Please stop the AI confidence theater

https://www.elenaverna.com/p/please-stop-the-ai-confidence-theater

by skadamat • 19 days ago

239 261 19 days ago

gregoryl• 19 days ago

The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!

altmanaltman• 19 days ago

quantum computing in next 5-10 years for sure will be the next grift, the wheels are already turning

ben_w3• 19 days ago

Quantum computing is soooo 2018, you want space data centres for the next 5-10 years (or "5-10 tears" as the apple keyboard gave me the first time).

im_down_w_otp• 19 days ago

Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years.

The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.

Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.

MichaelZuo• 19 days ago

Yeah, there will always be some percentage of bozos and clowns in America… that’s never going to change.

And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.

atonse• 19 days ago

Bozos and clowns are a universal cultural phenomenon.

overgard8• 19 days ago

This stuff makes me nostalgic for NFTs and the metaverse which is pretty horrifying all things considered.

mschuster912• 19 days ago

Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.

Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.

What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic.

Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days.

Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end.

First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point.

Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.

lstodd4• 19 days ago

I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre.

Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.

mschuster912• 19 days ago

Wired my home with fiber (10 GBit/s), I used premade fiber and a LC-LC socket box… no splicing needed, at all.

But yeah it‘s going to be a skill that will be important for datacenters.

Avicebron2• 19 days ago

Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.

embedding-shape3• 19 days ago

What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.

Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.

I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.

But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.

ben_w3• 19 days ago

But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using,

I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is.

Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.

classified• 19 days ago

AI Confidence Theater

That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.

dgellow4• 19 days ago

Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"

fercircularbuf• 19 days ago

My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.

cahaya• 19 days ago

I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap:

interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.

throwaway219450• 19 days ago

The biggest benefit for me has been getting side projects done. Little bugs or todos that would take more time than I have to spare, but don’t detract from the project.

I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.

Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you.

For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.

bensyverson• 19 days ago

The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy.

This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.

Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.

onion2k• 19 days ago

If you were to say 'doing the same work a bit faster' isn't life-changing then that's evidence that the hypothesis in the article is actually correct.

natsucks2• 19 days ago

Do you think it was the AI itself that gave you the boost here or the discussion and brainstorming?

vikp• 19 days ago

It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.

First, we have this section:

But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.

Then immediately after:

This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.

(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)

algoth1• 19 days ago

As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it

radicalbyte• 19 days ago

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

ed_elliott_asc• 19 days ago

Marketeers for venture capitalists? Does that beat vc’s?

AaronAPU3• 19 days ago

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

CPLX3• 19 days ago

Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.

You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.

tavavex3• 19 days ago

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

natsucks2• 19 days ago

I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.

tracerbulletx2• 19 days ago

I'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.

egr2• 19 days ago

I love this observation and this thread in general.

Frost1x• 19 days ago

Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.

There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.

esseph• 19 days ago

100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.

ghusto3• 19 days ago

There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:

https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...

It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.

rglover• 19 days ago

Drink Coke

a4isms• 19 days ago

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

adiabatichottub• 19 days ago

Ah, the plea for sanity dollar! Huge Market!

Sadly, he was never able to rid the world of all these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.

oooyay• 19 days ago

Incredible, Bill Hicks on HN. My life has come full circle.

Ironically Bill smoked like a chimney and for that we can also largely thank marketers.

BoingBoomTschak• 19 days ago

Sounds very much like the South Park bit when they call the guy selling jewellery to the elderly via teleshopping!

sajithdilshan• 19 days ago

The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation

sigmoid10• 19 days ago

Youtube channels are also getting hyper-monetized now. Private equity firms finally learned that some of these informational channels draw a huge crowd of loyal viewers with a very specific kind of technical interest and have built high levels of trustworthiness. Ideal targets for running ads. Now they buy all these channels and have their marketers optimize every corner for generating easy money.

f17428d27584• 19 days ago

“But first, we need to understand how we got here.”

fg137• 19 days ago

I mean, many channels like CNBC already looked like that before ChatGPT was invented, stretching a 3min "explainer" video with unnecessary background story and "expert interviews" that serve no purpose, so much that I just go through comments in hope that someone has summarized it for me.

conradfr• 19 days ago

The good thing is that it's steadily ruining shorts.

giancarlostoro• 19 days ago

You should have just said quick example: Windows

toofy• 19 days ago

let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.

how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?

it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”

at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.

wseqyrku3• 19 days ago

how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies [..]

