Where I'm at with AI

https://paulosman.me/2026/01/18/where-im-at-with-ai/

by crashwhip • 6 months ago

46 65 6 months ago

Legend2440• 6 months ago

I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough.

You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed.

There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsic value of art, etc.

erxam• 6 months ago

It should be reworded as: It's not being discussed amongst the people who matter.

rootnod34• 6 months ago

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN.

Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

sharifhsn• 6 months ago

Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.

The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI risk, etc. Resource constraints can be solved, but we’re wrestling with societal constraints. Industrialization created modernism, we could see a similar movement in reaction to AI.

aspenmartin4• 6 months ago

Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do not have to be problematic, they are highly site specific. In some cases there are real concerns (drought-y areas like Arizona, impact on local grids and possibility of rate impacts for ordinary people etc) but in many cases they are not problematic (closed loop or reclaimed water, independent power sources, etc).

everdrive• 6 months ago

This is a weird quirk that I observe in all sorts of contexts. "No one's talking about [thing that is frequently discussed]!" or, "There's never been [an actor in this identity category] in major movie role before!" (except there has plenty of times) or sometimes "You can't even say Christmas anymore!" (except they just did) The somewhat inaccurate use of hyperbolic language does not mean that there is _nothing_ to the particular statement or issue. Only that the hyperbole is just that; an exaggeration of a potentially real and valid issue. The hyperbole is not very helpful, but neither is a total refutation of the issue based on the usage of hyperbole.

throwup238• 6 months ago

@dang has noted this phenomenon in various forms multiple times. The most recent one I can find:

It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42205856

dgeiser13• 6 months ago

I find hyperbolic comments on recommendation threads, e.g. "I can't believe no one has mentioned <blah> yet", to be quite annoying. Every item recommended on this thread is going to be "first" when it's first recommended. Trying to rocket your suggestion to the top of the pile by suggesting it's self-obviousness doesn't mean it's a better suggestion than any others.

s-macke• 6 months ago

... emitting a NYC worth of CO2 in a year is dizzying

Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e.

Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective.

[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

happytoexplain• 6 months ago

Yes, it's being discussed a lot. No, it's not being discussed enough, nor by all the right people. It has the potential to cause untold suffering to the middle class of developed nations, since it's moving too fast for individual humans to adjust. On the Problem Scale that puts it on the "societal emergency" end, which basically can not be discussed enough.

sodapopcan• 6 months ago

Ya, I think "it's not being discussed enough" is a veiled way to say: "I can't believe so people are ok with this shit."

duped• 6 months ago

What's not being discussed are the people building these things are evil and they're doing it for evil purposes.

I spent some time thinking of a better word than "evil" before typing this comment. I can't think of one. Doing something bad that harms more than it helps for the purposes of enrichment and power is simply put: evil.

micromacrofoot• 6 months ago

I think maybe people who write that it's not being discussed really mean that people aren't doing anything based on the discussions. Overall all of this is just sort of happening.

Aurornis2• 6 months ago

You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed

It’s not just being discussed, it’s dominating the conversation on sites like Hacker News. It’s actually hard to find the useful and informative LLM content because it doesn’t get as many upvotes as the constant flow of anti-LLM thought pieces like this.

There was even the strange period when the rationalist movement was in the spotlight and getting mainstream media coverage for their AI safety warnings. They overplayed their hand with the whole call to drop bombs on data centers and the AI 2027 project with Scott Alexander that predicted the arrival of AGI and disastrous consequences in 2027. There was so much extreme doom and cynicism for a while that a lot of people just got tired of it and tuned out.

vonneumannstan2• 6 months ago

Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful"

Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on anything at all. Same vibes as the guys saying horseless carriages were useless and couldn't possibly do anything better than a horse which after all has its own mind. Just incredibly short sighted and lacking curiosity or creativity.

skydhash4• 6 months ago

First car prototypes were useless and it has taken a few decades to have a good version. The first combustion engine was in 1826. Would you buy a prototype or a carriage for transportation at that time?

volkk• 6 months ago

no, but AI isn't going to light on fire as I drive and potentially kill me. it's also not an exorbitant expense.

vonneumannstan2• 6 months ago

If you couldn't foresee how they would eventually be useful with improvements over time you probably bought a lot of horse carriages in 1893 and appropriately lost your ass.

ivanstojic• 6 months ago

If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said

It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.”

I’m tired of the hype boss.

deweller• 6 months ago

The second half of that argument was not in this article. The author was just relating his experience.

For what it is worth, I have also gone from a "this looks interesting" to "this is a regular part of my daily workflow" in the same 6 month time period.

jofla_net• 6 months ago

"The challenge isn’t choosing “AI or not AI” - that ship has sailed."

candiddevmike• 6 months ago

I think the rapid iteration and lack of consistency from the model providers is really killing the hype here. You see HN stories all the time around how things are getting worse, and it seems folks success with the major models is starting to heavily diffuse.

The model providers should really start having LTS (at least 2 years) offerings that deliver consistent results regardless of load, IMO. Folks are tired of the treadmill and just want some stability here, and if the providers aren't going to offer it, llama.cpp will...

KptMarchewa2• 6 months ago

There is a difference between quantization of SOTA model and old models. People want non-quantized SOTA models, rather than old models.

aspenmartin4• 6 months ago

Yea I hear this a lot, do people genuinely dismiss that there has been step change progress over 6-12 months timescale? I mean it’s night and day, look at benchmark numbers… “yea I don’t buy it” ok but then don’t pretend you’re objective

benrutter• 6 months ago

I think I'd be in the "don't buy it" camp, so maybe I can explain my thinking at least.

I don't deny that there's been huge improvements in LLMs over the last 6-12 months at all. I'm skeptical that the last 6 months have suddenly presented a 'category shift' in terms of the problems LLMs can solve (I'm happy to be proved wrong!).

It seems to me like LLMs are better at solving the same problems that they could solve 6 months ago, and the same could be said comparing 6 months to 12 months ago.

The argument I'd dismiss isn't the improvement, it's that there's a whole load of sudden economic factors, or use cases, that have been unlocked in the last 6 months because of the improvements in LLMs.

That's kind of a fuzzier point, and a hard one to know until we all have hindsight. But I think OP is right that people have been claiming "LLMs are fundamentally in a different category to where they were 6 months ago" for the last 2 years - and as yet, none of those big improvements have yet unlocked a whole new category of use cases for LLMs.

To be honest, it's a very tricky thing to weight into, because the claims being made around LLMs are very varied from "we're 2 months away from all disease being solved" to "LLMs are basically just a bit better than old school Markov chains". I'd argue that clearly neither of those are true, but it's hard to orient stuff when both those sides are being claimed at the same time.

Aurornis2• 6 months ago

I’m a light LLM user myself and I still write most of the important code by myself.

Even I can see there has been a clear advancement in performance in the past six months. There will probably be another incremental step 6 months from now.

I use LLMs in a project that helps give suggestions for a previously manually data entry job. Six months ago the LLM suggestions were hit or miss. Using a recent model it’s over 90% accurate. Everything is still manually reviewed by humans but having a recent model handle the grunt work has been game changing.

If people are drinking a firehose of LinkedIn style influencer hype posts I could see why it’s tiresome. I ignore those and I think everyone else should do. There is real progress being made though.

libraryofbabel• 6 months ago

This point about "some people already said six months ago that it was better than it was six months ago" is regularly trotted out in threads like this like it's some sort of trump card that proves AI is just hype. It doesn't make sense to me. What else do you expect people to be saying about a rapidly-improving technology? How does it help you to distinguish technologies that are hype from those that are not?

I'm sure people were saying similar things about, say, aviation all through the first decades of the 20th century, "wow, those planes are getting better every few years"... "Until recently planes were just gimmicks, but now they can fly across the English channel!"... "I wouldn't have got in one of those death traps 5 years ago, but now I might consider it!" And different people were saying things like that at different times, because they had different views of the technology, different definitions of usefulness, different appetites for risk. It's just a wide range of voices talking in similar-sounding terms about a rapidly-developing technology over a span of time.

