I get this is just another speculative opinion piece and nobody really knows what is going to happen, but I kind of wish shit would either happen or not already.
I'm absolutely fucking exhausted from this bullshit discourse after almost 4 years of it at this point.
These AI companies need to stop bloviating and administering verbal self-fellatio and either replace everyone or fuck off already. I don't even care which it is anymore, I just want to be done with this hype cycle and move on with my life/career.
Except the entire value proposition of these tools is that there is no skill or mastery to be built.
The entire slop factory workflow, or sorry I mean "AI-native" workflow is:
"Woah, I cajoled a chatbot into building something I don't understand at all, I'm so good at my job!"
It's the participation trophy of building. Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it. There's no compounding return on my effort. No lessons learned. No understanding built. No insights gleaned for possible future innovation. No differentiation. Just mind-numbingly screaming into a void until the slot machine shits out some slop amalgam that seems "good enough", and then I do it all again the next day.
If that's the game, count me out. It's nice that others apparently enjoy it, I guess. But to think there's any sort of mastery here is delusion. The only requirement to be "successful" with these tools is to stop giving a shit and surrender to it.
I think there will always be some sort of mastery element to communicating with AI. You can see that nowadays with juniors who blow through tokens and still don’t produce good results. There will always be some group of people using AI better than others. Maybe the results will be equal in the far future, but some other dimension like cost may be better used by some people
>> Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it.
How much you understand what was built is entirely up to you. Literally nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from having the AI walk you through it, or reading the code yourself if you don’t trust the AI.
What about the threat of unemployment due to not meeting AI usage/output metrics? I've personally found it has effectively coerced me to stop trying to understand pretty much anything, and instead just send out whatever passes basic test to "keep up".
Unless you want to just play bad-faith word games and say that "technically it's still not stopping you" in which case yeah man you got me good job buddy.
these tools cannot read your mind. every time you prompt it you condition what it will give you on what you gave it. there will either always be a limit to how good that will be or none of this will matter because no human will ever matter again.
so far the skill is to condition it to give you the best results.
there used to be a time where you had to hack together silly idiosyncratic prompts to get the model to do what you wanted. now you just go into the engineering and describe the object you want it to conjure for you in as much detail as possible (including the high level description of the internals if able) and any constraints you want on it.
Are there really companies losing right now for using less AI?
Think - would you rather your telecom company’s customer support be AI-forward? Would you pay an extra $5 per month to ensure that you get humans solving your problems immediately when you call with an issue?
What about your backup software? Would you rather choose the company that comes out with new innovations in backing up your data and tons of features, but occasionally breaks everything? Or would you want to choose a company for backup software that is slow at adding anything new and reliable? Isn’t it good if this is deterministic?
What about even a fitness tracking watch. Are there really that many missing features that need to be released way faster? Or is it better if it just tracks your heart rate and workouts well and then gets out of your way? Same here, don’t you want the features to be reliable and deterministic?
I'd be fine with an LLM for customer support, as long as it's empowered to solve my problem. There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM. In both cases, the limiting factor is the authority granted to them by their employer.
Nobody uses an LLM for watches or data backup AFAIK so those seem like moot points.
>There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM.
This kind of reductionist take is an immediate tell that one has no experience in that kind of role. More worryingly, it hints of something antisocial and misanthropic. Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day? Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day?
CS reps? No. You must be very lonely, yourself, if your mind went there in the context of this conversation.
Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Yes, and it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone, AI or human. That's my real hope.
Stage 1: Corporations replace impotent CS reps with AI.
Stage 2: Corporations gradually empower the AI to interface with their existing internal systems in order to get the customer off the phone faster and avoid social-media brouhahas. Yes, they could have empowered the people in stage 1 to do that, but they didn't.
Stage 3: Corporations realize the AI is just another unnecessary middleman on their payroll, and empower customers to check status, report and escalate issues, handle SLA and billing problems, and obtain RMAs directly via their websites. Which should have been how it worked all along.
No, not lonely, I simply choose to not dehumanize those who work in that role.
> it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone
why do you think it is the case that quite literally zero medium+ sized companies have no customer support? do you think it’s possible that not every single iota of knowledge or edge case is immediately digitized and ready for consumption by an LLM?
is it also possible that customers that pay serious money for a service don’t want to click about on a website to solve a problem they didn’t cause? wasting someone’s time like that when you already fucked up is a very quick way to lose a customer; one throat to choke, as they say.
but since you’ve drawn the rest of the owl with those stages, I can only assume you’re raking in mad consultant fees for companies like Meta - they certainly haven’t had any issues replacing their humans with AI recently!