Trigger warning. Could not finish that sentence.

ModernMech4• 19 days ago

It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.

1) cool people do cool things, start a scene

2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word

3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass

4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.

5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs

chiefgeek• 19 days ago

Burning Man?

toddmorey• 19 days ago

I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.

It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.

Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.

elorant• 19 days ago

Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.

Theodores2• 19 days ago

I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.

With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.

The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.

Dunning Kruger springs to mind.

Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.

Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.

This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.

After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.

In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.

skydhash4• 19 days ago

I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).

It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.

Razengan2• 19 days ago

Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.

saratogacx• 19 days ago

Probably not, it just re-baselines. Now the scams aren't for bread money but are for entertainment money. If the time resource isn't changing and the effort isn't changing but the needs fulfilled become wants fulfilled you're getting more joy from each dollar scammed instead of just substance.

It may make pity scams less effective though so I'd expect the implementation to change to focus more on creating urgency and less on altruism.

warumdarum• 19 days ago

Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende

adi_pradhan• 19 days ago

There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.

I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.

weego• 19 days ago

There are, they're all on the sell side though.

dgellow4• 19 days ago

Who are those people and businesses?

ambicapter• 19 days ago

I won’t tell you, you’re just gonna have to tokenmaxx in a vain attempt to chase the dragon.

munksbeer• 19 days ago

What sort of proof are you expecting from another poster on hn?

meindnoch• 19 days ago

The people selling shovels.

jdgoesmarching• 19 days ago

Elena is one of those people who was loudest about AI on other channels and now she writes this when, as you say, there’s a demand for articles like this.

It’s marketers doing marketing all the way down.

axegon_• 19 days ago

It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.

supaflybanzai• 19 days ago

Amen! Let it burn…

john_strinlai5• 19 days ago

Show me something truly life changing.

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

as a note, i found this particularly funny:

"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."

cautiouscat• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.

So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’

john_strinlai5• 19 days ago

how people tell them AI changed their life

yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.

dgellow4• 19 days ago

AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

cryo32• 19 days ago

Yes. However this one is a bit weird.

Every software purchase process I have been involved in I have asked the vendor to demonstrate their claims against our requirements.

With AI, I am expected to defend myself from claims that my requirements are wrong.

mekoka• 19 days ago

It’s doing more harm than good.

For context

Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.

KptMarchewa• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.

disgruntledphd22• 19 days ago

Mobile mapping too.

danlitt• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!

Angostura• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing",

I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.

adverbly• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Surely you're kidding right?

You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.

Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.

therobots927• 19 days ago

I don’t consider myself a wizard.

You seem a little full of yourself. (That’s putting it charitably. You seem full of shit.)

II2II• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.

The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.

I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.

Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.

dofm2• 19 days ago

I think this is very domain-specific.

FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.

LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.

overgard8• 19 days ago

It's held to that standard because of the hype. Literally the boosters can't stop saying "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"

nicce• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...

slopinthebag4• 19 days ago

Blender was life changing for me, both when I first discovered it and still today.

sebastiennight• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012

- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around

- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)

- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)

- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)

That's just off the top of my head.

I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?

dingaling• 19 days ago

E-mail, software encryption, HTTP and chat protocols have utterly transformed daily life.

rstuart4133• 19 days ago

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Off the to of my head web browsers, the algorithms that made WiFi / 5G / Bluetooth possible, public key encryption, GPS, SQL, TCP/IP, Reed Solomon codes spring to mind. Without them like today would be very different. Sounds life changing to me.

