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Comment by AnEro | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in the comments seem to not like the article or see it as a waste of time. I just don't think we are the audience they wanted for this, I think they want to show the average business owner the realistic potential and public (journalists that will distill this later) they are aware of the impacts and what to expect.

I don't read it as fear AI, I read change is happening because of AI.

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They also call out how it's more used for augmentation rather than full automation which will address some concerns the public has.

Tools empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge. The fact that people were concerned layman were simply going to be able to take on experienced programmers at their day jobs was farcical.

I'm not a dev but I thought the issue from a senior dev perspective was AI on AI, not layman on AI?

It seems like you get downvoted, but I think you touch on something important. IMO, right now there are two limitations with AI replacing experienced developers: a) It's not good enough at programming. It sometimes goes down rabbit holes and cannot get out. In other cases it comes up with ridiculously complicated solutions that could be solved much simpler. b) Making assumptions instead of gathering requirements.

I suspect that a) will get better over time. I also suspect that b) can be addressed by a pre-programmed prompt-flow that uses a LLM to gather requirements from a PM and ask probing questions to get a well-defined scope and agree on how edge cases should be handled. It doesn't seem far-fetched that a AI also would be able to call out small requirement changes that might allow for much simpler/faster solutions.

That is also what I think will happen, I mean these tools right now are just capturing market share with funding rounds and hacks surly? wrapping any foundational modal and trying to scope it down is always going to suck, but once people start to truly nail just training in only the information required to do that job (I described 03-high-mini or whatever it's called as a dumb finance bro with no depth to my wife) and then couch the task LLMs with orchestration LLMs, surly things improve?

I honestly don’t know who the audience could be, other than “people who like to tell others they’re in the know because they read AI companies’ press releases.”

At no point do I see an actual elevator pitch/tl;dr/summary of what the frak this index actually is, except that it’s part of some effort to track AI adoption. It just rains down figures about which industries are using how much AI without first grounding the new concept they’re introducing.

When you say you have a new economic index, you need to give me a number, how I should interpret that number, and where it comes from. I don’t see that.

GDP: measure if a country’s total economic output by adding up end product purchases.

CPI: general price level by taking a weighted average of prices throughout the economy

Big Mac index: how expensive goods are in a country relative to the US by reference to the local cost of a Big Mac, converted through the exchange rate.

Here I expect something like “the economic output-weighted fraction of production taken over by AI”, but instead it’s just a list of AI adoption by industry.

Why introduce an index and not headline with a definition of an index? Which audience prefers that?

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