[K0balt]

Yeah, there’s a lot of people that are in the “AI doesn’t work” camp. IDK what to tell them except that they are holding it wrong. My Anthropic subscription (in the hands of an experienced developer) is worth 4 mid tier or 2 top tier devs. And makes better code than the mids. If you “hold it right”.

[overgard]

I think you're describing a strawman. As a proper hater, I know these things have some useful functionality, but most of us don't think "stochastic tool that can do some useful things but also frequently fucks up" is worth two trillion dollars and massive overhyping from the most irritating people on the planet who can't even tell good code from bad.

[K0balt]

So you are saying that there are people that understand the value proposition and the utility, but don’t think it’s worth it to society (myself included) but who respond to that by lying about it not being effective? I guess that makes sense. Weird, but humans, so , yeah.

I react to that by leveraging a very useful but probably poisonous to society in the long term because humans aren’t good at having things that make them lazy tooll to try to mitigate the negative effects that it will definitely have if left to its own devices. I don’t see the point in raw resistance at this juncture.

[overgard]

You're talking in terms of "lies", but I would say this is more "not buying the hype". I use these things every day at work and at home, I'm aware of the workflows and "how to hold it", and I just don't see the theoretical results being promised. Some things are easier. It's not null. But every time someone says "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!" I want to trap them in those little "phantom zone" alternate dimension space prisons from the superman movies and launch them into space where nobody has to hear them ever again. It's ANNOYING and disingenuine. It's not a "skill issue" to push back against breathless hype from people that don't know what they're talking about.

IMO, the people spreading hype and fear are not neutral actors; if I just disagreed I wouldn't care. But I think they're causing actual harm based on a premise that isn't true. People are losing jobs. People are losing leverage in their work choices. Or if you want to be a cold capitalists, corporations are suffering after they have to rehire the workers they let go prematurely. That's why I put up resistance to it, because I think it's important right now that we don't accept the narrative being sold to us, nor the societal deal we're being offered (well, more railroaded into), both of which are bad.

[K0balt]

I’m with you on the societal harm, but I also think that in many ways “this changes everything” is not out of line.

It has enabled my team to approach and achieve a project that would have required 4x the staffing, at a minimum, 2 years ago. We are guiding the generation of more bug-free, lighter, more tested, more maintainable, better documented code at 1/4 the cost.

We can digest information as a team at 10x the speed, and we can now put volumes of reference resources at our immediate, context aware lookup in ways that were impossible 3 years ago.

It’s true that we are not just using the generic harness; our environment includes hundreds of custom tools , terabytes of reference material on rag, 8 custom local models (deployed trained and tuned by automation) hardware interfaces so that our models can interface directly to our prototypes and run tests, characterization, calibrations, firmware updates, and data dumps.

Most of those tools were one shotted by the AI itself, for a dollar or two each. Whenever we need a new automation capability we just roll it out, and even if it needs hardware it’s usually ready in two or three days, if software only 10 minutes. (Our in house tools don’t have to be as well documented, well written, or resource efficient as our production systems, since humans never even use them, and when we need a new feature we usually just have our AI tooling agent swarm start from scratch using the original as a rough guide)

So we are using AI as the core of our development and design process. If you’re not, you’re arguably “holding it wrong” IMHO.

We’re working to make sure that the next industrial revolution is friendly to humans and useful to people, not just corporations. Or trying to. I’ve got kids, and I’m really concerned about the world they are inheriting, so I’m trying my best to make it a little less terrible if I can.