The current valuations of AI companies suggest AI will have a similar effect. I think it will, in the long term. People tend to overestimate/oversell the short term effects of technology, and underestimate the long term effects.

codeknight11• 19 days ago

Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!

nailer2• 19 days ago

But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.

This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.

Planktonne2• 19 days ago

Do you earn 8 times as much now?

nailer2• 19 days ago

I know the point you’re attempting to make but I’ll answer anyway: no but my work is vastly less tedious.

no-name-here• 19 days ago

Link to the product, apparently has a free tier: https://www.descript.com

(I'm unaffiliated with them.)

phillipcarter• 19 days ago

Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products.

For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.

romaniv• 19 days ago

The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.

A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.

The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.

dofm2• 19 days ago

That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work.

Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.

fithisux• 19 days ago

The problem is that these people are left untreated because that is what people at power can exploit.

This is social collapse.

adam_arthur• 19 days ago

AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.

The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).

But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.

Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.

It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.

I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.

If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.

ghostpepper• 19 days ago

This is also the dichotomy I'm seeing. This meme sums it up https://fixupx.com/danhockenmaier/status/2021617680525172840

I like to imagine a similar dynamic happening when previous transformative technologies were invented: when the power tools like the chainsaw were invented, I wonder if there was a cohort of carpenters that dismissed them because of how much damage they could do in unskilled hands.

slopinthebag4• 19 days ago

Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?

throw3108223• 19 days ago

Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.

You could say that AI turned them from stupid and lazy to the famously dangerous combination of stupid and hardworking.

bwfan123• 19 days ago

fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing

There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.

In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.

Aurornis• 19 days ago

They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code

If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?

Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.

The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.

If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.

mathisfun123• 19 days ago

their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs

You think this a clever gotcha but it's not because no one was generating PRs before LLMs.

sfadsdfsdfad• 19 days ago

I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.

My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.

I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.

I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.

throw3108223• 19 days ago

Show me something truly life changing

Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?

overgard8• 19 days ago

Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job

lstodd4• 19 days ago

That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.

It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.

throw3108223• 19 days ago

Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.

simianwords• 19 days ago

People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.

Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.

No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.

_zoltan_• 19 days ago

I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue.

My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years.

I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.

LogicFailsMe• 19 days ago

As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it.

That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul.

AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh.

Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.

ProllyInfamous3• 19 days ago

As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com .

Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights).

----

My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er).

I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin.

Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

skydhash4• 19 days ago

Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).

Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.

forcedtolinux• 19 days ago

Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.

Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM. The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.

Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.

ProllyInfamous3• 19 days ago

Yes, conceptually I understand this is silly.

However, what I meant was: whatever the default programming language used when running Arduino Software Suite.

Which is "essentially C++" according to my LLM query.

greenavocado• 19 days ago

Ah, a 5070.

You will find this most prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557728

ProllyInfamous3• 19 days ago

I almost bought the 5070 (12GB), but got the 5070Ti (16GB), instead. It is MUCH FASTER than the non-Ti [1], and can run a multitude-more local LLMs:

<https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5070-ti.c4...>

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5070.c4218

I really wish NVIDIA would name their products better (e.g. the 5070Ti is closer to a 5080 than a 5070, in performance).

[1] Just as examples: 136 tok/s Llama3.1:8b; 65 tok/s Qwen3.5:9B; PoExile 4k@144Hz... it can do each while the majority of the CPU cores mine Monero =P

mikgp• 19 days ago

I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool.

And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.

hahahaa• 19 days ago

But but but... 1000x engineer who can out compete your 50 person startup with their agent flow.

lstodd4• 19 days ago

hahaha this reads like a porn clip script.

bitwize• 19 days ago

Remember, folks, AI is mainly just statistics. You know, as in what comes after "lies" and "damned lies".

aerhardt• 19 days ago

AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.

In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.

This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!

peteforde• 19 days ago

I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory.

Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.

ghusto3• 19 days ago

But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

- I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them

- I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore

- I don't try to debug

The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.

ModernMech4• 19 days ago

show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart
Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow

So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.

its_ethan2• 19 days ago

It feels a little disingenuous to ignore the second half of his final sentence/conclusion. Feels like you're trying to do some kind of "gotcha".

