[ryeats]

You know that teammate that makes more work for everyone else on the team because they do what they are asked to do but in the most buggy and incomprehensible way, that when you finally get them to move on to another team and you realize how much time you spent corralling them and fixing their subtle bugs and now when they are gone work doesn't seem like so much of a chore.

That's AI.

[Spooky23]

Just like a poorly managed team, you need to learn how to manage AI to get value from it. All ambiguous processes are like this.

In my case, I find the value with LLMs with respect to writing is consolidation. Use it to make outlines, not writing. One example is I record voice memos when driving or jogging and turn them into documents that can be the basis for all sorts of things. End of the day it saves me alot of time and arguably makes me more effective.

AI goes bad because it’s not smart, and it will pretend that it is. Figure out the things it does well for your scenario and exploit it.

[DavidPiper]

We need to update Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to AI that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

[xerox13ster]

And just like the original Hanlon’s Razor, this is not an excuse to be stupid or incompetent.

It is not a reason to accept stupidity or incompetence. We should reject these things and demand better.

[chistev]

Thank you.

[blibble]

> You know that teammate

now imagine he can be scaled indefinitely

you thought software was bad today?

imagine Microsoft Teams in 5 years time

[darthcircuit]

I’m not even looking forward to Microsoft teams on Monday.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

I only need to look at the past 5 years of Windows

[bambax]

I'm extremely wary of AI myself, especially for creative tasks like writing or making images, etc., but this feels a little over the top. If you let it run wild then yes the result is disaster, but for well defined jobs with a small perimeter AI can save a lot of time.

[runiq]

In the context of code, where review bandwidth is the bottleneck, I think it's spot on. In the arts, comparatively -- be they writing, drawing, or music -- you can feel almost at a glance that something is off. There's a bit of a vibe check thing going on, and if that doesn't pass, it's back to the drawing board. You don't inherit technical debt like you do with code.

[0xEF]

You are not wrong, but I pose the argument that too many people approach Gen AI as a replacement instead of a tool, and therein lies the root of the problem.

When I use Claude for code, for example, I am not asking it to write my code. I'm asking it to review what I have written and either suggest improvements or ways to troubleshoot a problem I am having. I also don't always follow its advice, either, but that depends on how much I understand the reply. Sometimes it outputs something that makes sense based on my current skill level, sometimes it proposes things that I know nothing about, in which case I ask it to break it down further so I can go search the Internet for more info and see if I can learn more, which pushes the limits of my skill level.

It works well, since my goal is to improve what I bring to the table and I have learned a lot, both about coding and about prompt engineering.

When I talk to other people, they accuse me of having the AI do all the work for me because that's how they approach their use of it. They want the AI to produce the whole project, as opposed to just using it as a second brain to offload some mental chunking. That's where Gen AI fails and the user spends all their time correcting convoluted mistakes caused by confabulation, unless they're making a simple monolithic program or script, but even then there's often hiccups.

Point is, Gen AI is a great tool, if you approach it with the right mindset. The hammer does not build the whole house, but it can certainly help.

[cardanome]

Generative AI is like micromanaging an talented Junior Dev that never improves. And I mean micromanaging to such a toxic degree that not human would ever put up with that.

It works but it simply not what most people want. If you love to code then you just abstracted away the most fun parts and have to only do the boring parts now. If you love to manage, well managing actual humans and seeing them grow and become independent is much more fulfilling.

On a side note, I feel like prompting and context management is something that is easier for me personally as a person with ADHD as I am already used to working with forms of intelligence that are different to my own. I am used to having to explicitly state my needs. My neurotypical co-workers get frustrated that the LLM can't read their minds and always tell me that it should know what they want. When it nudge them to give it more context and explain better what they need they often resist and say they shouldn't have to. Of course I am stereotyping a bit here but still an interesting observation.

Prompting is indeed a skill. Though I believe the skill ceiling will lower once tools get better so I wouldn't bank too much on it. What is going to be valuable for a long time is probably general software architecture skills.

