Comment by fhd2

Comment by fhd2 10 hours ago

20 replies

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Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying their books, products and stuff. A "personal brand" can have a lot of value. They can't be seen as obsolete. They're likely to talk about what could or will be, more than about what currently is. Money isn't always the motive for sure, people also want to be considered useful, they want to genuinely play around and try and see where things are going.

All that said, I think your approach is fine. If you don't inspect what the agent is doing, you're down to faith. Is it the fastest way to get _something_ working? Probably not. Is it the best way to build an understanding of the capabilities and pit falls? I'd say so.

This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. A lot of folks are on it, usually not exactly following the scientific method. We'll get evidence eventually.

embedding-shape 8 hours ago

> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.

Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.

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  • blackoil an hour ago

    How can we be sure you aren't paid by bear cartel to push this post?

    Reply View 1 reply
    • woooooo 34 minutes ago

      Bear cartel is a bunch of curmudgeons without tons of VC money. If they are being unfair, its purely for love of the game.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • buckwheatmilk 3 hours ago

    > which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals

    What would be enough to compromise your ethics and morals? I'm sure they can accommodate.

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    • embedding-shape 3 hours ago

      Hah, after submitting my comment, I actually though about it because I knew someone would eventually ask :)

      I'm fortunate enough to live a very comfortable life after working myself to death, so I think for 20,000,000 USD I'd do it, happily so. 2,000,000 would be too little. So probably between those sit the real price to purchase my morals and ethics :)

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      • grayhatter an hour ago

        Best I can do is t'ree fiddy.

        I can definitely be bought for much much less. But only because I'm pretty sure I could rave about some AI platform while still being honest about it. Why do you draw such a hard ethical line? I agree with your sentiment, AI is currently a net negative on the world that I care about. But I also believe people when they say it helps them. Despite their inability to articulate anything useful to me, or that I can understand.

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      • buckwheatmilk 3 hours ago

        It wasn't a shot at you personally but the point of this was that AI companies are flush with money and desperate to show any kind of growth and willing to spend money to do that. I'm sure they are finding people that have some social following and will happily pocket couple extra green bills to present AI products in a positive light with little to no actual proof.

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        • embedding-shape 2 hours ago

          > It wasn't a shot at you personally

          No shots fired, as far as I'm aware, so np :)

          > they are finding people that have some social following and will happily pocket couple extra green bills to present AI products in a positive light with little to no actual proof.

          No doubt about it, I don't think people realize how pervasive this really is though, people still sometimes tell me they trusted something on HN/reddit just because it was the most upvoted answer, or that they chose a product based on what was mentioned the most etc.

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  • jsksdkldld 8 hours ago

    [flagged]

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    • fhd2 7 hours ago

      Parent didn't mention Simon Willinson, and neither me nor parent appear to imply that _all_ people posting positively about LLMs are paid influencers, that'd be a ridiculous claim. It's just that there _are_ paid influencers, at every level, down to non-famous people getting a few bucks, and that's worth knowing.

      Here's one thing I quickly found on one of Anthropic's campaigns on LinkedIn: https://www.favikon.com/blog/inside-anthropic-influencer-mar...

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dust42 8 hours ago

> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet.

Exactly. But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development.

It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the umpteenth javascript CRUD boilerplate. And it can be deeply frustrating once projects are more complex.

Unfortunately I think benchmaxxing and lm-arena are currently pushing into the wrong direction. But trillions of VC money are at stake and leaning back, digesting, reflecting and discussing things is not an option right now.

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  • closewith 8 hours ago

    > But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development.

    While I agree with the latter, I actually think on former point - that hype is making sober discussion impossible - is actually directionally incorrect. Like a lot of people I speak to privately, I'm making a lot of money directly from software largely written by LLMs (roadmaps compressed from 1-2 years to months since Claude Code was released), but the company has never mentioned LLMs or AI in any marketing, client communications, or public releases. We all very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite competition.

    Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.

    > It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the umpteenth javascript CRUD boilerplate.

    There is so much latent demand for slightly customised enterprise CRUD apps. An enormous swathe of corporate jobs are humans performing CRUD and task management. Even if LLMs top out here, the economic disruption from this alone is going to be immense.

