I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

There's an old Bill Hicks bit where during his already awkward standup, he takes a moment to somehow dial the awkwardness up further: If you're of a certain age, you'll know the bit:

https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...

It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.

The same thing is happening in YouTube right now. My feed is filled with AI generated never ending rambling videos about simple topics that can be explained in 1 or 2 mins, but it keeps on dragging up to 10-30 mins to milk the maximum from monetisation

Gametheorys all defectors.. they are real. And that is why we must have lynch mobs ocassionally to regenerate the allmende

Sorry to break it to you, but those aren’t marketers. Marketers can’t build shit. Those are all savvy developers who realized that they can take their talents to less competitive markets and harvest at scale all the low hanging fruits.

It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.

1) cool people do cool things, start a scene

2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word

3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass

4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.

5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs

You should have just said quick example: Windows

I value both great devs and great marketers because I’ve seen dev teams build awesome tech that never found its audience.

It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.

Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

Unironically UBI or something similar could eliminate the need for -most- people to resort to petty scams.

let’s not forget the marketers who work for the same companies we do.

how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?

it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”

at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.

I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.

With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.

The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.

Dunning Kruger springs to mind.

Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.

Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.

This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.

After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.

In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.

AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive.

The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features).

But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved the needle and contributed the bulk of net new code.

Those 80% were constrained in the volume they could output pre-AI, but now they are unleashed to do a large amount of net new work but many without the skills to structure it well+maintainably.

It doesn't help that most management has been pushing on LoC over quality the past year.

I truly believe most companies as they exist today are not structured for AI. The amount of technical debt that will be created at a rapid pace is basically time delayed self destruction for most codebases if you let people run amok with low contribution standards and rubber stamped approvals.

If you treat each AI output as a small well-scoped, well-tested module, which interoperate with each other through well designed APIs, you can have high confidence in quality. But majority of people are pseudo-vibe coding and creating spaghetti monster codebases, and there's really no way to stop it without strong and tight technical oversight.

> They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code

If someone told you this (their coworkers generate bad PRs, but they generate good PRs) in the age before LLMs would you have also declared it psychosis?

Having to deal with lazy coworkers who submit bad PRs has been a feature of workplaces since the dawn of programming. Programming languages are a tool and they can be used or misused by the operator.

The difference now is that a lazy developer with an LLM can become prolific with their sloppy output and it’s harder for a lazy manager to notice.

If you’re trying to imply that nobody can use LLMs to good effect then that’s just denial at this point. The way good developers use AI isn’t to prompt and then submit PRs. It’s used as a pair programming partner. The developer still writes, reads, edits, and is responsible for the code.

> fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing

There is a lot of dumb money chasing the AI dream. That money is not asking hard questions about return on investment yet. But, the narrative is starting to shift as evidenced by this article. Even Meta is questioning the value of AI Agents.

In response, we see Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). The idea is to keep the AI dream alive one way or another because once that dies, the whole thing comes crashing down. So, dumb money is going to put up a strong fight in the marketing-sphere, and articles like these are needed to counter that.

That's "fundamental attribution error" as much as it is any form of psychosis, though I do agree it is at work.

Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.

I am not forced to use it, but I am a peculiar type of dev. Very lazy. Can go for weeks without producing anything of value while I think of stuff, delete stuff and generally just cogitate. I would work for 3-5 hours if I could but I have to sit in a chair for 8 hours to please the pointy haired people.

My colleagues are absolute work horses. They work for 8-10 hours minimum. Always responding to emails, putting out fires. Always typing furiously, producing lots of code. You are waiting for it, I know it and yes, it's all shit and all those fires are of their own making.

I picked up stuff in a month or two that took my colleagues years and I'm not a genius, as you can undoubtedly tell. I am just exceedingly lazy and I honestly think it's pathological. It got me in a lot of trouble in the past, but now, with the way AI is going I'm having a blast.

I have some proclivity for architecture and directing large complex projects. I hate typing code, but I love pointing out how it should be done. This shit is a life saver but for the love of God if you are not supremely lazy and averse to code, don't use it. My productive colleagues + AI = goddamn disaster.

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.

> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’

>i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.

AI boosters talk about it as life changing. I think it's fair to ask them to substantiate

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.

The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.

I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.

Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing",

I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.

I think this is very domain-specific.

FreeCAD genuinely changed my life: it made it possible for me to do things I was sure I would not be able to do, think in ways I never though I'd grasp, visualise and design physical things I thought required expertise I couldn't ever develop, and develop that knowledge, and it does so in a way nobody can take away from me.

LLMs, at best, feel like a bespoke, error-prone reference library combined with an addictive drug that I could get some value from, but risks stealing the joy from everything I do.

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!

It's held to that standard because of the hype. Literally the boosters can't stop saying "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Maybe a bait or not, but quite important for planes, for example. Or just cardiac pacemaker...

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

- My life was different before Skype allowed my business to go fully remote in 2012

- Stuck in Argentina during one of their troubled periods, AirBnB was the only way we could pay for accomodations because you couldn't withdraw USD or EUR, nobody would take a credit card, and it was a mess all around

- WhatsApp (which I don't use anymore, now replaced with Signal) changed the life of my family and how often we communicate with each other (and meet in person)

- My health and fitness is unrecognizable since I started using a couple of FOSS apps for calorie tracking and workout progressions (Waistline, GymRoutines, Podometre among others)

- Of course my life is different due to my own software because I absolutely hated editing videos myself, and OneTake has removed one of my top weekly pains :)

That's just off the top of my head.

