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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

AI is great at parsing and classification. Use it in a specific feature in our product that would be impossible to do with manual regex/parsing - saves hundreds of man hours a year.

It’s also been immensely useful for software development work - I find myself reaching for AI over docs more often these days due to its ability to understand context.

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We are using it for parsing and classification as well and have done a full internal study. The case is financial data collection. There are three side-by-side approaches we are comparing. Human-only, human-led, and ML-only. The only viable outcome for what we are doing is still human-only. The net cost of correcting the mistakes the ML makes in the human-led model are higher than the human-only model. The ML-only model has a capital risk higher than the value of our business. We're still experimenting with training but at least in our case, it's a poor solution.

Ergo YMMV and we shouldn't be spilling absolutes about it. It looks like it might work but does it really? We work in a very intellectually dishonest fashion-driven industry. Some objectivity would be nice in arguments.

As for writing code, I find it does a reasonable job of boilerplate but hits the crack pipe almost always if you stretch it. Then again that's better than any junior developer I've worked with so there is some utility there.

I agree. Occasionally ours doesn't work (frequent and very irritating OpenAI timeouts) or the output is inconsistent (different output from the same input).

"AI" is literally a marketing term for what we used to call algorithms, macros, etc. until very recently. Nothing fundamentally new is happening, just that what was largely confined to businesses and enterprises before has been adapted to become accessible to every man.

>I find myself reaching for AI over docs

I sincerely hope you read the documentation regardless to verify you aren't hallucinating. At best you'll just get the compiler mocking you, at worst you might find yourself responsible for a 737 MAX.

Oh, I still end up in the docs and have them open all the time. I don't generally use it for AI code completion. Maybe what's needed is just better doc search (that understands context and intent).

True AI should be like stackoverflow:

"How do I do X?".

"Are you crazy? You shouldn't do X. Best practices are doing Y, Z and T".

Sorry, but you mentioned the LLM understanding intent.

Now that’s an interesting idea!

Just for the record, in this example StackOverflow doesn't even attempt to understand intent, so neither should the LLM.

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