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    • fatherwavelet 5 hours ago

      It is delusional to believe the current frontier models can only write CRUD apps.

      I would think someone would have to only write CRUD apps themselves to believe this.

      It doesn't matter anyway what a person "believes". If anything, I am having the opposite experience that conversing with people is becoming a bigger and bigger waste of time instead of just talking to Gemini. It is not Gemini that is hallucinating all kinds of nonsense vs the average person. It is the opposite.

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      • bsenftner 5 hours ago

        There is a critical failure in education - people are not being taught how to debate without degenerating into a dominance debate or merely an echo chamber of talking points. It's a real problem, people literally do not understand that a question is not an opportunity to show off or to dominate, but is a request for an exchange of information.

        And that problem is not just between people, this lack of communication skill continues with people's internal self conversations. Many a bully personality is that way because they bully themselves and terrorize themselves.

        It's no wonder that people can use AI at all, with how poorly people communicate. So the cluster of nonsense that is all the shallow thinkers directing people down incorrect paths is completely understandable. They are learning by doing, which with any other technology would be fine, but with AI to learn how to use it by using it can serious damage one's cognitive ability, as well as leave a junkyard of failed projects behind.

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      • closewith 4 hours ago

        I’m not sure you read my comment. I didn’t claim LLMs have reached a ceiling – I’m very bullish on them.

        The point I was making is about the baseline capability that even sceptics tend to concede: if LLMs were “only” good at CRUD and task automation (which I don’t think is their ceiling), that alone is already economically and socially transformative.

        A huge share of white-collar work is effectively humans doing CRUD and coordination. Compressing or automating that layer will have second- and third-order effects on productivity, labour markets, economics, and politics globally for decades.

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JeremyNT an hour ago

> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. A lot of folks are on it, usually not exactly following the scientific method. We'll get evidence eventually.

I try to think about other truly revolutionary things.

Was there evidence that GUIs would dramatically increase productivity / accessibility at first? I guess probably not. But the first time you used one, you would understand its value on some kind of intuitive level.

Having the ability to start OpenCode, give it an issue, add a little extra context, and have the issue completed without writing a single line of code?

The confidence of being able to dive into an unknown codebase and becoming productive immediately?

It's obvious there's something to this even if we can't quantify it yet. The wildly optimistic takes end with developers completely eliminated, but the wildly pessimistic ones - if clear eyed - should still acknowledge that this is a massive leap in capabilities and our field is changed forever.

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  • grayhatter an hour ago

    > Having the ability to start OpenCode, give it an issue, add a little extra context, and have the issue completed without writing a single line of code?

    Is this a good thing? I'm asking why you said it like this, I'm not asking you to defend anything. I'm genuinely curious about your rational/reasoning/context for why you used those words specifically?

    I ask, because I wouldn't willingly phrase it like this. I enjoy writing code. The expression of the idea, while not even close to value I assign to fixing the thing, still has meaning.

    e.g. I would happily share code my friend wrote that fixed something. But I wouldn't take and pride in it. Is that difference irrelevant to you, or do you still feel that sense of significance when an LLM emits the code for you?

    > should still acknowledge that this is a massive leap in capabilities and our field is changed forever.

    Equally, I don't think I have to agree with this. Our field is likely changed, arguably for the worse if the default IDE now requires a monthly rent payment. But I have only found examples of AI generating boiler plate. If it's not able to copy the code from some other existing source, it's unable to emit anything functional. I wouldn't agree that's a massive leap. Boilerplate has always been the least significant portion of code, no?

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    • JeremyNT a minute ago

      Cards on the table: this stuff saps the joy from something I loved doing, and turns me into a manager of robots.

      I feel like it's narrowly really bad for me. I won't get rich and my field is becoming something far from what I signed up for. My skills long developed are being devalued by the second.

      I hate that using these tools increases wealth inequality and concentrates power with massive corporations.

      I wish it didn't exist. But it does. And these capabilities will be used to build software with far less labor.

      Is that trade-off worth the negatives to society and the art of programming? Hard to say really. But I don't get to put this genie back in the bottle.

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