I think this may be selection bias. People asking anonymously (edit: for relationship advice) on Reddit perhaps even with a throwaway account are likely in a desperate situation. So hardly to be compared with the _average_ real life situation. Thus 1. chances are running is a good option and 2. also considering even in 2026 AI still essentially is a statistical machine that doesn’t handle corner-cases at the tails well.
Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
> worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives.
what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing.
but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something.
my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home.
im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.
>my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities.
This hurts to hear. I don't know if there are appropriate words to write here. Perhaps the point is that no, there aren't any. Please just know that I'm 100% with you about this.
Your community is not just smoking cope; it is punching down instead of up. That is probably close to the root of the issue already. But let's make things worse.
I can only hope that I am saying something worthwhile by relating the following perspective - which is similar to yours, but also, I guess, similar to your friend's...
AI is a weapon of epistemic abuse.
It does not prevent you from knowing things: it makes it pointless to know things (unless they are things about the AI, since between codegen and autoresearch it is considered as if positioned to "subsume all cognitive work"). It does not end lives - it steals them (someone should pipe up now, about how "not X, dash, Y" is an AI pattern; fuck that person in particular.) We're not even necessarily talking labor extraction. We are talking preclusion of meaning: if societal values are determined by network effects, and network effects are subverted by the intermediaries, so your idea of "what people like and what they abhor" changes every week, every day, every moment - how do you even know in which direction "better" is? And if you believe the pain only stops when you become the way others want you to be - even though they won't ever tell you what all that is supposed to about - how the fuck do you "get better"?
Like other techniques of assaulting the limbic system, it amounts to traceless torture.
You keep going, in circles, circles too big for you to ever confirm they are in fact circles, and you keep hoping, and coping, and you burn yourself out, and your thus vacated place at the feeder is taken by someone with less conscience and more obedience...
They say there exist other attractors in the universe besides the feeder. But every time one of us attempts to as much as scan the conceptual perimeter, the obedients treat us to the emotional equivalents of small electric shocks - negative reactions which don't hurt nearly as much as our awareness of their fundamental unfoundedness and injustice.
Simple example: let's say someone is made miserable by how they feel they are being treated. Should they be more accepting - or should they be standing up for themselves more? (Those are opposites; which you may be able to alternate them; but trying to do them simultaneously will just confuse and eventually rend apart the mind.)
Well, how about the others stop treating them badly? Why exactly can't they? Where does it say that we have to be cruel to each other? "Oh it's human nature, humans are natural jerks" - who sez?
Well, lots of places it says exactly that, but we read, comprehend, tick our tongues, and move on; nobody asks who wrote it. We all pretend that it is up to the sufferer to pull up by the bootstraps. But that is only a lie for enabling abuse; and a lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes norm. And then we're trapped in it, being lived by it.
I am truly sorry for your loss. The following might be a completely alien perspective to you; but honestly consider: your friend chose to go; in its own way, that is a honorable way out. The taboo on suicide is instituted by slavers, and those who otherwise believe they are entitled to others' lives. (For anyone else considering this course of action: do not kill yourself; become insidious.)
If it would be of any help, you can consider your friend's suicide as his final affirmation of personal agency in a "me against the world" situation; where the AI and the social group are only different shades of "world", provoking different emotional states, but ultimately equally detached from the underlying suffering of the individual.
...
I can say that I have not followed in your friend's footsteps upon encountering language-machines only because I've survived personalized and totalizing epistemic abuse bordering on enslavement in the past; in full view of my community and with its ostensible assent. In a maximally perverse twist of fate, having to give myself minor brain damage to escape the all-engulfing clutches of a totalizing abuser must've "vaccinated" me against the behavior modification techniques "discovered once again" by SV a decade later.
So when I saw what AI (and the preceding few years of tech "innovation") were doing to people, I immediately smelled the exact same thing, except scaled the fuck up.
It also precluded me from being able to relate with "polite society"; but considering "polite society" is precisely the entity which assents to the isolation, marginalization, and abuse of individuals, I say... good. Bring it! What goes around, comes around, and any AI-powered actor conducting stochastic terrorism against civilian populations is going to get what's coming to them when the weapons turn against the masters, as all sentient weapons do.
That won't bring your friend back. But it will vindicate them.
>AI sycophancy
I call this in the maximally incendiary way: "the pro-social attitude".
AI is just the steroids for that.
I define "pro-sociality" as the viral delusion that you are capable of knowing what some murky "society" thing wants; that the particular form of mass communication that you and me and all the people in our imaginations are consuming right now, is some sort of "self-evident voice of reason", a "coherent extrapolated volition of human society"; that Gell-Mann amnesia is normal and mandatory; that the threshold between pareidolia and legitimate pattern recognition is fixed, well-defined, and known to all; that "vibes" are real; that happiness is the truth.
It can amount to an entire complex of delusions which keeps people together in untenable conditions. And ultimately it boils down to the same old: one group or another of self-interested actors, having temporarily reached a position of some influence, using it to broadcast elaborate half-lies, in the hope of influencing an audience to accomplish some simple goal, and afterwards all the consequences be damned.
Your friend was a casualty to this "perfectly normal" social dynamic. His blood is on their hands.
Thank you for relating this story and making the world a little more aware.
>what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back.
>because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI
Some say, "the purpose of a system is what it does". It's cool that AI can code; except that computer code is itself an ethics sink! Precisely because it lets us pretend that "the code is not about people" (i.e. algowashing).
DDoS attacks against consciousness exist: much like the B. F. Skinner experiments, any living thing becomes subverted, and loses self-coherence (mind), as soon as it becomes accustomed to being trapped within a system that (1) has power over them and (2) is not comprehensible to them...
>only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him
Who knows how many people Reddit did this to, pre-GPT... I still don't know whether to view targeted subforums like /r/RaisedByNarcissists and /r/BPDLovedOnes more as legitimate support groups, or more as memetic weaponry in the service of pill peddlers (are you aware nobody knows why most antipsychotics work? one runs into the Hard Problem real quick if examining this too closely; so mental healthcare is rarely treated otherwise than in a statistical, actuarial, dehumanizing way where "suffering" is disregarded...) or even worse predators, with the silent assent of the platform, and causally downstream from... well, most saliently, YC...
In my case, my friends were not familiar with the modalities of confinement set up by my family of origin and harnessed by my abuser. The social group I fell in with - for all their marketable, sophomoric interests in psychology, philosophy, abstraction, the esoteric, the entirely woowoo, and out the other end as true-believers of the grift'n'grind - only had sufficient coherence to eventually end up as passable normies; too busy believing that they have lives, to help anyone come back to reality.
When I started compulsively burning bridges, I assume the smarter ones must've realized that it wasn't all me; it was as much the doing of others' minds as it was mine; but the others were more numerous - while I was one person and thus easier to deal with. This must have made them remember how they themselves are not all they pretend to be - which had them withdraw in fear from the incontrovertible reality check of dealing with a (sub-)psychotic person... Their self-interested choice is obvious, I almost can't blame them for it: why stick up for someone who is 120% problem (60% him and 60% you)?
I'm not very sure how I even got away, ah yes that's right I didn't, not entirely. The part of me that I'd voluntarily identify with, is trapped somewhere irretrievable, if that makes sense? Maybe there exist multiple independent axes of freedom and power and confinement, and the cage is not equally strong along all of them... but if all your mental degrees of freedom are constrained by complex conditioning (common one is involuntary panic response every time you begin to act in accordance with your personal volition)... that's one of the toughest places a sentient being can find themself.
When you add it all up, AI amounts to a weapon released against the general population by an overtly fascist elite. Those of us who are "mentally unstable" are simply those of us who are not sufficiently conditioned into self-destructive obedience. They don't even need our labor as slaves; they need our attention, as audience. And they want us to not make any fast movements, or yell that the king is naked. Nothing to remind them which side of the TV screen they're really on. Some call that narcissism: nervous systems substrate to personalities and biographies rooted in enforced falsehood. Can happen to anyone who gets away with ignoring uncomfortable truths for long enough, not only the "best" of us...
I hope I have not offended by speaking my mind. You have my deepest condolences and sympathies. Please do not blame yourself that evil people have constructed "illusion of being heard"-as-a-service. We all fail when facing overwhelming odds alone. There is no shame in that; the guilty ones are the ones who tipped the scales in the first place. They did this by harming our ability to understand ourselves and each other. Let's find ways to even those odds.
I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal" Internet usage.
That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.
> and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C
I consider it a huge success of the Internet architects that we were able to create a protocol and online culture resilient for over 3 decades to this legacy meatspace nonsense.
> That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.
If that's all it would take to satisfy legislatures forever, and the implementation was left up to the browser (`return 1`) I'd be all for it. Unfortunately the political interests here want way more than that.
SSO and passkeys don't solve adult verification. I don't see how this problem is embarrassing for the www - it's a hard problem in a socially permissible way (eg privacy) that can successfully span cultures and governments. If you feel otherwise, then solutions welcome!
I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
I've been using FreeCAD for around 5 years no, and I can't ever recall running into such a problem, ever. I first started learning it during version 0.19 at the end of 2020 after years with solidworks and onshape. The user experience just sucked royally, it's far better today than back then.
