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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone using a chatbot already has felt the frustration of "it doesn't get what I want". And also "I have to explain so much that I might as well just do it myself

Ehm yes. That's because it actually doesn't work as well as the hype suggests, not because it's too "high bandwidth".

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Moreover, this is exactly the frustration I've experienced when working with outsourced developers.

Which tells me the problem may be fundamental, not a technical one. It's not just a matter of needing "more intelligence". I don't question the intelligence or skill of the people on the outsourced team I was working with. The problem was simple communication. They didn't really know or understand our business and its goals well enough to anticipate all sorts of little things, and the lack of constant social interaction of the type you typically get when everybody's a direct coworker meant we couldn't build that mind-meld over time, either. So we had to pick up the slack with massive over-specification.

if you can write a specification with no ambiguities you can just execute it, because it's code

Not just with outsourced developers. Computer science graduates hired in house to assist in writing specialised engineering software can often be a dead weight in the team for quite some time. This is not just because they and the engineers don't speak the same language but also because the CS graduates know nothing about physics and engineering so they cannot properly evaluate requirements documents.

Left to their own devices they often implemented requirements that were full of errors or even completely unnecessary because they did not understand the domain well enough to ask pointed questions.

I'd contribute that we, the engineering class, are as a whole terrible communicators that confuse and cannot explain their own work. LLMs require clear communications, while the majority of LLM users attempt to use them with a large host of implied context that anyone would have a hard time following, not to mention a non-human software construct. The key is clear communications, which is a phrase that many in STEM don't have the education to know what that phrase really means, technically, realistically.

No, this is absolutely not the reason. The reason is that many people benefit financially as long as the hype train keeps going choo choo. So they lie to our faces and sleep like babies at night.

There is that too, I agree. The hype train is many people's entire careers. But AI does work, is indeed capable of many of the claims, I'm saying the naysayers are using it wrong. But you know who will use it very well? The hype train.

It works for some annoyances in life, though. For example, you can get it to write a complaint to an administration. It's good enough unless you'd rather be witty and write it yourself.

often writing the witty complaint yourself can be not only more effective, but more emotionally satisfying.

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