What if useful AI is a fantasy?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Sounds like author is currently at the point of learning to use AI to develop mental models (simply continue?)

  I think one of the issues with LLMs that confuses people is that they're such a broad open-ended tool that people don't know what to do with them and so conclude they're not sure if they are useful, but in a meta way you could just keep asking the AI questions like "how do I make good use of LLMs in this case" and so on

  They seem like an upgraded kind of search engine for text prompts, if nothing else

  by erelong
• It's obviously useful - we have to figure out best practices.
  by bluegatty
• It is most certainly not obviously useful. To anyone who actually cares about quality and not just turning out slop, you have to spend so much time reviewing the code the machine generated that you wind up not saving any time. There are lots of people who don't give a damn about quality, but those were terrible developers before LLMs and remain so now.
  by bigstrat2003
• The hypothetical is that everyone will eventually agree with the author that AI is not useful. I don't see what could possibly change everyone's minds at this point. People have too much direct experience with it. At best, it might remain controversial.
  by skybrian
• > I didn’t have a mental model for the thing that was in front of me. If there is a bug, or if a new feature needed to be added my mind was precisely where it was before I started prompting, and I couldn’t even begin to make changes until I had built a thorough understanding of the code.

  Yes. Like working in a team. It can be hard to work on a team and to have to understand what your colleagues did, and how to fix or extend it. What if working in teams is a fantasy?

  by derdi
• Personally, I've found that understanding what the AI generates well enough to make substantial changes to it hasn't been too difficult, though it'll obviously depend on how complex the project you're working on is. Effectively speaking, it's like using any sort of off-the-shelf solution and then modifying that solution; you don't need to understand it to use it for your project, but you'll need to do so to make significant changes or add extra functionality.

  Practically speaking, is there really a difference between prompting an LLM to create a CMS for a website and installing something like WordPress or Ghost? The setup requires no understanding of the underlying software, but you'll have to build up a mental model from scratch if you want to extend or modify it later.

  Of course, it's not going to please anyone that likes the process of programming or knows enough to tell that the output is mediocre at best. But it's very useful for people that don't know how something works and want a 'workable' solution that functionally does what they need. It's basically the next iteration of the WYSIWYG web design tool, the CMS, the site builder, etc. A professional software engineer would be horrified by the code they output, but a non-technical manager type wouldn't notice or care.

  by CM30
• > Practically speaking, is there really a difference between prompting an LLM to create a CMS for a website and installing something like WordPress or Ghost?

  There is some difference; when you install WordPress or Ghost, your problems are shared. There's a community that goes along with the software and a "shared understanding in the world" of how it works and where the rough edges and limitations are. A lot of the time, LLMs will actually be better at modifying WordPress or Ghost to do what you want than they will be at fixing the CMS you built last Tuesday.

  When you custom build, you can get an exact fit for your needs but your misery is yours alone.

  by xyzzy123
• > What if <common sense>?

  I find it baffling that some people had to find this out the hard way. You already knew that it's — if not more work — then at least more tedious to study existing code than write your own.

  People have been choosing greenfield rewrites over grokking legacy code since forever.

  by mike_hock
• It's so interesting that people are so divided on this. He even said he generated multiple applications. Yet he has found a way to just about dismiss it somehow.

  AI is not going to go away and it's not going to stop improving. That would go against the entire history of computing.

  We have levels of improvements in the R&D pipeline in every area: hardware, software, model architecture and training. The models will get larger, architecture more sophisticated, computation dramatically more efficient. New materials, paradigms, more efficient nano-devices, scaling up manufacturing for better devices that are already out of the lab, etc. are in progress pointed towards multiple orders of magnitude efficiency gains. And by the way, that is not at all unusual -- we have been making large and small innovations in computing efficiency for decades.

  There are still some things lacking in AI -- it still is jagged intelligence. Give it a few years, people will be nostalgic about the time when humans could still point to some victories here and there. That doesn't require any major breakthroughs -- just continuing to increase the size of the models and improving the training.

  by ilaksh
• There are already extreme edge case uses for AI that are incredibly, freakishly efficient compared to literally any human. Just for say, book or film recommendations... If you want obscure in the sense that no critical re-appraisal or any kind of cult following or curiosity towards it doesn't exist at all period, I'm talking about movies with literally 7 comments across the entire internet. Great films, loved by noone, usually too old to catch any meaningful wave by now... Nothing will ever compare. I've not been able to read nearly as many books as I've watched films but every single recommendation has been fantastic and tailored to my taste in such a way that only very few people have ever achieved, and even then those people are not capable of giving you a brand new list of books to read or movies to watch every single night.

  In a broader sense, computational chemistry and drug discovery is already exploding- very, very hard to see that genie being put in the bottle. They've probably created such a large backlog of potentially useful outputs that it would take centuries for humans to sift through.

  Useful AI is already here! Get over it. Your term "jagged intelligence" is very good, I will have to write that one down. Jagged indeed.

  by stwsk
• I guess, just to play devils advocate, what if code turns out to just be the minimally expressive communication medium required for a human to maintain agency over the function of a system?