Are you shocked that techbros (and especially their CEO leaders) are misanthropists? We have probably empowered the most society adverse group of people in human history. Ones that didn't even need to speak to other humans to become rich.
no, not shocked; just willing to check that perspective more publicly than most.
the vonnegut quote is hitting hard today -
“why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
So, this is a complete nonsense take. Why do people keep making this kind of comparison? Is there really such a lack of critical thinking being taught these days?
What you were taught no longer matters, compared to what some of the rest of have learned over the past couple of years. Sorry. Shoot the messenger if it makes you feel better, but it won't change anything.
This comment has no substance to it. It's the same as posting "I am right and you are wrong. 'Sorry' if me being right makes you feel bad, but you are wrong."
People are asking legitimate questions whenever this is brought up, because the comparison is wrong. Compilers are an optimization of the previous paradigm, they let you do the exact same thing as what was done in the preceding decades, just faster. LLMs are not that, they are just a completely separate thing that exists alongside regular programming. Arguing that their use isn't just another option, but a superior and total replacement doesn't explain why you think that randomness is a perfect substitute for determinism. The only people I see promoting this view are ones who only want to look at graphs where lines are going up without caring about anything else. Because I think that even if LLMs get 10 times better, we'll still have industries and use cases where determinism will dominate, ones where you get one take to get things right. For instance, I would not fly on a plane with firmware that was created by a guy hitting Generate, going for a coffee break, coming back and saying "yea looks good".
> I understand this probably does not work if you're on some subscription and not using the API (tokens burn fast), but this has been extremely productive for me.
What? You mean 20 year olds who have never used a computer shouldn’t be in charge of hiring the CTO? That’s crazy. They’re far more qualified than the people with real jobs. They did an e-learning course!
It's funny how many of the startup-pilled HN crowd have completely abandoned the widely accepted principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want" in favor of solution-first thinking "how can I shove AI into something" which was always looked down upon.
This industry has lost its collective mind with this hype cycle. I'm not even against the technology, but this is all just shockingly reckless.
To be fair, there is a lot of acquisition capital looking for plays to throw at a wall and see if it sticks. The set of start-ups explicitly built as features, not standalone products, has always legitimately been non-zero. And when you get concentrations of acquisition capital, like we have now among the AI majors, you’ll see preference for that—versus the traditional product mode-of start-up.
Building a proper product is still good advice. But if you think you can slip that and flip a feature into a quick sale, that’s a higher ROI.
I dunno, making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype they'll fall for a wider range of bullshit than normal so I can slip one by them and leave them holding the bag while I ride off into the sunset with millions seems like it could be pretty accurately described as a scam.
I guess people can dress it up as business savvy and market timing or whatever pretentious lingo they want to make themselves feel better about it, but it's really just scamming by another name.
But we're in the Scam/Grift Economy now anyway so I guess everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, and I guess that's what we're seeing.
> making a "feature" that provides dubious-at-best value in hopes that potential buyers are currently so blinded by the hype
That’s not how these businesses are best built. Instead, the founders tend to look at what an industry should be doing, but due to incumbent politics hasn’t been able to. You build the thing from the outside, bypassing those politics. Once you have it, you’re parachuted in.
> it's really just scamming by another name
There is plenty of this in bullshit-product companies, too. At the end of the day, a bolt-on exit strategy is absolutely legitimate. Most people can’t execute on it because it requires understanding both the economic niche and high-level corporate politics at a few major players. So there is probably more noise in feature-only startups than in the broader startup ecosystem. But again, most startups fail for good reason.
> principles like "solve a real problem" or "make something people want"
Those have been dead for at least a decade now, and AI was not the culprit. When you can sell useless stuff that nobody knew they wanted and still make ROI, why would you limit yourself?
The thing with AI is that there is no ROI (except for Nvidia) but when world dominance with total power is the putative reward, the gambling gets more reckless than ever before.
"How can I shove AI into something" is just seeing if a new technology can be used to solve a problem that's already solved. It's low effort high value compared to solving a new problem. Although I agree that people are being reckless and shoving it in when it doesn't make a significant improvement.
I'm not advocating for being this way... but if you're starting a company primarily so you can have an "exit strategy", then it is natural to primarily virtue-signal to Wall St (instead of "solve a real problem")
tl;dr: this AI cargo-culting is ultimately unsurprising to me.
Either deliver on your fuckass promise to end the world and replace everyone and make everything shitty forever or fuck off.
Shit or get off the pot already, clowns.
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