The main thrust of what he was saying is in the second half: "a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too" - you could do your job tomorrow without an IDE auto-completing common syntax, but it's a useful tool for many people. OP is saying that AI, for him, is similarly a very useful tool that he considers to be close to "critical in [his] day".

Why not actually address that instead of playing word games?

Supermancho• 19 days ago

>> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart
> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow
So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.

That's ungracious, at best. Your interpretation is something close to the death of the position, while theirs is the moderate interpretation of "causes chaos".

adamors• 19 days ago

- I don't try to debug

Just today I wanted to add to my nvim setup some validation for Kubernetes YAML. Asked Claude why it wasn’t looking at schemas correctly. After 30 minutes of prompts and nudges, during which it went on multiple wild goose chases, I just gave up and did it myself.

Other times I did have more success but it’s not rare to encounter this infinite loop style drill-down, which ultimately wastes more time than if I did it myself from the beginning.

AlexeyBelov2• 18 days ago

I don't concern myself with technical details anymore. I don't try to debug.

To brag about this openly...

ghusto3• 14 days ago

Technology was and always will be a means to an end, not the end itself.

postalcoder2• 19 days ago

Ok I'll take the bait.

Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day.

Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one.

Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later:

And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.

AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.

nikanj2• 19 days ago

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power...

The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

icedchai• 19 days ago

Haven't you heard? Every company is an "AI company" now.

spmurrayzzz• 19 days ago

I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence.

I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.).

We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.

postalcoder2• 19 days ago

I did find the bit about ChatGPT's crappy prose amusing because while that may feel like it's a good benchmark for the state of AI, the quality of prose doesn't necessarily correlate with the major progress made over the last few years which is in post-training.

daishi55• 19 days ago

What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.

ingvay7• 19 days ago

Marketing, Finance, and HR

Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right.

While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down.

Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do.

It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.

tines2• 19 days ago

no brainer

An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

The same attitude has been directed at points through history for people "who depend on the internet," "who depend on computers," and "who depend on machines."

I was told growing up "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" and yet now my phone has an offline LLM on it.

gmm19902• 19 days ago

I find that thinking/agent mode sometimes makes it worse/comes up with the same thing and just takes a long time. But I’m sure it’ll be different with fable for a few months until that hype blows over

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

Something a lot of folks struggling with these systems don't get is that the instruction and management of them is often quite important - just because they're capable doesn't mean they're mind readers.

Most of the skepticism I encounter on this front is due to lack of proper direction, process involving planning and review before execution, and appropriate attention given to evaluation and feedback loops.

If you asked the smartest person in the world to YOLO a task with the sort of instruction the average denier uses to evaluate an LLM, you'd likely find they wouldn't get back what they were expecting either - and if you're evaluating on subpar models/tools, you shouldn't be surprised to get subpar results.

slopinthebag4• 19 days ago

Or they aren’t building a SaaS with React or a TUI with Typecript, which is about the only thing that LLMs have “solved”.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

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.

lilbigdoot3• 19 days ago

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

preommr• 19 days ago

I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.

I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

Totally agree that the lack of a common base of evaluation is terrible for the discussion, and benchmaxing only contributes to this.

The only way to get a sense for these systems is to use them on things you know well, and everyone knows different things at different levels.

People also tend to underestimate how fast this is moving and base their take on dated and subpar systems for a variety of reasons, a key one being that the firehose is too big for any one person to have a proper focus on all of it.

lilbigdoot3• 19 days ago

I tried to have multiple models convert a simple textmate grammar to a vim one, and none of them could do it. They couldn't even use the right names between the regex matches and the color definitions. I tried for about 30 minutes. It took me about 5

I tried having them work on a LSP. The fact I got a one shot half working autocomplete based on my existing work was cool, but again, they flailed on incredibly simple things like file path normalization / converting from a URI and I had to rewrite a decent amount of code. I don't think I saved any time

People keep throwing this out there but I keep wondering where are the receipts? I am seeing less interesting software released, anecdotally I know, since AI has taken hold, than before.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

Did you try providing it documentation for the respective formats (via browsing/tool use or input to the prompt)? And were you using a modern thinking model from Anthropic or OpenAI?

The crucial breakdown here sounds like either lack of proper context/harness or insufficiently capable model (there's a huge gulf between GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8/Fable class models and anything not from the big three) or both.

overgard8• 19 days ago

You know, people could just put their money where their mouth is. IE go build something amazing instead of talking endlessly about how they're going to build amazing stuff. That's why this feels like so much theatre.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

That's exactly what the people in my orbit and whom I'm watching are doing, and some of their outputs are fueling the excitement.

If you aren't seeing remarkable things being done with this tech, I'd argue you aren't looking hard enough. I understand there's a lot of noise obscuring the signal, but that's always the case with a "big thing."

nradov• 19 days ago

I should use it to read and vote on HN comments so that I don't have to waste time doing that myself.

shepherdjerred• 19 days ago

You’re absolutely right! This would save so much time.

Sent from my Claude Code

lowsong2• 19 days ago

Why do all arguments from AI boosters boil down to this same cycle:

A new model is released, AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time, and all criticism is shrugged off as "not up to date" and met with "try the new model!" Then, once level heads actually put the claims to the test and find it wanting, criticism is met with "you're just not using it right, you have to learn how to prompt/context/loop engineer for best results" until the next model comes out and this argument repeats.

heresalexandria15• 19 days ago

It shouldn't be a surprise that the baseline for "best" shifts as better tech comes out, but that doesn't make dated models any less capable than they were when they came out.

Skeptics continue to move the goalposts on what constitutes this mattering, but the fact that frontier systems are making novel maths & sciences discoveries and I can run an LLM on my phone for simple tasks that would've been unthinkable a few years ago are testaments to the directionality of the tech.

wseqyrku3• 19 days ago

AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time

Hint: Those are not AI fans. (See the top comment for context.)

cat_plus_plus• 19 days ago

AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.

nojito• 19 days ago

And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude.

This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.

justonepost2• 19 days ago

Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.

chrismorgan• 19 days ago

Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself.

Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.

overgard8• 19 days ago

Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?

einpoklum• 19 days ago

Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater?

But then how will the investors justify having poured over a Trillion USD into AI?

Confidence theater will continue until morale improves.

lspears• 19 days ago

"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH."

Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.

bronlund• 19 days ago

Relax, AI is going to kill education and eliminate jobs, and changing lives, but you have to be patient. Let it cook.

harimau777• 19 days ago

Can someone explain to me:

I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is).

To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.

apsurd• 19 days ago

from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.

llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.

rnd33• 18 days ago

Subsidized from a capex perspective maybe, but the profit margins for API-priced inference tokens are likely very high.

Also, a lot of people get stuck on the idea that the main use case of LLMs is to generate more production code. I don't see it like that at all anymore. It's just as useful or even more useful as a problem-solving partner, generating throw-away prototypes, conducting experiments, verifying assumptions against code and documentation, performing one-off UI or smoke testing.

therealdrag05• 19 days ago

It’s constantly goalpost moving.

“It’s totally useless” to “it hallucinates constantly” to “it’s not revolutionary” to “show me where it’s 100x productivity gains” to “if AI is so good then why isn’t OpenAI one shoting all its software and even cloning all software on the planet?”

Djrichsjdjdnxkd2• 19 days ago

She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss.

Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist.

No one is working on changing that. Anyone?

Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard?

We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.

wseqyrku3• 19 days ago

I have watched people interact with chatbots. It's like watching someone pulling a guinea worm out of their leg. I don't know where all that confidence come from.

luciana1u• 19 days ago

AI confidence theater is just the Dunning-Kruger effect with a GPU budget. Everyone else's AI code is garbage; my AI code is 'strategically augmented.'

weirdxx2• 19 days ago

Weird

weirdxx2• 19 days ago

Someone finally said something

Please stop the AI confidence theater

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