| ▲ | jawns a day ago |
| I'm starting to notice a pattern with these AI assistants. Scenario: I realize that the recommended way to do something with the available tools is inefficient, so I implement it myself in a much more efficient way. Then, 2-3 months later, new tools come out to make all my work moot. I guess it's the price of living on the cutting edge. |
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| ▲ | lukan 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The frustrating part is, with all the hype it is hard to see, what are really the working ways right now. I refused to go your way to live on the edge and just occasionally used ChatGPT for specific tasks, but I do like the idea to get AI assistants for the old codebases and gave the modern ways a shot just now again, but it still seems messy and I never know if I am simply not doing it right, or if there simply is no right way and sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. I guess I wait some more time, before also invest in building tools, that will be obsolete in some weeks or months. |
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| ▲ | mlrtime 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the cost of bleeding edge... in our internal company ai slack channel people ask what is the best method to do something every week. The answer is always something like: "As of today, do a,b,c. But this will be different next week/month". I like it, we are at the forefront of this technology and years from now we will be telling stories to kids on how it used to be. | | |
| ▲ | 1dom 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think the stories told about this time in particular will be the same as the stories told about any boom/bust cycle: a frenzied feeling of progress which resulted in a tiny handful of people getting outrageously wealthy, whilst the vast majority of people and society as a whole loses a whole lot of time, money and dignity. |
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| ▲ | ACCount37 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The consequences of having the world's smartest people working on those things 24/7. Often, either the model itself gets improvements that render past scaffolding redundant, or your clever hacks to squeeze more performance out get obsoleted by official features that do the same thing better. |
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| ▲ | 1dom 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think this is specifically the consequence of smart people working in a bubble: there's no clearly defined problem being solved, and there's no common solution everyone's aiming for, there's just a general feeling of a direction ("AI") along with a pressure to get there before anyone else. It leads to the false feeling of progress, because everyone thinks they're busy working at the forefront, when in reality, only a tiny handful of people are are actually innovating. Everyone else (including me and the person you responded to) is just wasting time relearning new solutions every week to "the problem with current AI" . It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month", especially when that solution is almost always a synonym of "prompt engineering", "software engineering" or "prompt engineering with software engineering". | | |
| ▲ | hobofan 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month" At least for the current iterations that come to mind here, every advanced new solution solves the problem for a subset of problems, and the advanced new solution after that solves it for a subset of the remaining problems. E.g. if you are tool calling with a fixed set of 10 tools you don't _need_ anything outlined in this blog post (though, you may use it as token count optimization). It's just the same as in other programming disciplines. Nobody is forcing you to stay up to date with frontend framework trends if you have a minimally interactive frontend where a <form> elements already solves your problem.
Similarly, nobody forces you to stay up-to-date with AI trends on a daily basis. There are still plenty of product problems ready to be exploited, that do well enough with state of AI & dumb prompt engineering from a year ago. |
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| ▲ | doctorpangloss 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The consequences of having the world's smartest people working on those things 24/7. haha, don't you worry, they are going to be back to working on ads - inside the chatbots - soon enough |
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| ▲ | pjm331 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hah I’m only on the cutting edge part time on the side so my experience has been more like - start thinking about the problem and then 2 or 3 days later new tools come out that solve it for me |
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| ▲ | rglullis 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fire and Motion: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ |
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| ▲ | jondwillis a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson |
