[krystofee]

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point.

I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code anymore – I'm thinking about code and reading code. The AI facilitates both. For context: I'm maintaining a well-structured enterprise codebase (100k+ lines Django). The reality is my input is still critically valuable. My insights guide the LLM, my code review is the guardrail. The AI doesn't replace the engineer, it amplifies the intent.

Using Claude Code Opus 4.5 right now and it's insane. I love it. It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.

[vanderZwan]

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology.

The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

[remus]

The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!

Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.

[carpo]

But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?

[latexr]

Exactly. It’s like if someone claimed to be selling magical fruit that cures cancer, and they’re just regular apples. Then people like your parent commenter say “that’s not a con, I eat apples and they’re both healthy and tasty”. Yes, apples do have great things about them, but not the exaggerations they were being sold as. Being conned doesn’t mean you get nothing, it means you don’t get what was advertised.

[amelius]

Yeah, but it should have been in the title otherwise it uses in itself a centuries old trick.

[sotix]

> The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented.

My company just released a year-long productivity chart covering our shift to Claude Code, and overall, developer productivity has plummeted despite the self-reported productivity survey conveying developers felt it had shot through the roof.

[JacoboJacobi]

I'd like to see a neutral productivity measure? Whether you tell me it went way up or way down I tend to be suspicious of productivity measures being neutral to perception changes that effect expectation, non paradoxical, etc.

[keyle]

It's fine for a Django app that doesn't innovate and just follows the same patterns for the 100 solved problems that it solves.

The line becomes a lot blurrier when you work on non trivial issues.

A Django app is not particularly hard software, it's hardly software but a conduit from database to screens and vice-versa; which is basic software since the days of terminals. I'm not judging your job, if you get paid well for doing that, all power to you. I had a well paying Laravel job at some point.

What I'm raising though is the fact that AI is not that useful for applications that aren't solving what has been solved 100 times before. Maybe it will be, some day, reasoning that well that it will anticipate and solve problems that don't exist yet. But it will always be an inference on current problems solved.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it, personally, I enjoy solving problems, not the end result as much.

[danielbln]

I think the 'novelty' goalpost is being moved here. This notion that agentic LLMs can't handle novel or non-trivial problems needs to die. They don't merely derive solutions from the training data, but synthesize a solution path based on the context that is being built up in the agentic loop. You could make up some obscure DSL whole cloth, that has therefore never been in the training data, feed it the docs and it will happily use it to create output in said DSL.

Also, almost all problems are composite problems where each part is either prior art or in itself somewhat trivial. If you can onboard the LLM onto the problem domain and help it decompose then it can tackle a whole lot more than what it has seen during pre- and post-training.

[NewsaHackO]

I feel as though the majority of programmers do the same thing; they apply well known solutions to business programs. I agree that LLM are not yet making programs like ffmpeg, mpv, or BLAS but only a small amount of programmers are working on projects like that anyway.

[consp]

> It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.

That's not how book printing works and I'd argue the monk can far more easy create new text and devise new interpretations. And they did in the sidelines of books. It takes a long time to prepare one print but nearly just as long as to print 100 which is where the good of the printing press comes from. It's not the ease of changing or making large sums of text, it's the ease of reproducing and since copy/paste exist it is a very poor analogue in my opinion.

I'd also argue the 10x is subject/observer bias since they are the same person. My experience at this point is that boilerplate is fine with LLMs, and if that's only what you do good for you, otherwise it will hardly speed up anything as the code is the easy part.

[ManuelKiessling]

This. By now I don’t understand how anyone can still argue in the abstract while it’s trivial to simply give it a try and collect cold, hard facts.

It’s like arguing that the piano in the room is out of tune and not bothering to walk over to the piano and hit its keys.

[ozim]

Downside is a lot of those that argue, try out some stuff in ChatGPT or other chat interface without digging a bit further. Expecting "general AI" and asking general questions where LLMs are most prone for hallucinations. Other part is cheap out setups using same subscription for multiple people who get history polluted.

They don't have time to check more stuff as they are busy with their life.

People who did check the stuff don't have time in life to prove to the ones that argue "in exactly whatever the person arguing would find useful way".

Personally like a year ago I was the person who tried out some ChatGPT and didn't have time to dabble, because all the hype was off putting and of course I was finding more important and interesting things to do in my life besides chatting with some silly bot that I can trick easily with trick questions or consider it not useful because it hallucinated something I wanted in a script.

I did take a plunge for really a deep dive into AI around April last year and I saw for my own eyes ... and only that convinced me. Using API where I built my own agent loop, getting details from images, pdf files, iterating on the code, getting unstructured "human" input into structured output I can handle in my programs.

*Data classification is easy for LLM. Data transformation is a bit harder but still great. Creating new data is hard so like answering questions where it has to generate stuff from thin air it will hallucinate like a mad man.*

Data classification like "is it a cat, answer with yes or no" it will be hard for latest models to start hallucinating.

[112233]

So I tried it and it is worse that having random dude from Fiverr write you code — it is actively malicious and goes out of it's way do decieve and to subtly sabotage existing working code.

Do I now get the right to talk badly about all LLM coding, or is there another exercise I need to take?

[demorro]

It's like arguing that the piano goes out of tune randomly and that even if you get through 1, 2, or even 10 songs without that happening, I'm not interested in playing that piano on stage.

[satisfice]

I am hitting the keys, and I call bullshit.

Yes, the technology is interesting and useful. No, it is not a “10x” miracle.

[Frieren]

> The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented.

How long have you been in the industry?

This does not seem a revolution compared with database standardization, abandonment of assembly for most coding, introduction of game engines, etc.

I see a lot of hype for LLMs from people that do not have the experience to compare them to anything else.

