Comment by codyvoda
18 days ago
this entire thread is very reddit-y
this stuff works. it takes effort and learning. it’s not going to magically solve high-complexity tasks (or even low-complexity ones) without investment. having people use it, learn how it works, and improve the systems is the right approach
a lot of armchair engineers in here
People, specifically managers and C-levels, are being sold on this crap on the idea that it can replace people now, today as-is. Billions upon billions of dollars are being shoved in indiscriminately, toothbrushes are coming with "AI" slapped on somehow from how insane the hype bubble is.
And here we have many examples from the biggest bullshit pushers in the whole market of their state of the art tool being hilariously useless in trivial cases. These PRs are about as simple as you can get without it being a typo fix, and we're all seeing it actively bullshit and straight up contradict itself many times, just as anyone who's ever used LLMs would tell you happens all the time.
The supposed magic, omnipotent tool that is AI apparently can't even write test scaffolding without a human telling it exactly what it has to do, yet we're supposed to be excited about this crap? If I saw a PR like this at work, I'd be going straight to my manager to have whoever dared push this kind of garbage reprimanded on the spot, except not even interns are this incompetent and annoying to work with.
it’s not magic. it can make meaningful contributions (if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them)
you’re taking an anecdote and blowing it out of proportion to fit your preformed opinion. yes, when you start with the tool and do literally no work it makes bad PRs. yes, it’s early and experimental. that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (I have plenty of anecdotes that it does!)
the truth lies in between and the mob mentality it’s magic or complete bullshit doesn’t help. I’d love to come to a thread like this and actually hear about real experiences from smart people using these kind of tools, but instead we get this bullshit
> ...(if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them)
So I keep being told, but after judiciously and really trying my damned hardest to make these tools work for ANYTHING other than the most trivial imaginable problems, it has been an abject failure for me and my colleagues. Below is a FAR from comprehensive list of my attempts at having AI tooling do anything useful for me that isn't the most basic boilerplate (and even then, that gets fucked up plenty often too).
- I have tried all of the editors and related tooling. Cursor, Jetbrains' AI Chat, Jetbrains' Junie, Windsurf, Continue, Cline, Aider. If it has ever been hyped here on HN, I've given it a shot because I'd also like to see what these tools can do.
- I have tried every model I reasonably can. Gemini 2.5 Pro with "Deep Research", Gemini Flash, Claude 3.7 sonnet with extended thinking, GPT o4, GPT 4.5, Grok, That Chinese One That Turned Out To Be Overhyped Too. I'm sure I haven't used the latest and greatest gpt-04.7-blowjobedition-distilled-quant-3.1415, but I'd say I've given a large number of them more than a fair shot.
- I have tried dumb chat modes (which IME still work the best somehow). The APIs rather than the UIs. Agent modes. "Architect" modes. I have given these tools free reign of my CLI to do whatever the fuck they wanted. Web search.
- I have tried giving them the most comprehensive prompts imaginable. The type of prompts that, if you were to just give it to an intern, it'd be a truly miraculous feat of idiocy to fuck it up. I have tried having different AI models generate prompts for other AI models. I have tried compressing my entire codebase with tools like Repomix. I have tried only ever doing a single back-and-forth, as well as extremely deep chat chains hundreds of messages deep. Half the time my lazy "nah that's shit do it again" type of prompts work better than the detailed ones.
- I have tried giving them instructions via JSON, TOML, YAML, Plaintext, Markdown, MDX, HTML, XML. I've tried giving them diagrams, mermaid charts, well commented code, well tested and covered code.
Time after time after time, my experiences are pretty much a 1:1 match to what we're seeing in these PRs we're discussing. Absolute wastes of time and massive failures for anything that involves literally any complexity whatsoever. I have at this point wasted several orders of magnitudes more time trying to get AIs to spit out anything usable than if I had just sat down and done things myself. Yes, they save time for some specific tasks. I love that I can give it a big ass JSON blob and tell it to extract the typedef for me and it saves me 20 minutes of very tedious work (assuming it doesn't just make random shit up from time to time, which happens ~30% of the time still). I love that if there's some unimportant script I need to cook up real quick, I can just ask it and toss it away after I'm done.
However, what I'm pissed beyond all reason about is that despite me NOT being some sort of luddite who's afraid of change or whatever insult gets thrown around, my experiences with these tools keep getting tossed aside, and I mean by people who have a direct effect on my continued employment and lack of starvation. You're doing it yourself. We are literally looking at a prime of example of the problem, from THE BIGGEST PUSHERS of this tool, with many people in this thread and the reddit thread commenting similar things to myself, and it's being thrown to the wayside as an "anecdote getting blown out of proportion".
What the fuck will it take for the AI pushers to finally stop moving the god damn goal posts and trying to spin every single failure presented to us in broad daylight as a "you're le holding it le wrong teehee" type of thing? Do we need to suffer through 20 million more slop PRs that accomplish nothing and STILL REQUIRE HUMAN HANDHOLDING before the sycophants relent a bit?
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Literally you're in a site where we are anything but armchair. We have years of experience. You're using your ad hominems wrong. Save them for a football thread and come up with actual arguments next time.