> 1. The people on HN tend to think they're very clever, but they're often not as clever as they think they are. That has a lot of wide-ranging implications, from classic "engineer's disease" thinking to stuff a lot dumber.

Related: the Rationalists display this very well (though it's certainly not unique to them). The jump from "I think my beliefs through carefully, therefore I am reasonably rational" (likely already false, or at best true in a limited domain) to "I am rational, therefore my beliefs are well-thought through" is actually very small in the human mind, despite the latter being the opposite of rationality.

Also, the existence of Gell-Mann amnesia should be taught to everyone!

> 3. I think there's a certain amount of defensiveness from AI enthusiasts.

I've encountered this as well. I think this is also a huge part of why you see so many people loudly exclaiming "every programmer uses LLMs now" despite that not being even close to true. If you criticize LLMs, it (socially, to them) counts as criticism of their users as well. As well, bosses are probably the most excited about LLMs because they hope to fire us all soon, so it can be pointlessly self-destructive to speak negatively about LLMs in a professional context right now.

That, plus AI boosters tend to be incredibly annoying about it, bringing it up at every possible opportunity, changing every technical discussion to be about them, suggesting them for the stupidest use-cases, loudly proclaiming nonsensical productivity boosts (perhaps you feel 5x as productive because you're forcing other people to spend their time fixing your shitty slop code?) etc. So as someone who does not use LLMs I avoid talking to them.

▲

orangedog an hour ago | parent [-]

I just think this speaks more to people observing different things and taking that as ground truth. I notice the people who are critical of these tools because like the above post and yours, they are relentlessly critical without ceding basic things like people are excited about these tools because they are useful. I have 0 doubts some people are seeing 5x productivity boosts because of the stuff that is regularly posted on HN - stuff that used to take months taking days.

I'm not a booster, I barely use these tools but what I notice is the two apparent "sides" that people have shifted into and really I don't think that' necessary because these are just tools that have adnvantages and disadvantages.

▲

uv-depression 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I have 0 doubts some people are seeing 5x productivity boosts because of the stuff that is regularly posted on HN - stuff that used to take months taking days.

I will cede this: it indeed seems like you can throw together a shitty half-working prototype very quickly using LLMs. There's been a deluge of half-working prototypes, but years in and where are all these projects now? No study has concluded anything near a 5x improvement.

Besides, my actual opinion is that even if these actually gave a large productivity improvement, it's wouldn't be worth it. The negatives are simply too large:

- the concentration of power they are pushing for;

- the environmental effects of training;

- the disinformation they spread at scale (which in practice is their primary use-case);

- the adverse effect on a shared reality from the fact that they cannot reliably answer questions, yet are presented as doing so;

- the adverse effect on a shared reality from their sycophancy (do the rich surrounded by yes-men seem in touch with reality?);

- their anti-social nature, as they discourage engaging with other people in favour of solipsism masked by a poor simulacrum of personhood;

- their weakening of labour power because of the managerial class' belief that they will soon replace workers (whether or not they actually can is not particularly relevant);

- the large-scale plagiarism they enable;

- lastly, their weakening of already incredibly lax standards of engineering from our field.

The promise of more software does not even come close to outweighing all of that.

	▲	orangedog 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's just from my personal experience when I rarely use Claude, I can get it to produce things in minutes that would take me hours. They're not shitty, I can review what's been generated and it's better than I would have done. Similarly with the UIs we build here, they would take days or weeks and we can put them together in a few hours. I can't speak to you other issues but these are here to stay and I think the only realistic way forward is to learn how to use them.