[nathan_douglas]

I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I _do_ think I'm starting to enjoy this workflow. I don't mind the micromanagement because it's usually the ideas that appeal most to me, not the line-level details of writing code. I suppose I fit in somewhere between the "love to code" and "love to manage" dichotomy you've presented. Perhaps I love to make it look like I have coded? :)

I set up SSH certificates in my homelab last night with Claude Code. It was a somewhat aggravating process - I had to remind it a couple times of some syntax issues, and I'm not sure that it actually took less time than I would've taken to do it myself. And it also locked me out of my cluster when it YOLO'ed some changes it should not have. On the whole, one of the worst AI experiences I've had recently.

But I'm thrilled with it, TBH, because it got done, it works, I didn't have to beat my head against the wall for each little increment of progress, and while Claude Code was beating its own head against the wall, I was able to relax and 1) practice my French, and 2) read my book (Steven Levy's _Artificial Life_, which I recently saw excerpted on HN).

The general state of things is probably still pretty terrible. I know there're no end of irritations that I have with Claude Code, and everything else I've looked at is even less pleasant. But I feel like this might be going in a good direction.

*EDIT*: It should go without saying though that I'd much rather be mentoring a junior person, though, as you said.

[scarecrowbob]

"Gen AI is a great tool, if you approach it with the right mindset."

People keep writing this sentence as if they aren't talking to the most tool-ed up group of humans in history.

I have no problems learning tools, from chorded key shortcuts to awk/sed/grep to configuring all three of my text editors (vim, sublime, and my IDE) to work for their various tasks.

Hell, I have preferred ligature fonts for different languages.

Sometimes tools aren't great and make your life harder, and it's not because folks aren't willing to learn the tool.

[ninetyninenine]

They write that sentence because gen ai has been effective for them.

We have intelligent people using ai and claiming it’s useful.

And we have other intelligent people who’s saying it’s not useful.

I’m inclined to believe the former. You can’t be deluded about positives usefulness. But you can be about the negative simply by using the LLM in a half assed way and picking the most convenient conclusion without nuance.

[kentm]

There’s actual studies that show that you can be deluded about positive usefulness. There was a study that showed people using AI thought they were being 20% more productive but actually had lowered productivity. Even productive people do not accurately estimate Joe properly track time and effort.

[ninetyninenine]

Interesting show me the study. My initial reaction is that it’s bs, but let me see the study before I make a judgement.

[runiq]

> You can’t be deluded about positives usefulness.

If you honestly believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

[ninetyninenine]

How can you be deluded? Everyone has used it. they literally see the positive results. It’s not speculative.

But you can miss the positive results if you haven’t used LLMs recently or used agentic ai like cursor. it’s easy to miss the positives

[shakna]

"You can’t be deluded about positives usefulness."

If that were true, then we would not have the Dunning-Kruger effect. Regardless of your intelligence, all of us are susceptible to a cognitive bias that makes us think that we are better than we actually are at some things.

The classical case used to demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect is self-assessment. That is, how well you think you can do a task. Rating the performance of a task - which is precisely what is happening here!

People are shit indicators of their own performance. With a great new placebo tool, people are incredibly likely to say it improved their life. Even though it did nothing at all.

Being deluded about positive usefulness is normal.

[ninetyninenine]

You just made that up. You created a connection between the Dunning-Kruger effect and positive delusion about tools. Do you have data to back that up?

I mean as much as we complain about LLMs hallucinating, here's an example of a human making shit up out of thin air. What's going on here is NOT self assessment. It's obviously assessment of an LLM.

Additionally the Dunning-Kruger effect like all of psychology stands on shaky ground.

[shakna]

So... Attack first? That what you're going with?

DKE has been confirmed more than anything else. It was one of the few things not hit by the replication crisis.

You're assessing how well you do, when aided or not, by a tool. That's still self assessment, I'm afraid.

And that self-assessment is flawed. [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

[scarecrowbob]

What you're missing in the discussion is that you've got an unexamined assumption that other folks -haven't- used these tools based on your conclusion that they are simply useful; you have assumed that if folks haven't found them useful then folks haven't "really" used them.

But that's simply not true.

