[jmkni]

I can relate to a lot of this.

Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time.

If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after.

Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IMO

[matula]

This post (aside from the title) is fairly nuanced, with the reality that "let an LLM do all the things" is going to be fraught with problems... but "let an LLM do some very specific things that saves me an hour or so from boilerplate code or tests" is very nice. Of course, I doubt a blog post titled "Sometimes AI is ok, sometimes it's not" would get the clicks.

[serbuvlad]

Exactly. AI is your intern, not your contractor.

[Yoric]

More precisely, AI is your intern who won't improve during the internship, ever.

[rhetocj23]

Just to play devils advocate - why do you think this is so?

And if you have a compelling thesis, why hasn't this spread to the investing community?

[Yoric]

> why do you think this is so?

Well, because nothing in the transformer architecture supports such learning ability. All AI researchers and most serious AI users are aware of this, so I'm not sure I understand the question.

> And if you have a compelling thesis, why hasn't this spread to the investing community?

The investing community believes that they can make money. That's feels pretty much orthogonal to whether the metaphorical intern can learn, and much more related to whether clients can be made to buy the product, one way or another.

[ewoodrich]

They mean it doesn't learn from experience/mistakes after spending time on your codebase. There are workarounds like documenting in CLAUDE.md/CODEX.md/.roorules which dump it back into the active context but are hit and miss in my experience. It's definitely better than nothing but Claude still routinely ignores important directives whenever it's in the right mood.

[jmkni]

And is also a pathological liar lol

[Yoric]

Yes, that, too.