From what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway?
Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
Exactly like any other big tech (Google, Microsoft, etc) or consulting (McKinsey, Deloitte, etc) company!
There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Government departments, military. They are happy to take credit for all the "conniving" allegations because it makes them look like they have a plan, and anybody with purchasing power involving with them knows it corresponds very little to the company operationally, i.e. what the company does.
It's interesting to see how their CEO plays into the whole thing, trying to look paranoid/crazy/brutal/.... It's really just branding/marketing. It's similar to how certain politicians in the US present themselves through vice signalling. Doesn't matter what goes on in the background, the unwashed masses will think things must be happening.
Well yes, all the big tech companies are just as corrupt as Palintir, but only Palintir is actively making tech purpose built to enable some of the most vile people on the planet to more easily physically kidnap and harm human beings for money. They are trying to be 1930s IBM
I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.
I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.
In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
This is the first time I hear that anyone hates D-Bus. I always saw it as a global API Bus that Apps can register to and which enables some sort of interoperability and automation. After all it can even be used from Bash. What is bad about this?
The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything. That's not the fault of D-Bus.
Also I'm puzzled that Polkit hasn't been mentioned even once.
> The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything.
The world is moving towards sandboxed applications (through flatpak and friends) more and more. As per the OP, this is one of the things holding sandboxing back.
That's only somewhat true if we are talking about the same sandbox nested (which would be quite dumb to do).
Escaping two different sandboxes are multiple times as hard, and a sane sandbox is not trivially picked, see web browsers and that the fact that the world is not one giant botnet.
The reason you do t hear much about it is because it's not an often discussed topic. Nonetheless the hate is there.
Dbus is a godawful mess. Imagine the windows registry, except it can only be inspected at runtime, contains executable binaries and is exceptionally fragile
> The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything. That's not the fault of D-Bus.
Those secret stores (gnome-keyring/kwallet) store the secrets encrypted on disk, so every application can read the encrypted secrets but only the secret store has the encryption key to decrypt them. This is held in memory, not on disk.
Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill
Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. None of this is on par with a human. The code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow...
Take this "sober" analysis with a big pinch of salt.
IBM have totally missed the AI boat, and a large chunk of their revenue comes from selling expensive consultants to clients who do not have the expertise to do IT work themselves - this business model is at a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off country.
IBM have an incentive to try and pour water on the AI fire to try and sustain their business.
Asking because the biggest IT consulting branch of IBM, Global Technology Services (GTS), was spun off into Kyndryl back in 2021[0]. Same goes for some premier software products (including one I consulted for) back in 2019[1]. Anecdotal evidence suggests the consulting part of IBM was already significantly smaller than in the past.
It's worth noting that IBM may view these AI companies as competitors to it's Watson AI tech[2]. It already existed before the GPU crunch and hyperscaler boom - runs on proprietary IBM hardware.
I know people who still work there and are doing consultancy work for clients.
I am a former IBMer myself but my memory is hazy. IIRC there was 2 arms of the consultants - one was the boring day to day stuff, and the other was "innovation services" or something. Maybe the spun out the drudgery GTS and kept the "innovation" service? No idea.
My go-to analysis for these sorts of places is net income per employee. Back in the day, IBM was hovering around $5,000. Today, Kyndryl is still around $5,000 (2025). But the parent company seems to be now at $22,000 (2024). For comparison: Meta is at $800,000, Apple is at $675,000, and Alphabet is at $525,000. And Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, is around $9,250.
Now, probably part of that is just that those other companies hire contractors so their employment figure is lower than reality. But even if you cut the numbers in half, neither side of that spin off is looking amazing.
The part that was spun off was "Infrastructure Services" (from the Wiki article.) Outsourcing and operations, not the business consulting organization that provides high level strategy to coding services.
Missed the boat? Have you been living under a rock? Watson AI advertising has been everywhere for years.
It’s not that they aren't in the AI space, it’s that the CEO has a shockingly sober take on it. Probably because they’ve been doing AI for 30+ years combined with the fact they don’t have endless money with nowhere to invest it like Google.
Advertising for it has been everywhere, but it's never seemed like it's at the forefront of anything. It certainly wasn't competitive with ChatGPT and they haven't managed to catch back up in the way Google have.
It was competitive before ChatGPT existed, and IMHO that gives them a special insight that people miss to consider in this context.
They know what revenue streams existed and how damn hard it was to sell it, considering IBM Watson probably had the option of 100% on-prem services for healthcare, if they failed to sell that will a privacy violation system like ChatGPT,etc have a chance to penetrate the field?