Not only have I used these tools and found them to be unhelpful to me, I have good reasons why I don't think they are helpful. I can even give two modalities in which I find them actively unhelpful:

- for creative work, they don't allow me to chew over the details which I find important to struggle with as I express my thoughts and how to communicate them

- for rote lookup or facts, I either understand the underlying material such that my code completion or templating tools are faster and clearer for me or I probably need to struggle with the underlying complexities until I can generalize the problem myself.

You simply assume that I'm not, like, a 47 year old with an annoying theory of mind and learning and who has conceptual models for how I learn things based on almost 3 decades of teaching hundreds of students, coaching dozens of my cohort, and learning many skills across several domains.

Which is fine. I am old enough that "you're holding it wrong" is something I've seen several times in my life.

But at the end of the day, all you have is the usual "you're holding it wrong" objection that most folks have to technology that doesn't actually fit well.

I will give you some free advice, totally worth what you're paying for it.

It is indeed entirely possible that humans are quite often "deluded about positives [sic] usefulness" of different tools. That delusion can often be a difficult or painful lesson. I've got a lot of tendon issues from rock climbing and bad scalar patterns in my clarinet playing to prove that well enough for myself.

I suggest that if you really believe that anything which helps you in some short term kind of way won't hamper you in your future endeavors, you might want to question that belief.

If you can't think of any examples (cocaine being one easy example) then I suggest that you don't know enough about the world to be conjecturing about it as you have been doing here.

In any case, good luck. Clearly all the people disagreeing with you here are wrong.

[ninetyninenine]

>In any case, good luck. Clearly all the people disagreeing with you here are wrong.

Doesn't prove your case. Plenty of instances where everyone is wrong and one person is right. Lead for example was once thought by everyone to be healthy. Very few people considered it toxic.

>I will give you some free advice, totally worth what you're paying for it.

Could be completely useless advice and totally worthless. You declaring it worth it does not suddenly make the advice valuable. In fact I'm anticipating negative value.

>It is indeed entirely possible that humans are quite often "deluded about positives [sic] usefulness" of different tools. That delusion can often be a difficult or painful lesson. I've got a lot of tendon issues from rock climbing and bad scalar patterns in my clarinet playing to prove that well enough for myself.

Of course it's possible. It's just more rare. I put values into a calculator. The calculator does a calculation faster than me. Was that delusion? There clear example. Can you give me a clear example of the alternative? Where you use a tool it only feels useful but isn't. Your rock climbing examples feel like a bit of a stretch. In fact they feel like counter examples, you eventually noted that they aren't useful.

>If you can't think of any examples (cocaine being one easy example) then I suggest that you don't know enough about the world to be conjecturing about it as you have been doing here.

I suggest that you actually don't know enough about the world compared to me given my 60+ years being alive. Your attitude is rude and condescending. But you know I often wonder what would trigger someone to be like this? Like why can't you be impartial and just give counter evidence? Why did you have to approach this whole thing with this attitude of "Let me give you a fucking tip".. Is it because I hit a nerve? Because one aspect of what I'm talking about is right and it's hard to face the truth? I don't know. I can only speculate.

Cocaine was at one point in time not known to be addictive. You could be right here with that analogy. But we can't fully prove it can we? The answers given by an LLM are too varied to form a definitive answer. Cocaine EVENTUALLY outputs a definitive symptom of addiction and other bad outcomes that are statistically significant. So even though at one point in time we didn't know... over time cocaine yielded definitive answers. but LLMs used for programming? What are we even measuring? We don't even know. So it's hard to see some definitive answer revealing itself over time. All I see are endless debates where I'm right, and I can't convince a kid like you that you're wrong.

[z0r]

Are you really >60 years old? You have a young posting style.

[bdangubic]

smart people are reading comments like and going “I am glad I am in the same market as people making such comments” :)

[ookblah]

seriously, the near future is going to be:

1) people who reject it completely for whatever reason. 2) people who use it lazily and produce a lot of garbage (lets be honest, this is probably going to happen a lot which is why maybe group #1 hates this future. reminds me of the outsourcing era) 3) people who selectively use it to their advantage.

no point in groups 1 and 3 trying to convince each other of anything.

[cgriswald]

I think that has been the state of affairs for awhile now.

I think your explanation for group 1 is true to a degree but have two other additional explanations: (1) Some element of group 1 is ideologically opposed. It might be copyright, or Luddism, or some other concern for our fellow humans. (2) Some are deluded into thinking there are only two groups and that group 3 people are all delusional.

Although it is probably an uphill battle I do think both groups 1 and 3 have things to learn from each other.

[kentm]

To be fair, there are a lot of people (especially on Hacker News) in group 2 convincing themselves that they are in group 3. And people in group 1 see that and think that group 3 is a lot lot smaller than AI acolytes think.

[IAmGraydon]

I’m glad for now. Understanding how to utilize AI to your advantage is still an edge at the moment, but it won’t be long before almost everyone figures it out.

[bdangubic]

it’ll be years because 87.93% of SWEs are subpar like the post I made comment on.

[raincole]

Yeah. Interestingly enough, I've found utilizing AI is a very shallow skill that anyone should be able to learn in days. But (luckily) people have some tendency preventing them from doing so.

[bdangubic]

with all due respect, this cannot be further from the truth. not only can you not get good in days but it is an ongoing journey. I have spent many, many month learning ins and outs and still spend an hour or two every day on learning/perfecting/…

[billy99k]

You can think that..and you will eventually be left behind. AI is not going anywhere and can be used as a performance booster. Eventually, it will be a requirement for most tech-based jobs.

[andersmurphy]

This reminds me of crypto’s “have fun being poor”. Except now it’s “have fun being left behind/being unemployed”. The more things change the more things stay the same.

[billy99k]

A bit different when you actually see the results.

A guy I went to highschool with complains endlessly about AI generated art and graphics (he's an artist) and like you, just wants to bury his head in the sand.

Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans and in a short period of time, you won't be able to tell the difference.

With the money being poured into AI by all major tech companies, you will be unemployed if you don't keep up with AI.

[abenga]

We care. If I get a video recommendation on YouTube and it is AI-created, I blacklist the channel. I will never listen to AI music. Even articles, the only way I will keep reading someone's writing is if I never find out they don't use it. I consume media and art to commune with my fellow man, not to look at pretty bitmaps and read just strings of prose.

[billy99k]

You are not the average consumer.

[tombarys]

> "Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans"

Maybe not yet. The real "art" consumers were always very sensitive and asking for originality (thus scarcity). It is an essential principle of the art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. If you use machine for creation, you less choices. You delegate most of your talented/crazy/hard choices to the model (which is based on such choices of already talented but combines them in a random way). The result is thin, diluted even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion the most art lovers will continue to seek for the dense art made by human, asking for some kind of proof. :) The real art will be even more appreciated. I guess.

[andersmurphy]

If the last few years of the AI hype cycle has taught me anything is there's massive late movers advantage.

Anyone who spent time learning the AI tools over that period of time has basically wasted their time. Working with agents is nothing like prompt engineering. I imagine whatever comes after will be nothing like agents etc. Sounds like those who try to keep up with AI will be equally unemployed.

[billy99k]

If the HN community is an example of this, they will be left behind regardless because they will avoid all tooling and the benefits that comes along with it.

I suppose I shouldn't care too much. Less competition for people like me that have embraced the change.

[andersmurphy]

Thing is short/medium term VC subsidies require lots of users to embrace AI. If they don't the money dries up and you end up paying the full price for these models. Which are currently heavily discounted (this is an understatement). How much are you currently paying for your usage 20$/m? 200$/m? How does that look when it's 2000$/m? 20000$/m?

[mwigdahl]

Yes, and it was exactly the same with compilers. All hype and fad -- everyone who's serious about software development writes in assembly.

[andersmurphy]

It's false comparison compilers are deterministic. The only probabilistic behavior I've seen has been for performance (query planning/branch prediction).

I mean you're not wrong the serious people drop into assembly when they need too. Even if you work in a context where you can't or don't drop down into assembly being able to make your own compilers is incredibly useful.

[mwigdahl]

Sure, compilers are deterministic and LLMs are not. If you're asserting that a probabilistic process can't get you to a deterministic outcome, Monte Carlo integration would like to have a word.