This is just how people are going to talk about rapidly-improving technologies for which different people have different levels of adoption at different times. It's not a terribly interesting point. You have to engage with the specifics, I'm afraid.

dtnewman• 6 months ago

The current landscape is a battle between loss-leaders. OpenAI is burning through billions of dollars per year and is expected to hit tens of billions in losses per year soon. Your $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT is nowhere near keeping them afloat. Anthropic’s figures are more moderate, but it is still currently lighting money on fire in order to compete and gain or protect market share.

I don't doubt that the leading labs are lighting money on fire. Undoubtedly, it costs crazy amounts of cash to train these models. But hardware development takes time and it's only been a few years at this point. Even TODAY, one can run Kimi K2.5, a 1T param open-source model on two mac studios. It runs at 24 tokens/sec. Yes, it'll cost you $20k for the specs needed, but that's hobbyist and small business territory... we're not talking mainframe computer costs here. And certainly this price will come down? And it's hard to imagine that the hardware won't get faster/better?

Yes... training the models can really only be done with NVIDIA and costs insane amounts of money. But it seems like even if we see just moderate improvement going forward, this is still a monumental shift for coding if you compare where we are at to 2022 (or even 2024).

[1] https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2016487974876164562?s=20

AnotherGoodName• 6 months ago

And just to add to this the reason the Apple macs are used is that they have the highest memory bandwidth of any easily obtainable consumer device right now. (Yes the nvidia cards which also have hbm are even higher on memory bandwidth but not easily obtainable). Memory bandwidth is the limiting factor for inference more so than raw compute.

Memory costs are skyrocketing right now as everyone pivots to using hbm paired with moderate processing power. This is the perfect combination for inference. The current memory situation is obviously temporary. Factories will be built and scaled and memory is not particularly power hungry, there’s a reason you don’t really need much cooling for it. As training becomes less of a focus and inference more of a focus we will at some point be moving from the highest end nvidia cards to boxes of essentially power efficient memory hbm memory attached to smaller more efficient compute in the future.

I see a lot of commentary “ai companies are so stupid buying up all the memory” around the place atm. That memory is what’s needed to run the inference cheaply. It’s currently done on nvidia cards and apple m series cpus because those two are the first to utilise High Bandwidth Memory but the raw compute of the nvidia cards is really only useful for training, they are just using them for inference right now because there’s not much pn the market that has similar memory bandwidth. But this will be changing very soon. Everyone in the industry is coming along with their own dedicated compute using hbm memory.

skydhash4• 6 months ago

that most software will be built very quickly, and more complicated software should be developed by writing the specification, and then generating the code. We may still need to drop down to a programming language from time to time, but I believe that almost all development will be done with generative AI tools

My strongly held belief is that anyone who think that way, also think that software engineering is reading tickets, searching for code snippets on stack overflow and copy-pasting code.

Good specifications are always written after a lot of prototypes, experiments and sample implementations (which may be production level). Natural language specifications exist after the concept has been formalized. Before that process, you only have dreams and hopes.

leoedin• 6 months ago

I've been playing around with "vibe coding" recently. Generally react front end and Rust back end. Rust has the nice benefit that you only really get logic bugs if it compiles.

In the few apps I've built, progress is initially amazing. And then you get to a certain point and things slow down. I've built a list of things that are "not quite right" and then, as I work through each one all the strange architectural decisions the AI initially made start to become obvious.

Much like any software development, you have to stop adding features and start refactoring. That's the point at which not being a good software developer will really start to bite you, because it's only experience that will point you in the right direction.

It's completely incredible what the models can do. Both in speed of building (especially credible front ends), and as sounding boards for architecture. It's definitely a productivity boost. But I think we're still a long way off non-technical people being able to develop applications.

A while ago I worked on a non-trivial no-code application. I realised then that even though there's "no code", you still needed to apply careful thought about data structures and UI and all the other things that make an application great. Otherwise it turned into a huge mess. This feels similar.

throwaway0123_5• 6 months ago

But I think we're still a long way off non-technical people being able to develop applications.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do a case study, having truly non-technical people build apps with these tools. Take a few moderately tech-savvy (can use MS office up to doing basic stuff in excel, understands a filesystem) people who work white collar jobs. Give them a one or two-day crash course on how Claude Code works. See what is the most complicated app which they can develop that is reasonably stable and secure.

