Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • "The discovery problem" is the biggest bottleneck to all human behaviour- travel, business development, academic rediscovery, literature, etc etc. Saying "my natural language input device is too intimidating to use" would be considered borderline insane 3 years ago.
    by alansaber
  • We're all ants. You can't see the whole sky by design. That's the "guard rails" they talk about.

    The non-technical marketing person can't use it because they don't understand programming tools. AI is by programmers for programmers. AI agents might make perfect sense to someone who understands a posix pipe. Marketers don't.

    by panny
  • I was trying to teach a co-worker some agentic stuff today, and this is totally true. Especially if they are using gimpy tools like Github Copilot.

    The harness matters. None of my super-powered CLI + skills stuff worked like how it does in a more powerful harness like Codex or Claude Code.

    Try telling someone to imagine it could do something amazing, if they switch to a completely different tool.

    by pseudosavant
  • year 3 of AI taking our jobs in the next 6 months

    thanks for not changing, humans

    by yieldcrv

  •   That’s the gap between a skilled AI user and everyone else. Take a non-technical marketing person and someone fluent in agents and tool use. The agent-fluent person can watch the marketer work for an hour and immediately see a dozen things to automate, delegate, or reinvent, including things the marketer hasn’t even tried yet. But put the most intelligent tool in the world in front of the marketer, and they’re staring at a blank prompt, unsure what to type. All that intelligence, and no way to see it.
    The author perfectly describes non-technical people who are AI skeptics. Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
    by aurareturn
  • Does it really? Or is it that they're all pretty much good enough and so you just go with what's cheapest or what you're used to?

    For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage.

    Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in the config file. But I stick with deepseek because it's more than good enough and is super cheap.

    by comrade1234
  • Subtle Lena[1] reference, maybe?

    [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

    by try_the_bass
  • This is very true, but I don't think this is an AI-only problem. It is fundamentally a human problem.

    There are so many things happening around us, and one of the biggest things that separates people is knowledge. A non-technical person who puts in the effort to learn technology becomes a technical person. The only way to become good at something is to actually do it and practice.

    Someone who still doesn't know what AI is also doesn't know what is possible in the world today. My mom is a good example. She comes up with a lot of ideas and tells me about them on calls. Recently I told her, "Just tell ChatGPT. It can probably build a lot of what you need." But even that sentence isn't enough for her to understand what I mean, because she doesn't yet have a mental model of what AI can actually do. She simply isn't aware of its capabilities.

    I'm going home in a few days and will be staying with her for a couple of weeks. I'm actually going to try an experiment: teach her some of these tools and see what happens. Can someone with essentially no technical background learn to use AI effectively and actually build something meaningful within a few weeks?

    She already has a good job and doesn't really need to become technical, so there is no practical necessity for her to do this. But I think it would be a fascinating experiment.

    by Vishal_Max

Explore Birbla archives