Comment by iammrpayments

A year+ ago, LLMs worked nearly as good as they work today.

I say this as someone that uses LLMs on a daily basis. It is a moderately useful tool for software development, but it was already useful in January 2025 (to pick a random date). Check what models were available by then. There were improvements since them, but they were mostly marginal.

The thing is, ever since ChatGPT 4 days there are people claiming on a daily basis exactly what you are claiming now, and it feels pretty silly. Sometimes it's hard to not imagine the accounts breathlessly claiming 100x productivity as bots.

In other words, I presume that if you are 100x more productive now, you were a 1/100x developer before LLMs. I actually question the capabilities of anyone making claims like that.

Sure it's better. 100x productivity is pure nonsense and there are other claims of this order.

Rejecting exaggerated claims doesn't mean that someone is not seeing any value.

Ok but none of those articles are remotely interesting. At least if you’re into the science part of computer science — algorithms, data flow, software and hardware architecture, intimate knowledge of the machine — and not just productivitymaxxing to make a messy pile of CRUD widgets that nobody asked for.

It’s all influencer and hustle culture now. The joy of technical creation and understanding has evaporated from the mainstream in mere months. We’re surrounded by AI meat puppets wearing the masks of engineers.

We have access to and use the same tech, the difference is elsewhere.

> It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.

The things some people say, how they talk about "outraged AI critics" what they would prefer those to be, would be fucking stupid even in first grade.

These, and things like "AI-generated news sites to attack critics" really speak for themselves. There is something worth really calling out here, and it fell out naturally.

Nov'25-Dec-25 something changed. I believe that was the time when Opus 4.5 was launched. (we went from function auto-complete to module auto-complete) People came from the vacations, and were like, make AI do your work. One could actually start offloading work to LLMs.

Yeah, this is nonsense. No one is arguing that AI is useless, but that there is a coordinated marketing campaign hyping it up.

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You can? It’s pretty remarkable what you can do with Qwen 3.6 on decent hardware, and Gemma 12b on nearly anything. If you can’t own it, take something for a spin on vast.ai where you can get all kinds of machines on tap for ~$0.20/hour+

llama.cpp has gotten so good that you can really get optimized performance with a few flags or none at all, and serve any model on-demand. Spend $45 to have your own GLM 5.2 machine for an hour. If you can’t manage full utilization you’d get 33.2M tokens, retailing for $128.

It takes some smarts to use dumb models, but renting time for frontier tokens is easy math. Vast also lets you run on spot which is great for training or agents with harnesses that can accommodate uncertain model availability.

It's the metrics though. I've noticed that AI topics get hundreds of votes, that means either someone is trying to beat the algorithm to stay in the top news, or suddenly this place is filled with thousands of AI enthusiasts who ignore all the rest, non-AI topics. (Thousands because not everyone will upvote, so if only a fraction upvotes hundreds of upvotes should translate to thousands.)

The imbalance is what is off.

Hypebros and full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil believe exactly the same things about LLMs.

The primary difference is that hypebros brag about incoming promised apocalypse, 40% unemployment, economy ruled by unaccountable monopolies and permanent underclass. Luddites think that such development would be a bad thing.

I dont think apocalypse will happen, but I do think AI companies are massive assholes who deserves all the pushback they can get for the way they doom hype themselves up.

I want to push back on this. Hacker News was way more interesting before 75% of the submissions were about AI.

> Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.