[blakeem567]

I been doing development for over 25 years and I completely agree with what they are saying. It's similar to going from punch cards to terminals. We were using assembly, COBOL, and Fortran in the 1990's and into the early 2000s. Zork even had a game engine. These are not the revolutions you think and have no hard cut off when change happened.

[falloutx]

Are you actually reading the code? I have noticed most of the gains go away when you are reading the code outputted by the machine. And sometimes I do have to fix it by hand and then the agent is like "Oh you changed that file, let me fix it"

[abricq]

> My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily

Then why is half of the big tech companies using Microsoft Teams and sending mails with .docx embedded in ?

Of course marketing matters.

And of course the hard facts also matters, and I don't think anybody is saying that AI agents are purely marketing hype. But regardless, it is still interesting to take a step back and observe what marketing pressures we are subject to.

[mpweiher]

> I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains...

Self-reports on this have been remarkably unreliable.

[7777332215]

0.05x to 0.5x

[satisfice]

You are speculating. You don’t know. You are not testing this technology— you are trusting it.

How do I know? Because I am testing it, and I see a lot of problems that you are not mentioning.

I don’t know if you’ve been conned or you are doing the conning. It’s at least one of those.

[yomismoaqui]

The best way to describe AI agents (coding agents here) I heard on some presentation, I think it was from Andrej Karpathy.

It was something like this:

"We think we are building Ultron but really we are building the Iron Man suit. It will be a technology to amplify humans, not replace them"

[megamix]

Are you also getting dumber? https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb

[WithinReason]

The monk analogy is perfect

[whattheheckheck]

And you not only use the emdash once -- you use it twice

[energy123]

> I'm maintaining a well-structured enterprise codebase (100k+ lines Django)

How do you avoid this turning into spaghetti? Do you understand/read all the output?

[hydr0smok3]

haha enterprise python/django! that was good

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good - it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily."

This may be true. The commenter may "believe in this tech" based on his experimentation with it

But the majority of sentences following this statement ironically appear to be "marketing hype" or "someone telling [us] it's good":

1. "The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented."

2. "Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point."

3. "I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code anymore - I'm thinking about code and reading code."

4. "Using Claude Code Opus 4.5 right now and it's insane."

5. "It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it."

The "framing" in this blog post is not focused on whether "this tech" actually saves anyone any time or money

It is focused on _hype_, namely how "this tech" is promoted. That promotion could be intentional or unintentional

N.B. I am not "agreeing" with the blog post author or "disagreeing" with the HN commenter, or vice versa. The point I'm making is that one is focused on whether "this tech" works for them and the other is focused on how "this tech" is being promoted. Those are two different things, as other replies have also noted. Additionally, the comment appears to be an example of the promotion (hype) that its author claims is not the basis for his "belief in this tech"

I think the use of the term "belief" is interesting

That term normally implies a lack of personal knowledge:

151 "Belief" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48"

Belief \Be*lief"\, n. [OE. bileafe, bileve; cf. AS. gele['a]fa. See {Believe}.]

1. Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact, opinion, or assertion as real or true, without immediate personal knowledge; reliance upon word or testimony; partial or full assurance without positive knowledge or absolute certainty; persuasion; conviction; confidence; as, belief of a witness; the belief of our senses. [1913 Webster]

Belief admits of all degrees, from the slightest suspicion to the fullest assurance. --Reid. [1913 Webster]

2. (Theol.) A persuasion of the truths of religion; faith. [1913 Webster]

No man can attain [to] belief by the bare contemplation of heaven and earth. --Hooker. [1913 Webster]

4. A tenet, or the body of tenets, held by the advocates of any class of views; doctrine; creed. [1913 Webster]

In the heat of persecution to which Christian belief was subject upon its first promulgation. --Hooker. [1913 Webster]

{Ultimate belief}, a first principle incapable of proof; an intuitive truth; an intuition. --Sir W. Hamilton. [1913 Webster]

Syn: Credence; trust; reliance; assurance; opinion. [1913 Webster]

151 "belief" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"

belief

n 1: any cognitive content held as true [ant: {disbelief}, {unbelief}]

2: a vague idea in which some confidence is placed; "his impression of her was favorable"; "what are your feelings about the crisis?"; "it strengthened my belief in his sincerity"; "I had a feeling that she was lying" [syn: {impression}, {feeling}, {belief}, {notion}, {opinion}]

151 "BELIEF" bouvier "Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)"

BELIEF. The conviction of the mind, arising from evidence received, or from information derived, not from actual perception by our senses, but from. the relation or information of others who have had the means of acquiring actual knowledge of the facts and in whose qualifications for acquiring that knowledge, and retaining it, and afterwards in communicating it, we can place confidence. " Without recurring to the books of metaphysicians' "says Chief Justice Tilghman, 4 Serg. & Rawle, 137, "let any man of plain common sense, examine the operations of, his own mind, he will assuredly find that on different subjects his belief is different. I have a firm belief that, the moon revolves round the earth. I may believe, too, that there are mountains and valleys in the moon; but this belief is not so strong, because the evidence is weaker." Vide 1 Stark. Ev. 41; 2 Pow. Mortg. 555; 1 Ves. 95; 12 Ves. 80; 1 P. A. Browne's R 258; 1 Stark. Ev. 127; Dyer, 53; 2 Hawk. c. 46, s. 167; 3 Wil. 1, s. 427; 2 Bl. R. 881; Leach, 270; 8 Watts, R. 406; 1 Greenl. Ev. Sec. 7-13, a.

[immibis]

Have you seen the 2025 METR report on AI coding productivity?

TLDR: everyone thought AI made people faster, including those who did the task, both before and after doing it. However, AI made people slower at doing the task.