> Had LLMs first been presented as a "better IntelliSense", where rather than auto-completing function names, your editor can now suggest implementations, very few people would have been upset.

I'm not rooting for AI companies or hustlers that are out to ride the wave and get rich.

However your claim is just hyperbole. I've used it in cross-cutting projects to extend protocol on desktop, iot device, which involves holding premise long enough to co-develop and test. It is also fantastic in debugging multi-threaded systems.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-]

This is an interesting theme that I see a lot: Some people are firmly anchored to an idea of AI capabilities that is a year or more behind the frontier.

Some times it comes from people who try out ChatGPT free tier or the Google AI summary and think it represents the state of the art.

More recently I suspect it’s from people who build their opinion based on being contrarian and cynical: They dislike the AI people and distrust everything they say. If the AI people say it’s changing the world, then the cynical and contrarian belief is to assume that the technology is actually very bad and they’re just lying to make a lot of money and retire.

These takes were more understandable in the earlier phases of AI when it really was very limited, but it’s getting harder to understand how someone can be thinking of AI as just a slightly better autocomplete or slightly better Grammarly at the end of 2026.

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mrweasel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> but it’s getting harder to understand how someone can be thinking of AI as just a slightly better autocomplete or slightly better Grammarly at the end of 2026.

That wasn't the point. My point was that if you had rolled LLMs out like that, as embedded technology in existing products. Slowly, over time, you'd have a lot less cynical people. I think the hostility towards AI product in large parts comes from the disruption and glancing over the negative parts. What we're doing now is the equivalent of putting millions of cars on roads which five years ago had never seem a car, only horses. We're doing so without any understanding of how that might affect society. Social media was a similar story. It was slower, yet we still didn't catch the majority of the negative consequences.

If it turns out that the people behind social media, and smart phones, don't care about e.g. peoples mental well being, then why would I trust that the people behind AI wouldn't behave the same way?

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rhdunn 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As I see it there are currently 3 broad classes of LLM usage:

1. enhanced autocomplete -- either line (e.g. JetBrains small language models) or longer predictions;

2. chat -- asking questions related to the task you are doing;

3. tool assisted/agentic -- letting models interact with tools to perform tasks.

I personally find 1 & 2 helpful for my development tasks. For 3, I'm cautious of using it for several reasons:

1. lack of control of what gets sent to the model (e.g. if you have confidential user data, proprietary code and/or data, access tokens/private keys);

2. letting the models run arbitrary commands (modifying the system, deleting files, etc.);

3. not having control over the design process, formatting of the files, etc.

	▲	threatofrain 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not having control of the design process is not the right way to use the leading models IMO due to the ROI of how much you get out from controlling the architecture phase.

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knottn an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are people whose livelihood depends on them not getting it. There are people whose worldviews depend on them not getting it. Denial is a part of grieving. There are also people who like to troll the ai maniacs because ai maniacs are easy to troll. It has been curious to me to see all this as well, smart people who seem oblivious feels strange.