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by NitpickLawyer 130 days ago
> and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all.

The rate of progress in the last 3 years has been over my expectations. The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane. No idea how people can say "no improvement".
4 comments
coldtea 130 days ago
>The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane

I wonder is there are parallel realities. What I remember from the last year is a resounding yawn at the latest models landing, and even people being actively annoyed in e.g. ChatGPT 4.1 vs 4 for being nerfed. Same for 5, big fanfare, and not that excited reception. And same for Claude. And nothing special in the last 2 months either. Nobody considers Claude 4.6 some big improvement over 4.5.

Sorry for closing this comment early, I need to leave my car at the house and walk to the car wash.

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qnleigh 130 days ago
Yeah not that long ago, there was concern that we had run out of training data and progress would stall. That did not happen at all.
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coldtea 130 days ago
Sure it did.
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zozbot234 130 days ago
"My car is in the driveway, but it's dirty and I need to get it washed. The car wash is 50 meters away, should I drive there or walk?"
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votepaunchy 130 days ago
Gemini flash tells me to drive: “Unless you have a very long hose or you've invented a way to teleport the dirt off the chassis, you should probably drive. Taking the car ensures it actually gets cleaned, and you won't have to carry heavy buckets of soapy water back and forth across the street.”
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dgxyz 130 days ago
Beep boop human thinking ... actually I never wash my car. They do it when they service it once every year!
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surgical_fire 130 days ago
If your expectations were low, anything would have been over your expectations.

There was some improvement in terms of the ability of some models to understand and generate code. It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.

I still think that any claims that it can operate at a human level are complete bullshit.

It can speed things up well in some contexts though.

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NitpickLawyer 130 days ago
> It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.

It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. There's no way that your comment can be taken seriously. It's 99.9% a troll comment, or simply delusional. 3 years ago the model (gpt3.5, the only one out there basically) was not able to output correct code at all. It looked like python if you squinted, but it made no sense. To compare that to what we have today and say "a bit more useful" is not a serious comment. Cannot be a serious comment.

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munksbeer 130 days ago
> It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore.

It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice.

And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.

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surgical_fire 130 days ago
This is such a weird framing.

My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work.

That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me.

It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you hate it.

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munksbeer 130 days ago
To be honest, I didn't even really read your comment. I was mostly responding to NitpickLawyer in general terms. Sorry about that, it wasn't really aimed at you.

But you're sort of doing the same thing I did - "second coming of Christ"?!

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surgical_fire 130 days ago
/shrug

I have no intention of changing your mind. I don't think of the people I reply to highly enough to believe they can change their minds.

I reply to these comments for other people to read. Think of it as me adding ky point of view for neutral readers.

Either way, I could use AI for some coding tasks back in GPT 3.5 days. It was unreliable, but not completely useless (far from it in fact)

Nowadays it is a little more reliable, and it can do more complex coding tasks with less detailed prompts. AI now can handle a larger context, and the "thinking" steps it adds to itself while generating output were a nice trick to improve its capabilities.

While it makes me more productive on certain tasks, it is the sort of the improvements I expected in 3 years of it being a massive money black hole. Anything less would actually be embarrassing all things considered.

Perhaps if your job is just writing code day in an out you would find it more useful than I do? As a software engineer I do quite a bit more than that, even if coding is the bit of work I used to enjoy the most.

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