Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs. Find a way to multiply yourself, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.

P.S. I learned that not all of you are developers.

-61 points · 31 comments · view on lemmy.world

31 Comments

nullpotential@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 23 pts · 231d (1 reply)

Piss off.

nil@piefed.ca · -8 pts · 231d

very sorry to hear that

kadu@scribe.disroot.org · 20 pts · 231d (1 reply)

Please use it bro. Skipping it will ruin your career. Please. Think about it, you want to use it, right? One more AI, it's the future, just please use it, bro. You're missing out, just give it a try.

nil@piefed.ca · -2 pts · 231d

Yup that's 100% what it says

Gsus4@mander.xyz · 14 pts · 231d (1 reply)

I'm already having a hard time pushing back against the very real AI hype ocean around me...skepticism IS warranted.

Reversing this and calling that skepticism "anti-AI hype" like there are giant worldwide marketing campaigns and billionaire financing for "anti-AI" sounds very silly.

PS: and I want cheap RAM back!

nil@piefed.ca · -1 pts · 231d

I totally agree that putting AI into everything is pretty dumb and capitalistic. Microsoft Copilot is nothing but Cortana but noisier (and invasive).

But in the area of programming LLMs are actually revolutionising the entire workflow.

Kirk@startrek.website · 12 pts · 231d (6 replies)

Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it.

OK well I've thought about it and I still don't understand. Surely, this thousand word essay can explain what ""AI"" can do right? Surely it's not the same vague nonspecific claims about "missing out" on the future?

It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening.

Huh. Guess I'm just really dumb then.

nil@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 231d

I agree that Microsoft Copilot is worthless as shit.

blarghly@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 231d (4 replies)

From the article, literally one line above the line you quoted:

In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks:

I modified my linenoise library to support UTF-8, and created a framework for line editing testing that uses an emulated terminal that is able to report what is getting displayed in each character cell. Something that I always wanted to do, but it was hard to justify the work needed just to test a side project of mine. But if you can just describe your idea, and it materializes in the code, things are very different.

I fixed transient failures in the Redis test. This is very annoying work, timing related issues, TCP deadlock conditions, and so forth. Claude Code iterated for all the time needed to reproduce it, inspected the state of the processes to understand what was happening, and fixed the bugs.

Yesterday I wanted a pure C library that would be able to do the inference of BERT like embedding models. Claude Code created it in 5 minutes. Same output and same speed (15% slower) than PyTorch. 700 lines of code. A Python tool to convert the GTE-small model.

In the past weeks I operated changes to Redis Streams internals. I had a design document for the work I did. I tried to give it to Claude Code and it reproduced my work in, like, 20 minutes or less (mostly because I'm slow at checking and authorizing to run the commands needed).

Kirk@startrek.website · 2 pts · 231d (3 replies)

Those paragraphs are what I'm talking about. The author fails to explain what the LLM actually did that was helpful. It's like saying "I used ChatGPT to plan my wedding menu" without any more details. What did it actually do? Why was it helpful? Those are the things I continue to not understand about these tools.

blarghly@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 231d (2 replies)

I'm confused why you are confused.

In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time

I feel like it is pretty clear the author said "hey AI, do this thing." The AI made an attempt, the author clarified a few things and maybe made some edits, and then was satisfied with the result.

Like your example of planning a wedding menu. I'm not sure where the ambiguity is. If someone said "I used chatgpt to plan my wedding menu", I assume they prompted it something like "plan my wedding menu. I want something classy but cheap. No fish." Then chatgpt spat out a few options, they provided feedback - "I dont like broccoli either" - and then they picked an option they like.

Kirk@startrek.website · 4 pts · 231d

It seems we agree on the facts, but not on what "useful" or "helpful" means. I honestly have never, ever considered deciding on what food to serve guests be "labor", but in the interests of replying in good faith I asked an LLM the exact prompt you gave. It gave a long, detailed reply, but here is the first part labeled "1. Welcome / Cocktail Reception":

Mini prosciutto‑wrapped melon balls • Brie & caramelized onion tartlets (store‑bought puff pastry) • Stuffed mushroom caps (herb cream cheese + breadcrumbs)

I want you to consider that this not actually helpful in the slightest, and is fact creating more work. Consider: is there a vendor nearby that has these items as an an option for event planning? Is this a recipe that even exists? Does this information further my mission of having a wedding in any conceivable way?

