People who tell you 'AI is changing everything' are lying

Posted by marbex7 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by dima853 1 day ago

The "centaur" point is spot on. The only AI use cases that actually work are when a skilled dev uses it like an autocomplete on steroids.

The 0% success rate in enterprise AI is wild though. If you can't write good internal documentation and define clear processes, throwing a chatbot on top of it just makes the chaos faster. Trying to skip the foundational engineering logic is a huge mistake.

Comment by jdlshore 1 day ago

This is mostly recapitulating the article “AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” that was posted here a week or two ago.

https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...

Comment by lilerjee 1 day ago

Interesting, two anti-AI articles were flagged in around 2-4 hours. Finding no supporting AI articles are flagged. Why?

Comment by lefty2 1 day ago

flagged as what?

Comment by ChiperSoft 1 day ago

Is there somewhere HN tells you that? For me theres just a "[flagged]" next to the title.

Comment by lefty2 13 hours ago

I understand now. Flagged means inappropiate for Hacker News. Yeah, they always flag any article that is anti-AI - even if it is well reasoned

Comment by newtonianrules 1 day ago

How many of these articles do we really need?

Comment by nh23423fefe 1 day ago

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Comment by piloto_ciego 1 day ago

I really like Cory Doctorow, his fiction is great, and he's really entertaining. But, at least about this? He's incorrect.

Comment by int32_64 1 day ago

Doctorow's absolutist writing style is so tiresome.

"perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again."

Talk to any professor. AI has had a profound and irreversible impact on higher ed, it has changed students completely, it has changed how professors operate, and it is changing how papers are written. The leading voices in mathematics are having profound discussions on the nature and uses of the technology. To dismiss these radical changes with this kind of pathetic snark is actually just embarrassing.

Comment by beej71 1 day ago

> AI has had a profound and irreversible impact on higher ed, it has changed students completely, it has changed how professors operate, and it is changing how papers are written.

University CS instructor here. The above is true, but it's not generally for-the-better. We're working with it, of course, since there is no choice. But students need to develop problem-solving skills that LLMs only steal from them. And they need to learn problem-solving skills that involve LLMs.

And so I work hard to help the students develop skill while using the very tool that robs them of it. It's possible, but it's extremely challenging for instructors and students, alike. It's a challenge that I rise to every day to maximize student benefit.

But LLM misuse during school makes the drawbacks completely negate all benefits, making LLMs positively dangerous for students who are mesmerized by the siren song.

In short, the snark isn't entirely unwarranted. Many students are bringing their robot to the gym to lift the weights for them. And when we, with pen and paper, corner these poor souls who haven't learned to think, they simply fail out and are lost. It's a problem.

So... great with the math breakthroughs and the whole "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" thing, but we have to work with the significant dark side of all this.

"You're not imagining it—the brain-rot is real."

Comment by tfandango 1 day ago

I work for a company with every AI tool imaginable. It's quite dystopian. Emails are flying back and forth with detailed AI analysis which is responded to with a copy and pasted response from another AI. And it's 95% noise. It begs the question of why people are even sending the emails anymore.

From the programming standpoint, it seems like the devs who honed their skills without AI being available to them are the most capable and productive at using it. But we are downsizing to increase spend on tokens, sales people are building apps that are nothing more than untested PoCs and asking how to deploy it into production, our executives believe the technology is some kind of magic...

I hope someday to hire some young developers again, when that day comes: thanks for your efforts getting them ready.

Comment by grebc 1 day ago

Discussions around how retarded it’s making its users?

Comment by 6stringmerc 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by TMWNN 1 day ago

Stross in Reddit, five days ago <https://np.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1vbtdga/what_is_...>:

>The current generative AI is just spicy autocomplete on steroids—doing phrase and paragraph level prediction rather than character/word level prediction. It doesn't "answer" questions, it just extrapolates the statistically most likely answer-shaped string based on its training set.

My reply:

>How do you explain the multiple unsolved math problems that AI has recently solved?

No answer by Stross.

Comment by selfhoster1312 21 hours ago

Very simple. Out of 9000 garbage assessment, you end up with one correct proof, which from what i read is not really human-readable/elegant as such.

This is to be expected out of a slop machine that has no notion of higher level concepts.

No one claimed autocomplete-on-steroids could not have any use. Some of us claim the cons (destruction of the planet, destruction of human though capabilities) infinitely outweigh the pros (you solved a useless mathematical problem or built yet another note-taking app, congratulations!)

Comment by ranger_danger 1 day ago

I try not to put much stock in black-and-white opinions because I think the reality is rarely that simple.

Comment by beej71 1 day ago

Look, it's either simple or it's not. ;)

Comment by jqpabc123 1 day ago

People in positions of authority are just as susceptible to hype and disinformation as the rest of us.

And maybe even more so since they carry the potential for bigger impact.

Comment by tokioyoyo 1 day ago

From time to time, I’ve seen “people whose time is very expensive” types to argue with literal AI slop bots on Twitter. Then delete the thread when they realize it after 30 mins of back and forth. So yeah, make your own assumptions.

Comment by joshstrange 1 day ago

I'll grant you that companies trying to force "AI" into everything are going about it mostly the wrong way but speaking from the position of someone who writes code and oversees people that write code: AI (aka LLMs) is absolutely changing everything.

I can't speak to other industries but LLMs have completely changed many if not all aspects of my job. We're producing more code, better tested code, better reviewed code, at a faster speed than ever before.

This will probably be downvoted since HN seems to be full of people who still think LLMs are ChatGPT 3.5-level "intelligence" and aren't willing or able to learn/try new methods. That sounds harsh but the truth is that writing code by hand is going away.

The people trying to shove "AI" into everything without thinking critically are wrong but so are the people who still, confidently, claim that LLMs cannot write good code. That might have been somewhat true 2 years ago but it hasn't been the case since at least Dec 2025 and has only improved since then.

As for the "0%" success rate in enterprise? Ehh, I'm not sure I buy that but I also work for a smaller startup and enterprise companies never cease to amaze me with their waste so maybe it's not so surprising. But it's not because LLMs are worthless, just that those people don't know what they are talking about and/or horribly overestimate how to use them effectively.

Comment by ksudb 1 day ago

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