[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

[ninetyninenine]

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

Aid? I assess the output of the tool. Whether that tool aids me is another topic all together. I am not using the tool to augment my existing abilities.

The tool is literally doing the task for me and I am evaluating the results afterwords. This is not some wrench that augments my existing strength. This is more of an assistant than a tool but wording can be manipulated so that assistants can also be thought of as tools. Let's not manipulate the wording to be in our favor and go for intent. The intent here is that clearly the LLM is different from a wrench. When you evaluate a wrench you also evaluate yourself because you are operating the wrench. When you evaluate an LLM, you are not operating it. You gave it a prompt and it went off on it's own to do something.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruge...

This is what I mean by dunning kruger. Either way, whether it's legit or not my points still stand.

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

What is this? Attack first? Who is getting attacked here?

[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.

[ninetyninenine]

I am. People say I look like I'm in my mid forties so that may be a factor.