Senal@programming.dev · 3 pts · 231d

Or Perhaps:

They have a large corpus of context files to help with all aspects of how the output is generated
They're using a model with specialised fine tuning for the task attempted
They have a series of MCP servers with access to relevant tooling available
They have many many hours of prior experience with the setup and usage of such tools
They used multiple tools manually and pulled the bits they needed
They just said "Make me a thing" and it just worked like magic

they mention reinforcement learning, pre-training and other general LLM concepts, but none of these are related back to the tasks they are talking about.

The point is, there was no explanation of how any of this was achieved, which can lead to confusion about what was actually achieved.

The LLM wrote some docs vs the LLM rewrote the library from end to end are very different things.

It's very much a "Don't give up on X, look at what can be achieved" but without any actual details on what is required to achieve those results.

PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 231d (6 replies)

AI in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that, fuck it. Absolutely not. I will not support the job stealer. The water guzzler. The environment destroyer.

nil@piefed.ca · -3 pts · 231d (3 replies)

So you think AI by itself is competent enough to steal work from people?

I mean, hell no. AI doesn't steal jobs. AI operators do. Do you think those random person who has absolutely no idea about programming and whatsoever can steal work off programmers?

unmagical@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 231d (2 replies)

Al doesn't steal jobs. Al operators do.

But your main post is begging people to become AI operators.

nil@piefed.ca · -1 pts · 231d

Yeah. So you don't have to lose jobs.

blarghly@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 231d

"Everyone stop using mechanical looms! They are going to steal all our weaving jobs!"

nymnympseudonym@piefed.social · -6 pts · 231d (1 reply)

"The Internet in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it"

"Computing in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it"

"Electricity in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it"

PMmeTrebuchets@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 231d

You're being obtuse on purpose. Whatever. I will not have sympathy for you when the clankers take your job next.

6nk06@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 231d

I have used some AI crap to optimize algorithms, but I would never used that for anything else. I strongly believe that AI is like Google. People were full of FOMO, selling it, writing books about search engines, when in reality, you could learn how to use it in a few hours.

OMG Google is so hard you have to spend months to make a proper query. Fuck no, you have to learn how to write a proper sentence. Same shit for AI. The problem is that AI is shit now. It may be useful in a few years, but not now.

originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com · 6 pts · 231d (1 reply)

you can absolutely hate ai and everything thats happeneing right now and still work and learn with the shitty tools being forced into our hands

you dont have to stop pointing out how much ai sucks just because you actually continue to use it to survive.

wtf is wrong with these people.

6nk06@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 231d

All these people do not create LLMs or anything. They sell books, ads, blog posts, hype... FOMO as I said, it's so powerful that idiotic CEOs fell in the trap and forced it on their employees.

owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 231d

Replace "AI" with "blockchain" and it's almost copy-paste from a few years ago.

Many people rightfully recognize that LLMs can be a useful tool in certain situations. But just like every other over-hyped tech buzzthing from the last two decades, it's overblown. And given the side-effects (like the environmental and social impacts) it's perfectly reasonable people would want to reject it outright.

nil@piefed.ca · 4 pts · 231d

I feel a lot of people in this thread (or maybe the entire lemmy community) are forced to use AI crap that corpos like Microsoft and Mozilla are trying to incorporate into their software.

fubarx@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 231d

"Hey, it worked for me. What's YOUR problem?"

HubertManne@piefed.social · -1 pts · 231d

The hype goes both ways. Its fine as a further abstraction of search but its energy usage is still concerning although I hope hardware technology will reduce that. Its generative funtion can be useful but is disengenous and so far cannot replace actual talent. It can also be a crutch as one becomes out of practice. That being said with folks that lack talent like myself it can be very helpful when you simply don't have or can't afford someone to help you. Its certainly going to improve and not go anywhere. Avoiding it would be like avoiding web searching to find answers in the aughts.

Amoxtli@thelemmy.club · -22 pts · 231d (3 replies)

People who hate AI are the Antifa types. Just ignore them.

alecsargent@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 231d

One can be right wing and hate AI as well. AI has nothing inherently political.

They run at a profit deficit.
They require huge amounts electric power.
Companies collect data and not respect licenses.
Aggresive scrapers are a problem to many sites and they do not respect robots.txt directive.
Some LLM's have criminal and pornographic content in their data collected.

unmagical@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 231d

I hate both fascists and the tools of fascist empires.

It is troubling that you are encouraging people to ignore those opposed to fascism though.

resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 230d

Congrats! This is the dumbest thing I've ever read.