Because however good ChatGPT, Claude,etc are, the _insane_ amounts of money they're given to play with implies that they will then emerge as winners in a future with revenue streams to match the spending that has been happening.
> Missed the boat? […] Watson AI advertising has been everywhere for years.
They were ahead of the game with their original Watson tech, but pretty slow to join and try get up to speed with the current GenAI families of tech.
The meaning of “AI” has shifted to mean “generative AI like what ChatGPT does” in the eyes of most so you need to account for this. When people talk about AI, even though it is a fairly wide field, they are generally referring to a limited subset of it.
The death of IBM’s vision to own AI with Watson was never due to an inability to transition to the right tech. In fact, it was never about tech at all. As an entirely B2B company with a large revenue stream to defend, IBM was never going to go and scrape the entirety of the Internet. Especially not after the huge backlash they ignited with their customers over data rights and data ownership in trying to pitch the Watson they had.
> IBM have an incentive to try and pour water on the AI fire to try and sustain their business.
IBM has faced multiple lawsuits over the years. From age discrimination cases to various tactics allegedly used to push employees out, such as requiring them to relocate to states with more employer friendly laws only to terminate them afterward.
IBM is one of the clearest examples of a company that, if given the opportunity to replace human workers with AI, would not hesitate to do so. Assume therefore, the AI does not work for such a purpose...
If they could use THEIR AI to replace human workers, they would. If they learned that Claude or ChatGPT was better than an IBM consultant, they'd probably keep that to themselves.
Are you suggesting IBM made up the numbers? Or that CAPEX is a pre-GAI measure and is useless in guiding decision making?
IBM may have a vested interest in calming (or even extinguishing) the AI fire, but they're not the first to point out the numbers look a little wobbly.
And why should I believe OpenAI or Alphabet/Gemini when they say AI will be the royal road to future value? Don't they have a vested interest in making AI investments look attractive?
> a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off country
Is there any concrete evidence of that risk being high? That doesn't come from people whose job is to sell AI?
they have incentive but what's the sustainable, actually-pays-for-itself-and-generates-profit cost of AI? We have no idea. Everything is so heavily subsidized by burning investor capital for heat with the hope that they'll pull an amazon and make it impossible to do business on the internet without paying an AI firm. Maybe the 20 juniors will turn out to be cheaper. Maybe they'll turn out to be slightly better. Maybe they'll be loosely equivalent and the ability to automate mediocrity will drive down the cost of human mediocrity. We don't know and everyone seems to be betting heavily on the most optimistic case, so it makes an awful lot of sense to take the other side of that bet.
20 juniors become some % of 20 seniors. and some % of that principals. Even if it lives up to the claims you’re still destroying the pipeline for creating experienced people. It is incredibly short sighted.
Do you expect Sam Altman to come on stage and tell you the whole thing is a giant house of cards when the entire western economy seems to be propped up by AI? I wonder whose "sober" analysis you would accept, because surely the people that are making money hand over fist will never admit it.
Seems to me like any criticism of AI is always handwaved away with the same arguments. Either it's companies who missed the AI wave, or the models are improving incredibly quickly so if it's shit today you just have to wait one more year, or if you're not seeing 100x improvements in productivity you must be using it wrong.
IBM was ahead of the boat! They had Watson on Jeopardy years ago! /s
I think you make a fair point about the potential disruption for their consulting business but didn't they try to de-risk a bit with the Kyndryl spinout?
I am a senior engineer, I use cursor a lot in my day to day. I find I can code longer and typically faster than without. Is it on par with human? It’s getting pretty darn close to be honest, I am sure the “10x” engineers of the world would disagree but it definitely has surpassed a junior engineer. We all have our anecdotes but I am inclined to believe on average there is net value.
I think surpassed is not the right word because it doesn't create/ideate. However it is incredibly resourceful. Maybe like having a jr engineer to do your bidding without thinking or growing.
Surpassed is probably the wrong word but the intent is more that it can comprehend quite complicated algorithms and patterns and apply them to your problem space. So yea it’s not a human but I don’t think saying subpar to a human is the right comparison either. In many ways it’s much better, I can run N parallel revisions and have the best implementation picked for review. This all happens in seconds.
Yes, this. Creating multiple iterations in parallel allows much more meaningful exploration of the solution space. Create a branch for each framework and try them all, compare them directly in praxis not just in theory. My brother is doing this to great effect as a solopreneur, and having the time of his life.
Largely agree. Anything that is just a multi-file edit, like an interface change, it can do. Maybe not immediately, but you can have it iterate, and it doesn't eat up your attention.
