Comment by grebc

It’s primarily about confidence and motivations. People with high confidence at what they do are supremely unmotivated to use something like AI to solve problems they don’t have.

People with low confidence will be super excited for AI because it solves problems they weren’t even thinking about.

Executives that don’t write code are super excited about AI because hopefully it means they can continue to high low confidence people, which are plentiful and cost less.

I am sitting on the sidelines watching in disbelief. I don’t use AI and don’t plan to. I used to write JavaScript for a living and still get JavaScript job alerts from a lot of job boards. The compensation for JavaScript work is starting to shoot through the roof as employers are moving away from garbage like React and Angular. The recent jobs are becoming fewer and are more reliant upon people with tons of experience that can actually program. Clearly AI is not replacing positions for higher talent with greater than 8-12 years experience.

Blindly dismissing everyone not impressed by the AI hype only serves to further delegitimize the AI hype.

As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.

When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages.

As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.

> You won't be 'underwhelmed' long.

This has been your constant mantra for 3 years now and is part of the reason people are underwhelmed.

Always fun to see the article happen live in the comments section.

> You won't be 'underwhelmed' long.

"Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for several years now.

Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1].

So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists.

[1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.

The same could have been said to someone who had yet to encounter generative AI. "Wait until you try it, you won't be underwhelmed for long".

But here we are.

Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.

Even SOTA models when used in agents in simple NLP tasks such as text classification still fail more times than acceptable when evaluated against a realistic evaluation dataset with sufficient example variety and with some adversarial prompts included.

Improving such uses cases is mostly an artisanal endeavor, sometimes a few-shot prompt improves things, sometimes it improves things at the expense of kind of overfitting it, sometimes structured reasoning works, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it works and then the latency and token explodes, etc etc....

And yet a lot of teams don't see this problem because they don't care much about evaluations, and will only find this issues in production a few months after deployment.

Are those who care about evaluation luddites?

It’s always been this way. It’s an online community.

Is it just me or is there a growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone…

> When did Hacker news start becoming a luddite, bad takes everywhere I look, feels like everyone is '50 year old burnt out guy' that has no idea what is going on vibe?

Much to the opposite, I think healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity. The overeager embracing of hype cycles is extremely cringe.

> I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google.

Cringe, as I was saying.

Conferences are just mutual fart smelling, swagger, and expensing trips on company momey. I am not against it, but treating your participation in some conference as a sign of the future is very silly.

Every conference I participated always overhyped every current bullshit.

tl;dr - "I will dismiss this because of the time I've been spending in a pro-AI bubble".

This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others.

But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.

I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.