.
This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.
I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical.
The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.
For sure, I appreciate your comment - this is a tough crowd, but it's their loss.
As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com .
Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights).
----
My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er).
I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin.
Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.
Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM. The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.
Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.
Ah, a 5070.
You will find this most prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557728
> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).
Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.
> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.
> The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy.
This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.
Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.
If you were to say 'doing the same work a bit faster' isn't life-changing then that's evidence that the hypothesis in the article is actually correct.
I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap:
interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project.
I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.
Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you.
For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.
Same here. Little side projects and convenience tooling for $day_job that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten built for lack of time. Doesn’t need to be perfect, beautiful code for an audience of one. It just needs to work.
Do you think it was the AI itself that gave you the boost here or the discussion and brainstorming?
There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.
I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
Who are those people and businesses?
I won’t tell you, you’re just gonna have to tokenmaxx in a vain attempt to chase the dragon.
The people selling shovels.
What sort of proof are you expecting from another poster on hn?
Blog posts, company names, or whatever. I'm not asking for a proof, I'm asking who are those unnamed people and businesses who transform themselves
Anything that someone would think answers the question or moves the needle forward.
Sure, HN has changed over time, but this tends to be a place where people field technical questions and get technical answers.
Elena is one of those people who was loudest about AI on other channels and now she writes this when, as you say, there’s a demand for articles like this.
It’s marketers doing marketing all the way down.
There are, they're all on the sell side though.
Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products.
For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
Can someone explain to me:
I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is).
To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.
from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.
llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.
Ok I'll take the bait.
> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day.
Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one.
Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later:
> And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.
AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.
I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence.
I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.).
We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.
I did find the bit about ChatGPT's crappy prose amusing because while that may feel like it's a good benchmark for the state of AI, the quality of prose doesn't necessarily correlate with the major progress made over the last few years which is in post-training.
Haven't you heard? Every company is an "AI company" now.
Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power...
The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)
"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH."
Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.
She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss.
Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist.
No one is working on changing that. Anyone?
Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard?
We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
- I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them
- I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore
- I don't try to debug
The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.
> - I don't try to debug
Just today I wanted to add to my nvim setup some validation for Kubernetes YAML. Asked Claude why it wasn’t looking at schemas correctly. After 30 minutes of prompts and nudges, during which it went on multiple wild goose chases, I just gave up and did it myself.
Other times I did have more success but it’s not rare to encounter this infinite loop style drill-down, which ultimately wastes more time than if I did it myself from the beginning.
> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart
> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow
So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
>>> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart
>> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow
> So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
That's ungracious, at best. Your interpretation is something close to the death of the position, while theirs is the moderate interpretation of "causes chaos".
It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha".
The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day".
Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?
I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool.
And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.
As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it.
That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul.
AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh.
Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.
I have watched people interact with chatbots. It's like watching someone pulling a guinea worm out of their leg. I don't know where all that confidence come from.
> Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself.
Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.
Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?
> Marketing, Finance, and HR
Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.
What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.
I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue.
My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years.
I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.
Relax, AI is going to kill education and eliminate jobs, and changing lives, but you have to be patient. Let it cook.
> It used to be that if someone started talking about vector databases, MCP, agents, memory, or RAG you
I find it hard to take seriously, if someone talks about MCP and "it used to be" in the same sentense. This protocol is not even 2 years old!
Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.
Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.
AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.
In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.
This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!
The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!
This stuff makes me nostalgic for NFTs and the metaverse which is pretty horrifying all things considered.
Yeah, there will always be some percentage of bozos and clowns in America… that’s never going to change.
And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.
Bozos and clowns are a universal cultural phenomenon.
quantum computing in next 5-10 years for sure will be the next grift, the wheels are already turning
Quantum computing is soooo 2018, you want space data centres for the next 5-10 years (or "5-10 tears" as the apple keyboard gave me the first time).
Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years.
The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
I don't know if breaking encryption will even matter if we just keep handing over all our data anyway.
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
Amen! Let it burn…
>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude.
This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.
AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.
> Show me something truly life changing
Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job
That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.
It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.
Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
> It's real intelligence
It is not. It can shortcut only because it had been done before.
I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory.
Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.
But but but... 1000x engineer who can out compete your 50 person startup with their agent flow.
hahaha this reads like a porn clip script.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.
This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
Link to the product, apparently has a free tier: https://www.descript.com
(I'm unaffiliated with them.)
Do you earn 8 times as much now?
I know the point you’re attempting to make but I’ll answer anyway: no but my work is vastly less tedious.
That's good to hear. I do think you should benefit more from the increased value created, but it sounds like it's actually made a significant difference to you.
> Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater?
But then how will the investors justify having poured over a Trillion USD into AI?
Confidence theater will continue until morale improves.
People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.
Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.
No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
> AI Confidence Theater
That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.
Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.
> What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic.
Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days.
Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end.
First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point.
Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.
I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre.
Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.
Wired my home with fiber (10 GBit/s), I used premade fiber and a LC-LC socket box… no splicing needed, at all.
But yeah it‘s going to be a skill that will be important for datacenters.
Remember, folks, AI is mainly just statistics. You know, as in what comes after "lies" and "damned lies".
Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!
It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.
First, we have this section:
But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Then immediately after:
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.
> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.
But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
> But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using,
I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is.
Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.