I think the whole point of creating software is to aim for it to be life-changing for someone. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But if it's life-changing for no one, why bother?

> i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.

Surely you're kidding right?

You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.

Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.

Blender was life changing for me, both when I first discovered it and still today.

> It’s doing more harm than good.

For context

Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.

I tried to have multiple models convert a simple textmate grammar to a vim one, and none of them could do it. They couldn't even use the right names between the regex matches and the color definitions. I tried for about 30 minutes. It took me about 5

I tried having them work on a LSP. The fact I got a one shot half working autocomplete based on my existing work was cool, but again, they flailed on incredibly simple things like file path normalization / converting from a URI and I had to rewrite a decent amount of code. I don't think I saved any time

People keep throwing this out there but I keep wondering where are the receipts? I am seeing less interesting software released, anecdotally I know, since AI has taken hold, than before.

You know, people could just put their money where their mouth is. IE go build something amazing instead of talking endlessly about how they're going to build amazing stuff. That's why this feels like so much theatre.

I find that thinking/agent mode sometimes makes it worse/comes up with the same thing and just takes a long time. But I’m sure it’ll be different with fable for a few months until that hype blows over

> no brainer

An excellent epithet for people who depend on AI!

I should use it to read and vote on HN comments so that I don't have to waste time doing that myself.

I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.

I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.

Why do all arguments from AI boosters boil down to this same cycle:

A new model is released, AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time, and all criticism is shrugged off as "not up to date" and met with "try the new model!" Then, once level heads actually put the claims to the test and find it wanting, criticism is met with "you're just not using it right, you have to learn how to prompt/context/loop engineer for best results" until the next model comes out and this argument repeats.

Or they aren’t building a SaaS with React or a TUI with Typecript, which is about the only thing that LLMs have “solved”.

> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.

Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM. The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.

Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.

Ah, a 5070.

You will find this most prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557728

> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).

Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.

> The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy.

This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.

Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.

If you were to say 'doing the same work a bit faster' isn't life-changing then that's evidence that the hypothesis in the article is actually correct.

I'm not disagreeing with the article, but I think you are right that if you use AI in the right setting it can do much more than the average ChatGP that outputs Linkedin like crap:

interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.

Do you think it was the AI itself that gave you the boost here or the discussion and brainstorming?

Who are those people and businesses?

Elena is one of those people who was loudest about AI on other channels and now she writes this when, as you say, there’s a demand for articles like this.

It’s marketers doing marketing all the way down.

There are, they're all on the sell side though.

from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.

llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.

I had a similar reaction to the "I work at an AI company" and finding out it was Dropbox. And I agree with you, they are not in any way an AI company that would be relevant for someone making claims about frontier intelligence.

I'm empathetic to their position though. It is entirely unsurprising to me that someone working in a growth role at Dropbox is unimpressed by the current state of AI relative to its broader claims in the market. They're not working on AI itself nor are they using applied AI where you see the biggest gains (e.g. SWE, ML, data science, etc.).

We still have a significant capability overhang at the frontier for a big chunk of knowledge work task domains, so I think its understandable (given the above selection bias) why someone would think the confidence is overblown. They have a point in their own domain.

Haven't you heard? Every company is an "AI company" now.

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power...

The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

> - I don't try to debug

Just today I wanted to add to my nvim setup some validation for Kubernetes YAML. Asked Claude why it wasn’t looking at schemas correctly. After 30 minutes of prompts and nudges, during which it went on multiple wild goose chases, I just gave up and did it myself.

Other times I did have more success but it’s not rare to encounter this infinite loop style drill-down, which ultimately wastes more time than if I did it myself from the beginning.

> show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart

> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow

So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.

Yup, this is why I get so irritated with AI boosters. If it were just a matter of "I disagree", then I would be happy to ignore the people whom I believe to be deluded, but the problem is: layoffs are real, economic impacts are real, datacenter impacts are real, the impacts on education are real, the impacts on college graduates who can't find jobs are real, the impact of people suffering from psychosis is real. And most of these impacts are from _hype_, not because the technology does what was promised. e.g The CEO fires his workers and then has to rehire a few months later because it turns out the AI couldn't do the job. These people are causing SO MUCH harm, and for what purpose? To ingratiate themselves to billionaires who don't respect them anyway, or to get a retweet on twitter?

This stuff makes me nostalgic for NFTs and the metaverse which is pretty horrifying all things considered.

Yeah, there will always be some percentage of bozos and clowns in America… that’s never going to change.

And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.

quantum computing in next 5-10 years for sure will be the next grift, the wheels are already turning

Amen! Let it burn…

Being unemployed can be life changing too, if it can do your job

That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society.

It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.

hahaha this reads like a porn clip script.

Link to the product, apparently has a free tier: https://www.descript.com

(I'm unaffiliated with them.)

Do you earn 8 times as much now?

I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre.

Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.

> But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using,

I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is.

Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.