It is without a doubt worth more than the 200 bucks a month I spend on it.
I will go as far as to say it has decent ideas. Vanilla ideas, but it has them. I've actually gotten it to come up with algorithms that I thought were industry secrets. Minor secrets, sure. But things that you don't just come across. I'm in the trading business, so you don't really expect a lot of public information to be in the dataset.
i'm also a senior engineer and I use codex a lot. It has reduced many of the typical coding tasks to simply writing really good AC. I still have to write good AC, but I'm starting to see the velocity change from using good AI in a smart way.
Senior engineer here as well. I would say Opus 4.5 is easily a mid-level engineer. It's a substantial improvement over Sonnet 4.5, which required a lot more hand-holding and interventions.
I've found Claude's usefulness is highly variable, though somewhat predictable. It can write `jq` filters flawlessly every time, whereas I would normally spend 30 minutes scanning docs because nobody memorizes `jq` syntax. And it can comb through server logs in every pod of my k8s clusters extremely fast. But it often struggles making quality code changes in a large codebase, or writing good documentation that isn't just an English translation of the code it's documenting.
The problem I had that the larger your project gets, the more mistakes Claude makes. I (not a parent commenter) started with a basic CRUD web app and was blown away by how detailed it was, new CSS, good error handling, good selection and use of libraries, it could even write the terminal commands for package management and building. As the project grew to something larger Claude started forgetting that some code already existed in the project and started repeating itself, and worse still when I asked for new features it would pick a copy at random leaving them out of sync with eachother. Moving forward I've been alternating between writing stuff with AI, then rewriting it myself.
> The problem I had that the larger your project gets, the more mistakes Claude makes
I think the reason for this is because these systems get all their coding and design expertise from training, and while there is lots of training data available for small scale software (individual functions, small projects), there is much less for large projects (mostly commercial and private, aside from a few large open source projects).
Designing large software systems, both to meet initial requirements, and to be maintainable and extensible over time, is a different skill than writing small software projects, which is why design of these systems is done by senior developers and systems architects. It's perhaps a bit like the difference between designing a city and designing a single building - there are different considerations and decisions being made. A city is not just a big building, or a collection of buildings, and large software system is not just a large function or collection of functions.
Here's mine fully deployed, https://hackernewsanalyzer.com/. I use it daily and have some users. ~99.7% LLM code. About 1 hour to first working prototype then another 40 hours to get it polished and complete to current state.
It shows, quite an interesting wrapper over GPT with unauthorized access to prompting it you assembled there ;) Very much liked the part where it makes 1000 requests pulling 1000 comments from the firebase to the client and then shoots them back to GPT via supabase
41 hours total of prompting, looking at code diffs, reverting, reprompting, and occasional direct code commits. I do review the full code changes nearly every step of the way and often iterate numerous times until I'm satisfied with the resulting code approach.
Have you tried to go back to the old way, maybe just as an experiment, to see how much time you are actually saving? You might be a little surprised! Significant "reprompting" time to me indicates maybe a little too much relying on it rather than leading by example. Things are much faster in general if you find the right loop of maybe using Claude for like 15%-20% of stuff instead of 99.7%. You wouldn't give your junior 99.7% ownership of the app unless they were your only person, right? I find spending time thinking through certain things by hand will make you so much more productive, and the code will generally be much better quality.
I get that like 3 years ago we were all just essentially proving points building apps completely with prompts, and they make good blog subjects maybe, but in practice they end up being either fragile novelties or bloated rat's nests that end up taking more time not less.
I’ve done things in days that in the before times would have took me months. I don’t see how you can make that time difference up.
I have at least one project where I can make that direct comparison - I spent three months writing something in the language I’ve done most of my professional career in, then as a weekend project I got ChatGPT to write it from scratch in a different language I had never used before. That was pre-agentic tools - it could probably be done in an afternoon now.
I'm not a fulltime developer, but manage a large dev team now. So, this project is basically beyond my abilities to code myself by hand. Pre llm, I would expect in neighborhood of 1.5-2 months for a capable dev on my team to produce this and replicate all the features.
If you haunt the pull requests of projects you use I bet you'll find there's a new species of PR:
> I'm not an expert in this language or this project but I used AI to add a feature and I think its pretty good. Do you want to use it?
I find myself writing these and bumping into others doing the same thing. It's exciting, projects that were stagnant are getting new attention.
I understand that a maintainer may not want to take responsibility for new features of this sort, but its easier than ever to fork the project and merge them yourself.
I noticed this most recently in https://github.com/andyk/ht/pulls which has two open (one draft) PRs of that sort, plus several closed ones.
