[shubhamjain]

I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits.

Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

[nottorp]

Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.

I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations, other by than "throw more AI at it" or "it will get better in 5 years, just in time for cold fusion".

> you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence

Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you when the wolf actually comes.

[ChadNauseam]

> I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations

You see what you choose to focus on. I come across many people who are excited about the possibilities of AI-assisted coding, who are frustrated by its limitations, who share strategies for overcoming or avoiding those limitations, and s on. For a concrete and famous example, I would put Andrej Karpathy in this category. Where are you looking that you're not finding any of these people? linkedin?

[i_love_retros]

In my experience the people who are excited about ai assisted coding are people who aren't good at coding in the first place and don't care about quality, consistency, or understanding what they are having it write, and people who have a vested interest in ai coding tools being used (leadership who want to say "my team uses ai" and "ai experts" who have a personal brand dependent on ai being successful)

[rhdunn]

AI assisted coding is really good as an enhanced auto-complete, often better as it picks up patterns in the code and will complete whole lines or chunks of code. There, I'll assess the results like any other auto-completed suggestions.

For other things like when asking questions I won't just blindly copy what the LLM is suggesting. I'll often rewrite it in a style that best fits the style of the codebase I'm working on, or to better fit it into what I'm trying to achieve. Also, if I've asked it for how to do a specific one-line query and it has rewritten a whole chunk of code, I'll only make use of that one line, or specific fix/change. -- This also helps me to understand the response from the LLM.

I'll then do testing to make sure that the code is working correctly, with unit tests where relevant.

[SyneRyder]

The user you're replying to has made many similar posts like this. I previously tried engaging in good faith. I try not to fall into the XKCD 386 trap now, my time is better spent with Claude Code. Hope I can help save you some time too!

[nottorp]

Yes, I try to avoid the evangelism topics but they're much worse than blockchain and are taking up most of HN now.

Can't help but click sometimes, always see the same arguments, so why not post the same thing as well?

By the way, I never check user names, I just reply to the post content.

[Closi]

> Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.

You always have people at both sides of the aisle though - people who say it can do much more than it can, and people who say it can do much less.

It's the same with all technologies - robotics, crypto, drug discovery, the internet, digital cameras, quantum computing, 3D Television, self-driving cars - it was probably the same with the steam engine. All of these will have had people who said that the technology would be useless and die (e.g. Napoleon and the steam engine), and others that would have said it was totally transformative.

Pointing to people who hold extreme opinions 'for' a particular technology that are overly-bullish, and then dismissing the technology based on that, isn't a particularly good strategy in my opinion.

[raincole]

> Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

Who's "they"?

> If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you when the wolf actually comes.

Who's "you"?

You seem to believe all AI advocates are of the same hivemind and they somehow think and behave collectively. Have you considered that they might be different people with individual opinions and motivations?

[n2d4]

It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.

AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early on, many thought chess would be one of the last things mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a waste of time.

In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically mean the AI DJ is bad at everything.

    > Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!

[nottorp]

> Who is "they"?

Anthropic IIRC?

[rhdunn]

Here's the post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler. It was written by a researcher at Anthropic.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

So you want to bring every conversation on the topic down to the level of the most idiotic fanboys making the most outlandish claims that are easiest to shoot down? If this was JUST directly in response to these “AI evangelists”, a group which I’ll ignore that you’re unfairly treating as a monolith, that’d be fine.

However, every post here that says the slightest thing positive about AI’s abilities is always met with “yeah well it can’t do my dishes for me so it’s total garbage!” BS.

You yourself are bringing up “making a compiler” out of nowhere. Nobody but you brought that up here. Yet you’re using it as the be-all end-all yard stick, simultaneously completely ignoring and completely proving the argument that you’re replying to.

It’s amazing how big a % of the developer community has started acting like intentionally unintelligent petulant children the moment they’re faced with an iota of the sort of job security risk they’ve been inflicting on others for decades. Some of you need to grow up.

[scott01]

This appears to be a troll account, that only ever engages in heated discussions. Please, do not engage with it, folks :) On a related note, has anyone noticed actual bots commenting on HN? I sometimes feel discussions are a bit weird here.

[worksonmine]

> This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?

I would guess it's for the same reasons that you're ignoring all the fixes necessary to get to an actual "full blown native Mac app". It's rarely a single sentence unless your app does something trivial like printing Hello World.

[qsera]

>That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

The example you described, no.

It is not good because its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...

[drdaeman]

> its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...

Isn’t the same true for a lot of individual programmers and even teams?

Especially so if they were provided just a short one-sentence vision instead of proper documentation.

[qsera]

Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.

Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one uses a process that is inherently probabilistic and will show up in every result, while other just depends on the probability of you getting a good team.

[drdaeman]

I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.

In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces junk, but progress is pretty appalling)

[qsera]

>beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence...

I am not sure I want to keep paying for something that needs some amount of luck on my side, to be useful. Writing elaborate plans for LLMs also feels a bit pointless when there is no hard and fast rule about how much of it will be followed ..

Apparently some people appear to be doing it, but I am afraid it is not something that will have a universal appeal..

[ErroneousBosh]

> This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?

Isn't that a bit overblown? I just fired up Copilot in VSCode and typed in "make me a DAW plugin that will inject MIDI control changes into the track output" and it didn't even know where to start.

[eithed]

What a strange take - you dismiss valid criticisms of Spotify product, just to venture off into the land of "well you can create a mac app with one sentence" as if that would matter here.

[rfw300]

I don’t necessarily endorse the author’s broad conclusions about “AI”, but I will say that the Spotify DJ specifically is an enragingly bad product. Nothing close to the utility of Claude Code.