This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction."
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
> It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread.
Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning
Probably over twenty today in my work day alone. Its a normal part of working with agents. They do not always have the context they need, but fail to be aware of this.
Misinterpreting the results of performance testing it had just run to argue for the exact opposite of what the data it generated showed.
Stating something was current guidance (a quick read shows the document it found was from 2016, it was served the last edit date in it's API call, along with newer documents that contradict it).
Assuming what a Jira ticket said without ever reading it with it's tools and then doubling down on the contents it has assumed.
On learning specifically, it constantly gets grammar in foreign languages wrong it can write fluently when prompted correctly but when asked the sort of wrongheaded questions from flawed premises learners commonly make it is prone to making stuff up. I experienced this yesterday when asking about how danish comparisons work.
Heck i mean see <a href="https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-generated-prompt-injections-in-compaction-summaries/" rel="nofollow">https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-gener...
They are prone to make up restrictions for themselves you never asked for. Ive seen this behavior on occasion also.
lol i love playing with food labels. the things it spits out for anything de papa in an otherwise English paragraph is terrifying. ai must solve the spanglish potato problem. also the spanglish con issue.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
So, I don't think a pro-AI post can be well thought out, either. It's too early and chaotic to understand what's going to happen, and it may actually be uncertain. Pro and anti are both far too simplistic.
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.
RugnirViking · · focus · HN ↗
The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread.
Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
RugnirViking · · focus · HN ↗
Misinterpreting the results of performance testing it had just run to argue for the exact opposite of what the data it generated showed.
Stating something was current guidance (a quick read shows the document it found was from 2016, it was served the last edit date in it's API call, along with newer documents that contradict it).
Assuming what a Jira ticket said without ever reading it with it's tools and then doubling down on the contents it has assumed.
On learning specifically, it constantly gets grammar in foreign languages wrong it can write fluently when prompted correctly but when asked the sort of wrongheaded questions from flawed premises learners commonly make it is prone to making stuff up. I experienced this yesterday when asking about how danish comparisons work.
Heck i mean see <a href="https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-generated-prompt-injections-in-compaction-summaries/" rel="nofollow">https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/self-gener...
They are prone to make up restrictions for themselves you never asked for. Ive seen this behavior on occasion also.
jambalaya8 · · focus · HN ↗