[lqstuart]

"AI" is a $100B business, which idiot tech leaders who convinced themselves they were visionaries when interest rates were historically low have convinced themselves will save them from their stagnating growth.

It's really cool. The coding tools are neat, they can somewhat reliably write pain in the ass boilerplate and only slightly fuck it up. I don't think they have a place beyond that in a professional setting (nor do I think junior engineers should be allowed to use them--my productivity has been destroyed by having to review their 2000 line opuses of trash code) but it's so cool to be able to spin up a hobby project in some language I don't know like Swift or React and get to a point where I can learn the ins and outs of the ecosystem. ChatGPT can explain stuff to me that I can't find experts to talk to about.

That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment. But since NVIDIA is effectively taking all the fake hype money and taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another, maybe the whole Ponzi scheme will stay afloat for a while.

[strange_quark]

> That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment

What sucks there’s probably some innovation left in figuring out how to make these monstrosities more efficient and how to ship a “good enough” model that can do a few key tasks (jettisoning the fully autonomous coding agents stuff) on some arbitrary laptop without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. The problem is nobody in the industry is incentivized to do this because the second this happens, all their revenue goes to 0. It’s the final boss of the everything is a subscription business model.

[smurfsmurf]

I've been saying this since I started using "AI" earlier this year: If you're a programmer, it's a glorified manual, and at that, it's wonderful. But beyond asking for cheat sheets on specific function signatures, it's pretty much useless.

[mikeg8]

I’d disagree. I think there is still so much value it can offer if you really open your mind. For instance, I’ve met very few “programmers” that I’d consider even moderately competent at front-end, so the ability of a programmer to build and iterate a clean and responsive UI is just one example of a huge win for AI tools.

[sp4cec0wb0y]

How do I save comments in HN? This sums up everything I feel. Beautiful.

[supriyo-biswas]

Click the comment timestamp, then “favorite” it