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Comment by nikincn | Hacker News Reader

Faking in demo video is now an essential evil to get virality . Because social media is about virality . All commenting on the video and this thread are now curious to try Devin, to prove it works or to prove it doesnt .

So now if it works faking helped it get virality , more users , more demand for product .

If it doesnt work good enough still it will be good enough for some of the users who discovered it because of the virality .

Only worst case is it is too hopelessly bad or doesnt work at all or tried to get to the moon and got nowhere . Hope the founders are smart enough to not be this bad

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You are mistaken. Lying about a products capabilities, trying to pass off something that isn't might work for a while but eventually people find out (evem with heavy marketing) and word gets around.

When you are selling something, you must be absolutely honest with what you are delivering. If you can't do it don't put it on! Not delivering makes you lose trust.

Scott Wu's option is here is to keep the lie going or just throw in the towel and say hey AI was a hype it's good at summarizing text and descent code assistant but its not going to replace human software engineers for a long time.

Which do you think he's going to take? Whichever is going to result in $$$.

No one should do business, or collaborate academically, with anyone associated with the video or company again. To co-author with anyone involved with this is misconduct, and every University should be aware of that - they are liars, they cannot be trusted to do research. The VC's should retrieve all unspent cash and sue the founders.

They can reflect on what they did looking at the canvas of the inside of their tents in a homeless camp.

I disagree. There are no actual lies in the video itself, and I don't think that, for example, the engineer who is narrating the video is responsible for writing the description of the video (which is where the actual lie was).

The person (probably in marketing) that made the false claim is at fault, and any manager involved who did not stop the lie is at fault.

The software developers who are working on Devin's code likely had no control of or idea about how the video was going to be marketed.

There have been many times that I've been part of a team that built a product we were proud of, and had some business or sales person at our company, over our objections, make claims about it to a customer (or potential customer) that the sales person had been told were not true.

I had an example at work recently where this happened - so I agree with you. You objected, which was right.

I rang the customer and explained the misunderstanding. I discussed the problem with the sales folks and it was agreed that this shouldn't have been said.

I feel ok about it, there was an exaggeration, I corrected it, we moved on.

That's where the difference is. If the developers and the narrator were unaware that these were lies then they should have been aware. If they were aware then they should have objected. I see no evidence that they objected.

Im not curious to try Devin. LLM agents suck and have sucked since the first faked demo 2 years ago. I’ll leave it to the real labs (OA, Anthropic, DeepMind, FAIR) to make real advances.

I liked Steve Yegge's quote on the Latent Space podcast late last year: "I'll believe in agents when somebody shows me one that works."

That's really all I require, just show me an agentic workflow that doesn't routinely implode at various stages and I'll buy in to some of the broader claims about the future of agents.

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