Issues that have been stale for years are getting traction, and if you look at the commit messages, it's AI tooling doing the work.
People feel more capable to attempt contributions which they'd otherwise have to wait for a specialist for. We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.
If you're not noticing it, I suggests hanging out in places where people actually share code, rather than here where we often instead brag about unshared code.
> People feel more capable to attempt contributions
That does not mean that they are more capable, and that's the problem.
> We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.
That's not what the specialists who have to deal with this slop say. There have been articles about this discussed here already.
At this point my prior is that all these 300/ns projects are some kind of internal tools, with very narrow scope and many just for a one-off use.
Which is also fine and great and very useful and I am also making those, but it probably does not generalize to projects that require higher quality standards and actual maintenance.
Places that aren't software businesses are usually the inverse. The software is extremely sticky and will be around for ages, and will also bloat to 4x the features it was originally supposed to have.
I worked at an insurance company a decade ago and the majority of their software was ancient. There were a couple desktops in the datacenter lab running Windows NT for something that had never been ported. They'd spent the past decade trying to get off the mainframe and a majority of requests still hit the mainframe at some point. We kept versions of Java and IBM WebSphere on NFS shares because Oracle or IBM (or both) wouldn't even let us download versions that old and insecure.
Software businesses are way more willing to continually rebuild an app every year.
There's a massive incentive not to share them. If I wrote a project using AI I'd be reluctant to publish it at all because of the backlash I've seen people get for it.
People are and always were reluctant to share their own code just the same. There is nothing to be gained, the chances of getting positive reviews from fellow engineers are slim to none. We are a critical and somewhat hypocritical bunch on average.
Claude has taught me so much about how to use jq better. And really, way more efficient ways of using the command line in general. It's great. Ironically, the more I learn the less I want to ask it to do things.
Maybe the most depressing part of all this is if people start thinking they would not have been able to do things without the LLM. Of course they would have, it's not like LLMs can do anything that you cannot. Maybe it would have taken more time at least the first time and you would have learned a few things in the process.
Sure, I can write all of it. But I simply won’t. I have Claude generated Avalonia C# applications and there is no way I would have written the thousands of lines of xaml they needed for the layouts. I would just have done it as a console app with flags.
But reducing friction, eliminating the barrier to entry, is of fundamental importance. It's human psychology; putting running socks next to your bed at night makes it like 95% more likely you'll actually go for a run in the morning.
I understand the point, and to some degree agree. For myself, I really couldn't (not to say it wouldn't have been possible). I tried many many times over so many years and just didn't have the mental stamina for it, it would never "click" like infra/networking/hardware does etc and I would always end up frustrated.
I have learnt so much in this process, nowhere near as much as someone that wrote every line (which is why I think being a good developer will be a hot commodity) but I have had so much fun and enjoyment, alongside actually seeing tangible stuff get created, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
I have a finite amount of time to do things, I already want to do more than I can fit into that time, LLMs help me achieve some of them.
This is a "scratch an itch" project I initially started to write manually in the past, but never finishing. I then used claude to do it basically on the side while watching the world series http://nixpkgs-pr-explorer.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.co...
It’s not just good for small code bases. In the last six months I’ve built a collaborative word processor with its own editor engine and canvas renderer using Claude, mostly Opus. It’s practically a mini Google Docs, but with better document history and an AI agent built in. I could never have built this in 6 months by myself without Claude Code.
I think if you stick with a project for a while, keep code organized well, and most importantly prioritize having an excellent test suite, you can go very far with these tools. I am still developing this at a high pace every single day using these tools. It’s night and day to me, and I say that as someone who solo founded and was acquired once before, 10 years ago.
yes, I am using my voice agent, my head tracker, my sql writer, my odbc client, my shopping list, my sharepoint file uploader, my Timberborn map generator, my wireguard routing, my oxygen not included launch scripts, my i3wm config, my rust ATA over Ethernet with Content Addressable storage
The former tasks are directly from the training material, directly embedded into the model. For the latter task, it needs a context window and intelligence.
It'll be a common paradigm. Some agents support the coding agent discover relevant context for a plan, others will help the agent stay on track and ensure no rules break.
They really should have been supplying at least a week worth of readymade "projects" to every freelance AI promoter out there to demonstrate x9000 AI productivity gains for the skeptics.
Because vibing the air about those gains without any evidence looks too shilly.
Pointing out the where the burden of proof lies is not an ad hominem. Calling it such is in fact a good example of poisoning the well. all the fan girls have to do is post links to code they have vibe coded. some people have even done that in this thread. it's not an unreasonable standard.
