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Comment by raincole

14 days ago

But somehow, according to HN, LLMs make you less productive, not more :)

The people who don’t know how to use an LLM to make them more productive, or are scared it’s going to take their job, are louder than the people who are making good use of them to make them more productive.

That just seems to be human nature unfortunately - the complainers are always louder.

  • As someone currently "making good use of" generative AI while simultaneously being painfully aware of its shortcomings, I think the overall discourse is a bit more nuanced. Bucketing folks into simple "for" and "against" GenAI camps does nothing to cover the vast spectrum in between, making your take ultimately built on a false dichotomy. Further implying those camps fall on the lines of those "in the know" of AI vs "those in denial/scared of" is patronizing at best, and I've grown tired of this oversimplification parroted out every time the topic of LLM systems come up.

    Those within well informed, technical circles will fall somewhere in between the for/against labels, myself included.

    The GenAI hype cycle is finally starting to collapse as the general population starts to realize that these systems aren't the panacea for "everything" after all. They provide enormous utility in some domains like coding, but even then there are massive tradeoffs, footguns and the usual horse blinder ills that come with every hype cycle. I just hope we stop having to "learn the hard way" with respect to undisciplined use of current-gen LLM systems writ large, and cooler heads prevail sooner rather than later.

    • Not sure why my comment is being downvoted. Am I mistaken and folks really see only for/against AI as a binary option here? Interesting to me if so. I would think that a technical community would view ai as a tool, but perhaps our existentialism is getting the better of us?

  • What? We must have different internets, I agree in general, but the "AI is the second coming" crowd is louder than standing next to a jet on takeoff. I'm in the "AI is making me more productive but a worse developer" crowd, don't know what I count as.

    • You got shuttled into one bubble and the previous commenter into another advertising / news bubble. It's incredible how different the media experience is for people in different media bubbles.

That's a bit dishonest, the consensus on HN seems to be that LLMs are very good at oneshotting small projects from scratch. Especially when using super mainstream technologies like html and tailwind, as does the discussed website. And especially when it's a one time operation and the project will never need to be maintained, like the discussed website.