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Comment by e3bc54b2 | Hacker News Reader

The worse part is not even being trolled at AI roundabout. The worse part is gaslighting by people who then go on to imply that I'm dumb to not be able to 'guide' the model 'towards the solution', whatever the fuck that means. And this is after telling me that model is so smart to just know what I want.

Claude and Gemini are pretty decent at providing a small and tight function definition with well defined parameters and output, but anything big and it starts losing shit left and right.

All vibecoding sessions I've seen have been pretty dead easy stuff with lot of boilerplate, maybe I'm weird for just not writing a lot of boilerplate and rely on well-built expressive abstractions..

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Remember, if AI couldn't solve your problem, you were probably using the wrong model. Did you try with o5-selfsuck-20250523-512B?

It’s brilliant because you can always shift the blame on the user. Wrong prompt, wrong model, should have used an agent and ran 3 models in parallel, etc.

Meanwhile we get claims that the tools are as capable as a junior programmer, and CEOs believe that.

Yeah it's my favourite argument. Apparently this magical tool that can replace engineers and can do and write anything needs you to write prompts so detailed that you could have just written the damn code yourself, and probably had an easier time with it to boot.

The whole thing feels like we're in a collective delusion because idiotic managers and C-suites are blindly lapping up the advertising slop coming from the AI companies.

My least favorite part of this trend is the ageism. "Crusty curmudgeons are not up-to date with the latest bloat if they think RTFM is still a thing", "Oh, you didn't like ORMs? Did you try letting an AI generate code for your ORM?"

Maybe in the future all of these assistants will offer something amazing, but in my experience, there is more time invested in prompting that just reading the relevant documentation and having a coherent design.

My suspicion is that many, (but not all please no flames) of the biggest boosters of AI coding are simply inexperienced. If this is true, it makes sense that they wouldn't recognize the numerous foot-guns in AI generated code.

As an experienced coder, I find ai invaluable for a ton of stuff, nearly none of it writing production code.

* Variable naming

* Summarizing unfamiliar code

* Producing boilerplate code when I have examples

* Producing one-liners when I've forgotten the parameter order or API specification. I double check, but this is basically a Google that directly answers your question

* Pre-code brainstorming

* Code review. Depending on the language it can catch classes of problems that escape linters

In my experience it won't produce production-ready code, but it's great as a rubber duck and a second pair of eyes.

You're the one doing the gaslighting now. "It doesn't work for me, therefore it can't possibly work for anyone else."

Which is a very reasonable conclusion given the kinds of errors it makes.

Why are you so defensive about the tech?

Involved in any AI startups, perhaps?

Most of them are involved (including the latest round of YC startups), who have VCs invested in them to boost "AI agents" all over the internet and ignoring the laughable errors it makes.

Here are some headlines:

OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic [0]

Anthropic blames Claude AI for ‘embarrassing and unintentional mistake’ in legal filing [1]

xAI blames Grok’s obsession with white genocide on an ‘unauthorized modification’ [2]

So you see, these AI models can easily be prone to producing nonsensical errors unpredictably at any time.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/openai-explains-why-chatgp...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession...

At this point you should just take this as your secret weapon. Let people convince each other that AI can't do that thing, while you are one-shotting the exact thing with a cost of $0.05.

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