[jaccola]

Yeah I don’t know what’s true when reading about LLMs. Same with comments here on hacker news. So much money on the line it’s clear they would seed communities with marketing shills (and some people are just tribal).

Same since they own Bun, they have every incentive to make this seem easier than it was.

[torben-friis]

This is a huge problem regarding the specifics of ai. Tech is becoming very adversarial as a worker, since marketing and technical information are blurring lines more and more.

[smrtinsert]

Influencers are getting paid to promote ai for 10s of thousands of USD. This is one the reasons social media has been swamped with it lately.

[1alprw]

Yes, some of the latest campaigns:

https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...

Anthropic's own talking point guide:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945021

There were earlier initiatives from the industry. This is just what is in the open and does not even include automated LLM "influencers".

[gofreddygo]

OMG ! I've been dealing with one such AI kool aid nut for 6 months now and I can trace a lot of they've done down to specific pointers from that anthropic "champion" playbook.

[bdelmas]

This! I now have to fight bad tech decisions at my companies because many devs follow influencers.

Look also at the hate spread against UE5… It’s everywhere and half of the arguments are falsehoods made by influencers with no real experience in the industry…

[ignoramous]

> Tech is becoming very adversarial as a worker, since marketing and technical information are blurring lines

Since one of LLM's largest market (with product fit) is us developers, we are experiencing what the crypto bros did to others.

[cortesoft]

You can just use AI for yourself and see. It isn't some mysterious product that only a few people get to use.

[chromadon]

This is the thing. I do use LLMs (mostly Anthropic).

It just does not generate good useable code. I have to review every single change to a higher degree than I would my own code because it likes to slip in hidden nasties. I have to rewrite at least 50% of what it generates.

That being said, I know devs who swear that they don’t even write code anymore. Like this rust port. I can’t even fathom blindly merging something his massive.

[nipah]

"rewrite 50% of what it generates" See, I'll not claim they write good code. But have you considered maybe your standards are a little bit too high for the tool? I made like 15 tools already using AI for my use, most of them I barely needed to touch in the code. The code is not great, no, but it's not useless and that's what matter for me. You try and iteratively ask for the AI to do things. If you want to ensure a higher degree of quality you can ask for tests and use techniques such as mutation testing to increase coverage, etc.

If you expect the same level of quality as you would write by hand, then you probably is better off... not using those tools. I mean if I was rewriting 50% of the generations I get I would not be using them at all.

[SwellJoe]

I think we're still seeing pretty wild variance in how effective LLMs can be for code, depending on who is driving it. I've seen some folks getting themselves into messes pretty regularly with LLMs. But, ever since Opus 4.5, it's been pretty obviously better to work with it than without it, remarkably better in some use cases. Porting an application with source available and a huge existing test suite is pretty much the ideal use case for an LLM. It has everything it needs to succeed. I can't imagine why anyone would embark on a porting effort without an LLM at this point.

[bmitc]

Most people do use LLMs, which is why they have the so-called pessimistic opinions they do.

[vga1]

Judging by most public comments, people are really mediocre at using them. I don't get how it's possible to get such poor results from them.

[mg794613]

That's because your usecases were simple and/or small.

Otherwise, you would have known.

Unless you don't have experience and you believe the whole "You are right! it _is_ a and not b" bs...

[cortesoft]

Or, perhaps, you are the one who is mistaken and other people ARE having success with large and complex programs?

I am not saying you ARE wrong, but I don’t know how you could be so certain that no one else is having success with complex, AI written, code.

There are well known, established, and respected engineers creating AI projects right now. For example, antirez, the creator of Redis, created the DS4 project. When you see these sorts of projects, do you never think, “Maybe I might be wrong about this.”?

[nipah]

Okay, doubt. What level of complexity you believe this project has? Including the changes that required changing burn-cubecl.

https://github.com/mii-nipah/voxcpm-rs

--- Just to be clear, I'm not saying they don't make mistakes. In fact I constantly scream into the void with the sheer amount of absolute stupidity of those models, however I would never say, using them for what I use, that they can only be used for simple and small use cases.

[vga1]

Such absolutely unfounded confidence is impressive.

[abustamam]

While this is true, it's also true that few people have the budget to spend a bunch of tokens on porting bun over to rust.

[_puk]

And yet we have stories[0] of companies judging merit on tokens used.

Rather than using these tokens to do rewrites that have the potential to massively improve the day to day, they're just burnt for the sake of burning them.

It's individual initiative, and company culture that are at play as much as budget.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110529

[abustamam]

Tokens are the new LoC it seems!

> It's individual initiative, and company culture that are at play as much as budget.

I agree, but parent comment was insinuating that gp could just use an llm to verify their hypothesis, which is what I was attempting to point out in my comment. The tool isn't out of reach, but not everyone has employer sponsored LLM plans.

[cortesoft]

I don’t think it would cost a crazy amount of token to port the project. You could probably do it in a few days with a Claude max subscription.

[fny]

I'm not sure it matters what anyone claims. It's easy to use and experience its abilities and limitations.

[port11]

The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Context: 20 years coding, 13-ish of which professional. Using LLMs for side projects, including a very big one. Also using them to help manage our home server.

I’ve used 20-ish agents with OpenRouter, Google’s own AGY, Mistral’s Vibe, and Claude Code. The good ones are good and can be very helpful with spec’ing work or handling repetitive tasks. Except for Opus 4.6, none of them produce TypeScript that I’d be super proud of; but they write stuff that’s good enough compared to what I’ve seen in the industry. It’s always some mix of spaghetti and shortcuts. That’s fine, you steer the model and tighten your specs and tests.

Anyone claiming ‘Model X can one-shot’ an app is delusional about maintainability, deployment, all the little things that grease the wheels. Anyone claiming ‘LLMs are useless’ is probably not being impartial. That’s it.

And any company claiming AI is awesome at everything and will replace everyone? Yeah, they’re lying, at least about their capabilities as of right now.