I don’t think anyone* doesn’t think these things don’t have practical limitations. It’s more that a lot of the negative stories and results seem to have a “I asked a random stranger on the internet to balance my check book and got money stolen” vibe to them that very much do fall into a “you’re using it wrong” category**. They absolutely have limitations, they absolutely get things wrong and need a real human involved still. They’re also a lot more capable when used in the right contexts and with the right tooling than some people are giving them credit for. It’s a new tool and like most new and exciting tools, it’s going to be shoved everywhere, it will take time to learn to use effectively, and everyone and their dog is going to try building “Thing but with AI”, just like when the internet was new and exciting everything was “Thing but online”. And some ideas will turn out to be terrible, some will turn out to be too early, but viable as tech improves, and some (like AI code completion, and some of the better agent based tools) will prove to be useful now and get better as the tech gets better and users get more skilled.
* Yes there are some truly unhinged boosters and CEOs out there that think they’re going to replace their entire support staff with chat models tomorrow. They’re wrong and the best thing we can do to discourage that is make it painful and hold them to the promises their AI makes, even if it means they need to give away a year of free flights because the chat bot said they would.
** corollary to the above note, plenty of the negative articles / experiences are also just exploring the real limitations and reporting on them. But the internet is the internet and as always it’s the extremes that get amplified and make for the biggest clicks. It is frustrating that even in spaces like HN where you might expect more nuanced discussion a lot of the discussion seems to fall into the extreme booster/detractor headlines and re-hashes of those positions (and strawmen of both) rather than interesting explorations of the extents and limits. I suppose you just can’t really have a good nuanced discussion with you and a thousand of your closest friends.