zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful.

So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress.

The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.

>>grey-a+ba
The first paragraph of this blog calls senior skeptical developers "unserious" but the person who wrote it has a cartoon gopher as his avatar.

The next few paragraphs basically say "the tool run arbitrary programs on your machine, pull in arbitrary files, and use that to run more arbitrary commands" and then blames you for thinking that is a bad sequence of events.

In the best possible light I (an AI-neutral reader) can paint this rant on a hosting-company blog (why publish this?) is that 1) allowing random textbots to execute programs on your work computer is good (disagree), 2) those chatbots do, in fact, occasionally say enough correct-ish things that they are probably worth your company paying $20+/month for your access (agree).

>>liveon+kk
I think tptacek is generally worth reading. He is one of the users with the highest karma on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek)

I’m happy to have read this, which is reason enough to publish it - but also it’s clearly generating debate so it seems like a very good thing to have published.

>>sethhe+1m
I generally like tptacek, but this piece has major flaws. His dismissal of all copyright concerns on the grounds that some developers engage in piracy is horribly lazy.