zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief?

But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

>>didip+Th
LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high.

LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will magically disappear if we throw enough data and compute at it when they clearly will not.

>>Night_+Nn
Pretty much. What actually exists is very impressive. But what was promised and marketed has not been delivered.

>>Gigach+Vn
I think the missing ingredient is not something the LLMs lack, but something we as developers don't do - we need to constrain, channel, and guide agents by creating reactive test environments around them. Not vibes, but hard tests, they are the missing ingredient to coding agents. You can even use AI to write most of these tests but the end result depends on how well you structured your code to be testable.

If you inherit 9000 tests from an existing project you can vibe code a replacement on your phone in a holiday, like Simon Willison's JustHTML port. We are moving from agents semi-randomly flailing around to constraint satisfaction.