My point was that comparing the rise of AI tooling to the rise of HLL compilers is a much better comparison than comparing it to crypto.

HLL compilers were originally seen as crutches and inferior tools and that "real" programmers used assembly. Compiler-generated code was derided as inefficient and ugly.

And it was! In the early days, a good programmer who knew the machine could outdo the compiler. But that didn't stop a huge expansion of new programmers who could write COBOL and FORTRAN but never learned assembly. And the compilers got better over time. These days it's a rare wizard who can outdo a compiler's optimizations, and it takes multiple orders of magnitude longer for those rare humans to achieve it.

LLM tooling isn't going away. Even in these very early days, it enables non-programmers to construct basic applications that work, using English requests! And the tools have gotten better on almost a monthly basis.

You can like them or not like them, just like the early programmers could like or not like compilers. But dismissing them as analogous to empty crypto hype is a bad comparison.

[andersmurphy]

My comparison wasn't about the tech. It was about the proponents of said tech. A lot of people who push AI use the same sorts of arguments that people used to push crypto.

[sampl3username]

Left behind what? Consumeristic trash?

[dragontamer]

Don't you see that the future is XML SOAP RPCs? If you don't master this new technology now, you'll be left behind!!

Then again, maybe I'm too old now and being left behind if I remember the old hype like this....

The entirety of the tech field is constantly hyping the current technology out of FOMO. Whether or not it works out in the future it's always the same damn argument.

[billy99k]

The workforce in tech.

[ryeats]

I was being a bit melodramatic, I'll use it occasionally and If AI gets better it can join my team again I don't love writing boilerplate I just know it's not good at writing maintainable code yet.

[rsynnott]

I mean, the promoters of every allegedly productivity improving fad have been saying this sort of thing for all of the twenty-odd years I’ve been in the industry.

If LLMs eventually become useful to me, I’ll adopt LLMs, I suppose. Until then, we’ll, fool me once…

[BrouteMinou]

When all you got is pontificating...

[threatripper]

You sound bitter. Did you try using more AI for the bug fixing? It gets better and better.

[ryeats]

My interest tend to be bleeding edge where there is little training data. I do use AI to rubber duck but can rarely use it's output directly.

[threatripper]

I see. In my experience current LLMs are great for generating boilerplate code for basic UIs but fail at polishing UI and business logic. If it's important you need to rewrite the core logic completely because they may introduce subtle bugs due to misunderstandings or sloppiness.

[ryeats]

Yep you are also right, some amount of boilerplate code is perfectly reasonable since some problems are similar but just different enough and unique enough they don't merit designing an architecture that gets rid of the boilerplate. this is probably the most useful thing that AI could do for us. I think I am more worried as a maintainer that we won't see that we are copying all that boilerplate too often and it's subtle bugs are multiplied and now we have to maintain all that code because AI doesn't yet do that.

[skydhash]

Cognitive load are not related to the difficulty of a task. It’s about how much mental energy is spent monitoring it. To reduce cognitive load, you either boost confidence or avoid caring. You can’t have confidence in AI output and most people proposing it looks like they’re preaching to not care about quality (because quantity yay).

[threatripper]

But quality is going up a lot. Granted, it's not up to human levels yet, but it is going up fast. Also we will see more complex quality control in AI output, tailored to specific use cases and sold at a premium. Right now these don't exist and if they existed it would be too expensive to run 100x requests for the same amount of output. So humans are stuck in quality control, for now.

[Arainach]

One of the biggest problems with AI is that it doesn't get better and better. It makes the same mistakes over and over instead of learning like a junior eng would.

AI is like the absolute worst outsourced devs I've ever worked with - enthusiastically saying "yes I can do that" to everything and then delivering absolute garbage that takes me longer to fix/convince them to do right than it would have taken for me to just do it myself.

[threatripper]

Current models have no memory, they don't learn. You have to learn for them for now. You have to put the learnings in the instructions and in code comments. If you don't describe WHAT your code SHOULD do and WHY you write it in THAT particular way it will have no idea and the code may just look like bad non-standard code waiting to be "improved".

It works best if you keep close to mainstream styles and if you keep it easy and straight-forward.