[refulgentis]

Apologies that you're taking on the chin here. Generally, I'll just skip fantastical HN threads with a critical mass of BS like this, with pity, rather than an attempt to share (for more on that c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929335)

Been on HN 16 years and never seen anything like the pack of people who will come out to tell you it doesn't work and they'll never pay for it and it's wrong 50% of the time, etc.

Was at dinner with an MD a few nights back and we were riffing on this, came to the conclusion is was really fun for CS people when the idea was AI would replace radiologists, but when the first to be mowed down are the keyboard monkeys, well, it's personal and you get people who are years into a cognitive dissonance thing now.

[Libidinalecon]

I just totally disagree.

I want AI to be as strong as possible. I want AGI, I especially want super intelligence. I will figure out a new and better job if you give me super intelligence.

The problem is not cognitive dissonance, the problem is we don't have what we are pretending we have.

We have the dot com bubble but with a bunch of Gopher servers and the web browser as this theoretical idea yet to be invented and that is the bull case. The bear case is we have the dot com bubble but still haven't figured out how to build the actual internet. Massive investment in rotary phone capacity because everyone in the future is going to be using so much phone dial up bandwidth when we finally figure out how to build the internet.

[danielbln]

Yeah, it really pulled the veil away, didn't it? So much dismissiveness and uninformed takes, from a crowd that had been driving automation forward for years and years and you'd think they'd get more familiar with these new class of tools, warts and all.

[Libidinalecon]

I just can't understand how anyone who actually uses the tools all the time can say this.

[danielbln]

Say what exactly? Driving automation of all kind with Claude Code level tools has been incredibly fruitful. And once you spent sufficient time with them you know when and where they fall on their faces and when they provide real tangible reproducible benefits. I could not care less for the AI hype or bubble or whatever, I just use what I see works as I'm staring these tools down for 10h+/day.

The problem is that these conversations are increasingly drifting apart as everyone has different priors and experiences with this stuff. Some are stuck in 2023, some have so very specialized tasks that it's more work whipping the agent in line that it saves, others found a ton of automation cases where this stuff provides clear net benefits.

Don't care for AGI, AI girlfriends or LLM slop, but strap 'em in a loop and build a cage for them to operate in without lobotomizing themselves and there's absolutely something to be gained there (for me, at least).