They're literally doing novel research. The smartest mathematicians in the world couldn't solve Erdős' planar unit distance problem for 80 years, and OpenAI's models knocked that out a couple months ago.
This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.
I admire your efforts here, but you’re tilting against windmills with your comments here. There’s a loud contingent of AI skeptics on HN who haven’t updated their tired arguments in years. Their fervent hatred of AI is mere religious dogma at this point, not anything empirical.
The upside is that we’re competing against these folks. Let them continue to stick their heads in the sand.
Somewhere, someone may be painting an equally reductive picture of you and your position.
You two are obviously smart people, but have you considered that maybe you are unconsciously being backed into a position that is just as absolutist as those you are arguing against? That you are just taking the opposite side in a binary argument where each side sees only one side of the coin?
I use these tools all day every day, and the feeble arguments against them that I’m referencing don’t match my experience from a year ago, let alone today. I rarely argue much about AI on HN anymore, it seems utterly pointless. It’s genuinely sad to me to see how many here are so blinded by rage and fear that they can’t have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of AI. Obviously not everyone, but that’s who my comment was addressing.
I also wouldn’t characterize my position as absolutist or one side of a binary. Interesting that you’d assume that.
Fair enough. I too use LLM coding tools all day everyday. If we’re specifically talking about the arguments in this thread, I have experienced both sides of the argument. Some use cases are more in-distribution than others. I wouldn’t dismiss either side out of hand. I see it more as a “yes, but…”
Seriously I've been on a sabbatical and have no pressure to use AI. I keep trying on my compiler and for coding they flail so hard every time. I love how good they are at helping me diagnose bugs, it's so much better than scouring google like I used to hoping for some result that matches what I'm seeing. Even then, they hallucinate all the time and just say odd things that don't make sense. As soon as you ask them something obscure they just.... merp
This sounds like you may be using subpar models and/or tools - have you had this experience using Codex with GPT-5.5 on at least "high" reasoning or on Claude Code using Opus 4.8 (both with ability to browse web and sufficient context for your project)?
This stuff is moving fast, and if you aren't evaluating SoTA on at least a quarterly basis, you're going to have a bad time.