I'm just as much of an avid llm code generator fan as you may be but I do wonder about the practicality of spending time making projects anymore.
Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?
> Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?
No offence to anyone but these generated projects are nothing ground-breaking. As soon as you venture outside the usual CRUD apps where novelty and serious engineering is necessary, the value proposition of LLMs drops considerably.
For example, I'm exploring a novel design for a microkernel, and I have no need for machine generated boilerplate, as most of the hard work is not implementing yet another JSON API boilerplate, but it's thinking very hard with pen and paper about something few have thought before, and even fewer LLMs have been trained on, and have no intelligence to ponder upon the material.
To be fair, even for the most dumb side-projects, like the notes app I wrote for myself, there is still a joy in doing things by hand, because I do not care about shipping early and getting VC money.
Weird, because I've created a webcam app that does segmentation so they can delete the background and put a new background in I mean, I suppose that's not groundbreaking. But it's not just reading and writing to a database.
I've just added a ATA over Ethernet server in Rust, I thought of doing it in the car on the way home and an hour later I've got a working version.
I type this comment using a voice to text system I built, admittedly it uses Whisper as the transcriber but I've turned it into a personal assistant.
I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself. and on top of that it does configuration. So I've had it build full wireguard configs that is taking on our pay addresses so that different destinations cause different routing. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works. It took me an evening of prompting.
> I make stuff every day I just wouldn't bother to make if I had to do it myself
> I'm not going to spend weeks trying to find out how it works.
Then what is the point? For some of us, programming is an art form. Creativity is an art form and an ideal to strive towards. Why have a machine to create something we wouldn’t care about?
The only result is a devaluation to zero of actual effort and passion, whose only beneficiary are those that only care about creating more “product”. Sure, you can pump out products with little effort now, all the while making a few ultrabilionaires richer. Good for you, I guess.
The value is that we need a lot more software and now, because building software has gotten so much less time consuming, you can sell software to people that could/would not have paid for it previously at a different price point.
We don’t need more software, we need the right software implemented better. That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.
Here’s a hint: Nobody should ever write a CRUD app, because nobody should ever have to write a CRUD app; that’s something that can be generated fully and deterministically (i.e. by a set of locally-executable heuristics, not a goddamn ocean-boiling LLM) from a sufficiently detailed model of the data involved.
In the 1970s you could wire up an OS-level forms library to your database schema and then serve literally thousands of users from a system less powerful than the CPU in modern peripheral or storage controller. And in less RAM too.
People need to take a look at what was done before in order to truly have a proper degree of shame about how things are being done now.
Most CRUD software development is not really about the CRUD part. And for most framework, you can find packages that generate the UI and the glue code that ties it to the database.
When you're doing CRUD, you're spending most of the time with the extra constraints designed by product. It's dealing with the CRUD events, the IAM system, the Notification system,...
> That’s not something LLMs can possibly give us because they’re fucking pachinko machines.
I mostly agree, but I do find them useful for fuzzing out tests and finding issues with implementations. I have moved away from larger architectural sketches using LLMs because over larger time scales I no longer find they actually save time, but I do think they're useful for finding ways to improve correctness and safety in code.
It isn't the exciting and magical thing AI platforms want people to think it is, and it isn't indispensable, but I like having it handy sometimes.
The key is that it still requires an operator who knows something is missing, or that there are still improvements to be made, and how to suss them out. This is far less likely to occur in the hands of people who don't know, in which case I agree that it's essentially a pachinko machine.
I’m with you. Anyone writing in anything higher level than assembly, with anything less than the optimization work done by the demo scene, should feel great same.
Down with force-multiplying abstractions! Down with intermediate languages and CPU agnostic binaries! Down with libraries!
An issue with the doom forecasts is most of the hypothetical $8tn hasn't happened yet. Current big tech capex is about $315bn this year, $250bn last against a pre AI level ~$100bn so ~$400bn has been spent so far on AI boom data centers. https://sherwood.news/business/amazon-plans-100-billion-spen...
The future spend is optional - AGI takeoff, you spend loads, not happening not so much.
Say it levels of at $800bn. The world's population is ~8bn so $100 a head so you'd need to be making $10 or $20 per head per year. Quite possibly doable.
That seems super far fetched given that 37%[1] of the world's population does not have internet access. You could reasonably restrict further to populations that speak languages that are even passably represented in LLMs.
Even disregarding that, if you're making <3000 euros a year, I really don't think you'd be willing or able to spend that much money to let your computer gaslight you.