CuriouslyC• 6 months ago

This is a big part of why vibe coded projects fall over. AI creates big balls of mud because it's myopic as hell. Linters help but they're still pretty limited. I've had good success using https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/valknut to automate the majority of my refactoring work. I still do a style/naming pass on things, but it handles most issues that can be analytically measured.

JBAnderson5• 6 months ago

I think part of the issue here is that software engineering is a very broad field. If you’re building another crud app, your job might only require reading a ticket and copy/pasting from stack overflow. If you are working in a regulated industry, you are spending most of your time complying with regulations. If you are building new programming languages or compilers, you are building the abstractions from the ground up. I’m sure there’s dozens if not hundreds of other sub fields that build software in other ways with different requirements and constraints.

LLMs will trivialize some subfields, be nearly useless in others, but will probably help to some degree in most of them. The range of opinions online about how useful LLMs are in their work probably correlates to what subfields they work in

skydhash4• 6 months ago

The thing is if you’re working on a CRUD app, you probably have (and you should) a framework, which make it easy to do all the boilerplate. Editor fluency can add an extra boost to your development speed.

I’ve done CRUD and the biggest proportion of the time was custom business rules and UI tweaking (updating the design system). And they were commits with small diffs. The huge commits were done by copy pasting, code generators and heavy use of the IDE refactoring tools.

mkw5053• 6 months ago

The Uber comparison feels weak because their lock-in came from regulatory capture and network effects, neither of which LLMs have once weights are commoditized (are we already there?).

willtemperley• 6 months ago

It's important to remember these things are almost certainly gaslighting people through subtle psychological triggers, making people believe these chatbots far more than they are, using behavioural design principles [1].

I often find when I come up with the solution, these little autocompletes pretend they knew that all along. Or I make an observation they say something like "yes that's the core insight into this".

They're great at boilerplate. They can immediately spot a bug in a 1000 lines of code. I just wish they'd stop being so pretentious. It's us that are driving these things, it's our intelligence, intuition and experience that's creating solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_design

bandrami2• 6 months ago

I use it for routine coding tasks like generating scaffolding or writing tests

IDK this sounds a whole lot like paying for snippets

speff2• 6 months ago

Framed this way, it's useful for saving time creating or finding those snippets at least.

rootnod34• 6 months ago

for<TAB>….

Yeh, you are right. A snippet for they would have taken longer than booting an agent and let it hallucinate for—loop parameters that didn’t even exist.

bandrami2• 6 months ago

I still think that's missing the point of LLMs; they're sources of plausible text continuations. Their strength is using them in places where the actual semantics of their output isn't important.

rootnod34• 6 months ago

Almost. It’s worse though. It’s using snippets without using grey matter and shifting blame if needed.

A snippet for a for loop in your editor, yeah, go ahead. A “snippet for “make this spec into half assed code” is a wholly different story.

Overpaid bubble snippets at best.

jillesvangurp2• 6 months ago

increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work.

Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.

And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.

And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.

goalieca• 6 months ago

There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that.

I don’t think typing code was ever the problem here. I’m doubtful this got any cheaper.

jillesvangurp2• 6 months ago

There's a big difference between typing assembler, cobol or whatever; or typing something more modern in terms of what the resulting code does. And also there's a good reason why programmers aren't paid in characters/words/lines/bytes whatever per hour: they are mostly not typing but thinking. The amount of thinking they do is a constant. The amount of typing they do is a constant. But there's a big step change in productivity for the resulting stuff.

yalogin• 6 months ago

There really are no other use cases for generative AI than software flows. The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable. One think I am convinced of is that software engineering salaries will fall and we have seen the peak salaries for this industry, they will only fall going forward. Sure there will be a few key senior folks that continue to make a lot, but the software salaries itself will go through a k split just like out economy.

ryandrake• 6 months ago

The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable.

"Software Engineers" isn't a single group, here. Some software engineers (making millions of dollars at top AI companies) are automating other software engineers' workflows and making those software engineers replaceable. The people who are going to be mostly negatively affected by these changes are not the people setting out to build them.

KptMarchewa2• 6 months ago

The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable.

