Speaking of that "obviously impressive" line, I'm getting really tired of something like that line seemingly needing to be included by anyone doing any criticism of agentic systems. The most common form of it is "these models are obviously useful" midway through a bunch of arguments about environment, data provenance, skill atrophy, or even correctness issues.

It's just really weird. Why does everyone feel the need to equivocate? "I worry about genocide and the environmental impact of radiation from nuclear bombs. Obviously, they are very useful for annihilating entire cities, certainly. But are we really atrophying our ability to invade with infantry?"

I want to tell these people to just cut it out. It's demeaning to their own position.

This may be out of left field but you might be interested in Michael Parenti's essay "left-wing anti communism". It's about this same thing in American politics where everyone from the furthest right to furthest left has to condemn socialism before opening their mouth, and how it's turned the US's elected left into preemptively apologetic losers.

No idea where you stand politically but there's not that many arguments about this type of rhetorical error so hopefully you consider it.

> Speaking of that "obviously impressive" line, I'm getting really tired of something like that line seemingly needing to be included by anyone doing any criticism of agentic systems. The most common form of it is "these models are obviously useful" midway through a bunch of arguments about environment, data provenance, skill atrophy, or even correctness issues.

> Why does everyone feel the need to equivocate?

Blame the mods here for that. This is the first week since 2023 I haven't had a HackerNews account banned for directly critiquing LLM code generators.

> I want to tell these people to just cut it out. It's demeaning to their own position.

I couldn't agree more. It's a rhetorical disaster.