[Havoc]

It's definitely not at the make me a photoshop stage but I don't think that angle explains adequately explains the tone of the anti-AI hn discussions taking place at all.

If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real people would go "oh cool have fun with that" and move on with their life. Instead we see pretty emotionally charged posts.

[maccard]

What stage is it at then? Because every new model is met with people saying they haven’t opened an editor in a year, or how they’re 10x more productive. But I’m not seeing 10x more tickets closed, 10x more bugs fixed, or 10x more feature designs that we can smash through. I see verbosity and noise when used by the people who were behind, and I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt

[Havoc]

>I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt

It's certainly currently an edge if you know what to tell the mystery box of magic in precise terms.

I don't think this distinction is going to endure though - every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted. We started with it printing hello world, to autocomplete where you still needed to be able to know what the line should do, to autocompleting functions, to writing entire units, to working out architecture tradeoffs, to doing research planning architecture execution and testing all autonomously. That trajectory plus people retreating to nebulous "I'm adding taste" tells me this is going to sail straight past "tool in toolbelt" territory at Mach 10.

Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement (i.e. https://metr.org/ ).

[maccard]

I’ll agree it’s an edge. But edges aren’t worth the GDP of a middle sized European country.

> every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted

I disagree. The agent + harness model was a huge leap and really moved the bar. The tools became genuinely useful for coding very quickly.

> Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement

At some point, the exponential improvements have to show results or it’s just a Ponzi scheme.

[Havoc]

I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.

That's why I'm saying this whole look at one point in time logic isn't useful here. Depending on where you set the cutoff you get diametrically opposed answers.

>Ponzi scheme

The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement. Tech genie is out of the bottle, people are intrigued and people with ability to tinker on this are spread globally. Even if the entirety of western tech & financial sphere disappeared tomorrow tech progress here would wobble and slow not stop.

Even the one global nexus where progress could have been killed globally - Taiwan - is looking like it'll de-risk shortly between CXMT and SMIC's rapid progress.

In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent) continues until proven otherwise. Stack enough improvements on top of each other and instead of a useful script you shall have your photoshop. Maybe...

[maccard]

> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.

I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sam Altman has said “ we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so”. The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x what his other engineers ship. I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is, because there’s a lot of talk about where it’s not, and that’s gmoving the goalposts.

> The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement.

Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.

> In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent)

Making wild promises, and insane promises about capability and then doing the same thing 3 months later when a new model releases? Isn’t it convenient that both OpenAI and Anthropic have models that are “too powerful” to release. How responsible of them.

At the same time; Anthropic, OpenAI and Copilot have all changed to usage based to billing recently for enterprises as they’ve been been undercharging by 10/100/1000x in many cases. Enterprises are limiting costs (uber limiting spend to $1500/mo this week).

If these tools were really game changing and integer productivity multipliers why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools and getting ahead of their competitors? Because they’re “not quite ready” just like they weren’t 6 months ago, and they still won’t be in 6 months.

[Havoc]

>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is

I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.

>Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.

Certainly, and the questionable subsidizations may disappear but the tech won't. If APIs disappear tomorrow I'll be looking into building a LLM rig. And researchers at unis will continue to do research to advance the tech. And chinese labs will continue. Pace may be somewhat limited but IPOs blowing up stop this tech train

>The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x

CEOs say all kinds of crazy shit. I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing

>usage based to billing

I don't think it's relevant at all for general purpose technologies like this. It'll land where market forces dictate. Maybe some people go bankrupt. Do you know what the billing model on the first electricity grids were? I don't. And I don't care. If it's useful the market will figure out the economics.

>why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools

They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.

[eudamoniac]

I can't speak for others, but my main emotional issue with it is how it has addled the minds of my employers. If they would judge on output and I couldn't keep up objectively, ok fine I'll use AI. But they judge on usage even if output is worse! Anyone would be upset if forced to abandon their skills and work in a different way that produces worse results and is less enjoyable. It's just stupid.

[maccard]

That’s because it’s really hard to evaluate results but usage is comparable across people. It’s the equivalent of counting lines of code submitted or jira tickets closed.

[trumpdong]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[hunterpayne]

"If it was just a toy with no shot at making something real"

This just isn't true. It isn't about what the LLM can do, its about what the executives think the LLM can do that's the problem.

[habinero]

If people just wanted to make their own stuff and have fun, that's fine. Knock yourself out.

However, it's launched this enormous tidal wave of mediocrity that emboldens the dumbest people to do the dumbest shit and make it my problem. I just had to yell at one of the IT guys for trying to hook up our Duo to Claude, and I'm still mad about it lol.

[Havoc]

Stupid people are always going to do stupid shit. I don't think that makes the enabling technology the problem & the anger towards it is misdirected.

>trying to hook up our Duo to Claude

ngl that is hilarious

[habinero]

Yeah, but the idiots had to put in effort before, which was difficult for them for obvious reasons.

Now they have a cheerful idiot robot who can actually do the idiot things they dream up and it tells them how brilliant they are.

[skirmish]

Is it this: GitLab Duo Agent Platform with Claude accelerates development [1]? Well, Gitlab itself promotes hooking them up!

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-duo-agent-platform-with...

[habinero]

No, Duo as in Cisco Duo IAM.

It was a "please do not fuck around with a central pillar of our security infrastructure just because you can" thing lol.

[trumpdong]

What's a Duo?