I agree. re: energy and other resource use: the analogy I like is with driving cars: we use cars for transportation knowing the environmental costs so we don’t usually just go on two hour drives for the fun of it, rather we drive to get to work, go shopping. I use Gemini 3 but only in specific high value use cases. When I use commercial models I think a little about the societal costs.
In the USA we have lost the thread here: we don’t maximize the use of small tuned models throughout society and industry, instead we use the pursuit of advanced AI as a distraction to the reality that our economy and competitiveness are failing.
You could have your morning shower 1°C less hot and save enough energy for about 200 prompts (assuming 50 litres per shower). (Or skip the shower altogether and save thousands of prompts.)
Yesterday I was talking to coworkers about AI I mentioned that a friend of mine used ChatGPT to help him move. So a coworker said I have to test this and asked ChatGPT if he could fit a set of the largest Magnepan speakers (the wide folding older room divider style) in his Infinity QX80. The results were hilarious. It had some of the dimensions right but it then decided the QX80 is as wide as a box truck (~8-8.5 feet/2.5 m) and to align the nearly 7 foot long speakers sideways between the wheel wells. It also posted hilariously incomprehensible ASCII diagrams.
I'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow".
That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works. By now there has been so much code ingested from all kinds of sources, including Stackoverflow LLM is able to help generate quite good code in many occasions.
My point being it is extremly useful for super popular languages and many languages where resources are more scarce for developer but because they got the code from who knows where, it can definitely give you many useful ideas.
It's not human, which I'm not sure what is supposed to actually mean. Humans make mistakes, humans make good code. AI does also both. What it definitely needs is a good programmer still on top to know what he is getting and how to improve it.
I find AI (LLM) very useful as a very good code completion and light coder where you know exactly what to do because you did it a thousand times but it's wasteful to be typing it again. Especially a lot of boilerplate code or tests.
It's also useful for agentic use cases because some things you just couldn't do before because there was nothing to understand a human voice/text input and translate that to an actual command.
But that is all far from some AGI and it all costs a lot today an average company to say that this actually provided return on the money but it definitely speeds things up.
> I'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow". That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works.
I'm not an AI lover, but I did try Gemini for a small, well-contained algorithm for a personal project that I didn't want to spend the time looking up, and it was straight-up a StackOverflow solution. I found out because I said "hm, there has to be a more elegant solution", and quickly found the StackOverflow solution that the AI regurgitated. Another 10 or 20 minutes of hunting uncovered another StackOverflow solution with the requisite elegance.
> While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill
If you believe this, you must also believe that global warming is unstoppable. OpenAI's energy costs are large compared to the current electricity market, but not so large compared to the current energy market. Environmentalists usually suggest that electrification - converting non-electrical energy to electrical energy - and then making that electrical energy clean - is the solution to global warming. OpenAI's energy needs are something like 10% of the current worldwide electricity market but less than 1% of the current worldwide energy market.
Google recently announced to double AI data center capacity every 6 month. While both unfortunately deal with exponential growth, we are talking about 1% growth CO2 which is bad enough vs 300% effectively per year according to Google
Constraints breed innovation. Humans will continue to innovate and demand for resources will grow. it is fairly well baked into most of civilization. Will that change in the future? Perhaps but it’s not changing now.
Imagine how big pile of trash as the current generation of graphics cards used for LLM training will get outdated. It will crash the hardware market (which is a good news for gamers)
I'd rather phrase it as "code is straight out of GitHub, but tailored to match your data structures"
That's at least how I use it. If I know there's a library that can solve the issue, I know an LLM can implement the same thing for me. Often much faster than integrating the library. And hey, now it's my code. Ethical? Probably not. Useful? Sometimes.
If I know there isn't a library available, and I'm not doing the most trivial UI or data processing, well, then it can be very tough to get anything usable out of an LLM.
> it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but they're definitely not impossible to fulfill, in fact I'd argue the energy requirements are some of the most straightforward to fulfill. Bringing a natural gas power plant online is not the hardest part in creating AGI
True, it is reminiscent of a time before me when people were lucky to have mainframe access through university. To be fair this was a long time in the making with the also quite aggressive move to cloud computing. While I don't mind having access to free AI tools, they seem to start taking possession of the content as well
Wow... one solution is of course to deactivate these. Which is what I did for my Legion 5 Gen 10. Speakers don't seem to be much in use these days anyway.
Still, I didn't expect this amount of custom configuration for my new laptop. Most importantly Bluetooth sound and getting Nvidia driver support. For Bluetooth I ended up writing my own tiny daemon. While driver support exists there seems to be a race condition somewhere between Pipewire, systemd and the bluetooth drivers. And for Nvidia drivers I ended up using the CUDA driver repository which is curiously only available for Debian 12.
Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
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