Do you really think we should be like ancient egyptian scribes and gatekeep the knowledge and skills purely for our sake?

I don't think there has been other field that is this open with trade secrets. I know a dentist who openly claims they should be paid for training dental interns (idk what the US terminology is) despite them being productive, simply because they will earn a lot of money in the future. I did not want and do not want software engineering to become that.

datsci_est_20152• 6 months ago

This article is different because it actually talks about code review, which I don’t see very often. Especially in the ultra-hype 1000x “we built an operating system in a day using agentic coding”, it seems like code review is implied to be a thing of the past.

As long as code continues to need to be reviewed to (mostly) maintain a chain of liability, I don’t see SWE going anywhere like both hypebros and doomers seem to be intent on posting about.

Code review will simply become the bottle neck for SWE. In other words, reading and understanding code so that when SHTF the shareholders know who to hold accountable.

Normal_gaussian• 6 months ago

This is one of the key elements that will shift the SWE discipline. We will move to more explicitly editing systems by their footprint and guarantees, and verifying that what exists matches those.

datsci_est_20152• 6 months ago

“Editing systems” will remain being a rigid and formal process, though. The discipline won’t become softer and more easily understood (SWEs are going to be replaced!), if anything it will become harder and less easily understood.

Shareholders don’t want a “release” button that when they press it there’s a XX% chance that the entire software stack collapses because an increasingly complex piece of software is understood by no one but a black box called “AI” that can’t be fired or otherwise held accountable.

sjsizjhaha2• 6 months ago

The corollary here is there’s 2 cases here:

1. You know exactly what the code should look like ahead of time. Agents are handy here, but this is rare and takes no time at all as is

2. You don’t know exactly what it should be. Building the mental model by hand is faster than working backwards from finished work. Agents help with speeding up your knowledge here, but having them build the model is not good

Code review is and always was the bottle neck. You are doing code review when you write code.

dudeinhawaii• 6 months ago

I'm very PRO AI and a daily user but let's be real, where is the productivity gain? It's at the edges, it's in greenfield, we've seen a handful of "things written with AI" be launched successfully and the majority of the time these are shovels for other AI developers. Large corporations are not releasing even 5x higher velocity or quality. Ditto for small corporations. If the claimed multipliers were broadly real at the org level, we would be seeing obvious outward signals like noticeably faster release cycles in mainstream products, more credible challengers shipping mature alternatives, and more rapid catching-up in open-source software projects. I am not seeing that yet, is anyone else? It feels like the 'invisible productivity' version of Gross Domestic Product claims, the claims don't seem to match real-world.

And those are the EASY things for AI to "put out of work".

HARD systems like government legacy systems are not something you can slap 200 unit tests on and say "agent re-write this in Rust". They're hard because of the complex interconnects, myriad patches, workarounds, institutional data codified both in the codebase and outside of it. Bugs that stay bugs because they next 20 versions used that bug in some weird way. I started my career in that realm. I call bullshit on AI taking any jobs here if it can't even accelerate the pace of _quality_ releases of OS and video games.

I'm not saying this won't happen eventually but that eventually is doing a heavy lift. I am skeptical of the 6-12 month timelines for broad job displacement that I see mentioned.

AIs (LLMs) are useful in this subtle way like "Google Search" and _not_ like "the internet". It's a very specific set of text heavy information domains that are potentially augmented. That's great but it's not the end of all work or even the end of all lucrative technical work.

It's a stellar tool for smart engineers to do _even_ more, and yet, the smart ones know you have to babysit and double-check -- so it's not remotely a replacement.

This is without even opening the can of worms that is AI Agency.

sjsizjhaha2• 6 months ago

the smart ones know you have to babysit and double-check -- so it's not remotely a replacement.

This has been the big one for me. Of all the best devs I know, only one is really big on AI, but he’s also the one that spent years in a relational database without knowing what isolation levels are. He was absolutely a “greenfield” kinda dev - which he was great at, tons of ideas but not big on the small stuff.

The rest use them judiciously and see a lot of value, but reading and understanding code is still the bottleneck. And reviewing massive PRs is not efficient.

Where I'm at with AI

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