  If we consider (and I’m not saying this is true, just for arguments sake) that this agency is important as other humans enjoy talking to humans about a goal, rather than machines, and we think this will never change.

  In this peculiar case, it actually doesn’t matter how “good” llms get - they will never cross a barrier fundamental to human nature?

  by wizzledonker
• > At first this seems far-fetched, but consider what happened to Facebook’s Metaverse. For a brief window of time it actually seemed reasonable to believe that we would all be spending most of our waking hours with high-tech ski goggles strapped to our heads. That we would work, relax, and socialize with these bulky headsets tricking our brains into thinking they were in a different world.

  Literally nobody thought this.

  by jkahrs595
• I seriously don’t understand the naysayers around here. Have they just not used anything past gpt4? You can’t just outsource all of your thinking to them, but they’re obviously useful.
  by hosel
• Usefulness depends on intended job to be done. A hair dryer isn't very useful at drying clothes.

  If someone spent a lifetime mastering woodworking with hand tools, and then was shown a couple very early rudimentary power tools (lacking safety features, crude features, etc) they would rightly conclude they weren't useful. The artisan can do better work faster with less risk of dismemberment without them.

  Prior to LLMs, the world's demand for good software was bottlenecked by access to competent software engineers. The people who want software just want it, they don't care about the craft. They have a different job to be done than the engineer.

  An example this reminds me of is a jobs to be done theory thought exercise:

  Two different first time home owners need to store yard working tools in their backyard, and determine they need a shed. The first one cares most about minimizing the time it takes to get the shed. The second one has some special constraints to deal with AND also wants to start developing their amateur construction skills. They both need sheds, but they have different values, so:

  - the first one buys a shed-kit made of plastic panels that can easily be assembled in 20 minutes.

  - the second one buys a power saw, power drill, tool belt, saw horses, lumber, screws, metal roofing, etc and builds a custom shed from relative scratch over a few weekends.

  Another example is getting take out vs cooking the meal yourself. There are many many examples.

  LLMs are already useful to many. They are also not useful to many others. To assume they aren't useful to anyone just because they aren't useful to you is a sign of absent cognitive empathy. Not acknowledging that other people have other priorities and values they are equally valid to your own.

  by FloorEgg
• I agree. Although the author didn't delve into it he seems to hint that it may not prove useful enough to the companies that spend money on tokens to justify the huge investments in AI. For me yes, it's very useful. But what remains to be seen is is it useful to the entities and people willing and able to spend huge amounts of money in AI in exchange for increased productivity or profit... And if so is it useful to generate a cash return on the huge cost investments in datacenters that AI demands
  by vivekd
• > A hair dryer isn't very useful at drying clothes.

  More useful for drying clothes than a blender would be though. Or an LLM for that matter. No real point here I just thought it was an interesting example you used because it's still something that does work if you're lacking better options

  > Another example is getting take out vs cooking the meal yourself

  Interesting analogy

  Buying ingredients and Cooking for yourself is almost guaranteed to be cheaper and healthier for your body in the long run. It's pretty difficult to eat out cheaply and very difficult to eat out healthily.

  I dunno, might turn out to be some parallels there. I suspect that much like eating too much takeout, LLM usage makes us less fit.

  by bluefirebrand
• The author of the article mainly talks about agentic programming, code generation, and reasoning. Ans very rightly identifies a big problem with agentic programming, in my experience. If developers can't maintain the software without AI, it's doubtful they can steer AI to maintain it either. Maybe this is not true and we can tell AI something like 'reduce the number of lines of code' until the essential software is exposed and pared down to a quantity and modularity that humans can then participate.

  No doubt, most of the value creation is outside of creating software. But if Nvidia and Anthropic do succeed in making better hardware and better software, then the positive reinforcement loop does seem like it could take off. And coding is a big part of that.

  Maybe we don't need to understand the code at all? Hard to fathom.

  by hermitShell
• Anecdotally, my 81 year old father was able to point his phone at the boiler and ask Gemini what the error message meant. It correctly identified the boiler model, identified the error code being displayed on the screen, explained what it meant, provided him with a way to confirm the problem by checking the water pressure guage and then asked to be shown the underside. It again correctly identified and described to him the position and colour of the filling loop lever and how to adjust it to start and stop the water flow. He was able to do all this instead of spending hundreds on getting a plumber out at night because it was during a cold spell and he needed the heating on. That kind of thing is no fantasy and was amazing to witness.

  edit: I had already looked up the error code the "old fashioned" way using Google to find the boiler manual, so I would have stepped in if needed, but it was literally flawless and I can't think of any time anything like that hasn't worked when I've used it for similar diagnostics.

  by kennyadam
• > That kind of thing is no fantasy and was amazing to witness.

  How about the case where the "AI" misided the error code?

  Did you test that? Result could be even more amazing...

  > He was able to do all this instead of spending hundreds on getting a plumber out at night

  ... or consulting the manual.

  by chrisjj
• Seems we are many to have had the exact same experience with the boiler and an LLM (Claude in my case). +1.
  by throw310822