Comment by ath3nd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ath3nd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

People who get overly excited from every new shining thing also thought that NFTs and Crypto and web3 (whatever the heck it means) are the next coming of Jesus.

If LLM boosters were not so preachy about it, I'd left them off the hook easier. But at the current moment:

- Only study up to date shows experienced developers have 19% less productivity when using LLMs https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

- There are studies showing that using LLMs regularly makes you dumber https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

- The fresh study from MIT shows 95% of AI pilots fail https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

- The companies developing LLMs don't have that part of their business profitable nor any path for profitability. You can see it with Anthropic's constantly changing token limits and plans, and with Microsoft and OpenAI not able to reach a deal https://www.ft.com/content/b81d5fb6-26e9-417a-a0cc-6b6689b70...

- Hell, Sam Altman himself admitted that the current Ai market is just a bubble https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/18/openai-sam-altman-warns-ai-m...

When the LLM cultists wake up during the bubble pop, I wonder what they are gonna jump on next. The world is running out of hype bandwagons to jump on. Maybe... LLM NFTs?

And other people said the Internet was a fad and a bubble and cell phones were just for people who wanted to look important and solar panels would never work.

History is full of people making wrong predictions in both directions about new technology.

As the most obvious parallel, pets.com went bust in the first dot com bust and so did webvan. Today chewy is successfully replicating pets and ordering groceries online for delivery is common.

We might see 1,000 different AI companies go bankrupt in the next few years, but still have AI be a huge chunk of the economy throughout the 2030s.

  > And other people said the Internet was a fad

So what? A broken clock is still right twice a day.

My point is: are there more false positives or false negatives?

You're also cherry picking. Even with AI there are pretty high profile people saying it's a fad as well as pretty high profile people saying it's going to kill us all.

Look at crypto. WAS it hype? Clearly. Don't tell me the price of bitcoin, tell me how the technology actually changed the world. Tell me how it did even a tenth of what the crypto bros promised.

Look at VR. Don't tell me how much you like the latest Quest, tell me how many people are in the metaverse. Tell me how many people even own a VR system. Tell me how the tech achieved a hundredth of what was promised.

Look at Segway. When was the last time you even saw one? Have you ever even used one? How many people even know what they are?

It doesn't matter if your prediction is right if it is 1 in 1000. The Simpson has a better batting record than that and they aren't even trying. What matters is consistent predictions. Even if you believe this time is different I don't know how you can not understand why people are skeptical. In the last decade we watched people become billionaires off of VR and crypto.

Even if AI is different, people are being glamorized for their experience in crypto and VR as reasons for why they'll be successful in AI. If you believe in AI then why wouldn't you see this as a fox in the chicken coup?

Those people didn't make their billions through technology, they made their billions through hype.

You can believe AI is a bubble and full of hype even if you believe the technology has a lot of uses. It's a lot easier to build hype around a grain of truth than a complete fabrication.

If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea.

As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.

  > If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault

Yet if you make a plane and say that you don't need training or a license to operate it and you crash then yes, it is the plane's fault.

  > I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that

Many of these studies show participants self rate as being more productive and getting things done more quickly. In fact, self reporting is well known to be an unreliable metric. People frequently hallucinate. People self report seeing ghosts, aliens, demons, Big Foot, past lives, and all kinds of things that don't exist. Most of these people aren't lying either, they believe the things they report. Most people (probably everybody) have experienced the Mandela Effect in some form or another. Hell, we even know eye witness testimony can be unreliable and even manipulated/influenced.

I've seen plenty around me who claim to be faster with the help of AI. Some are! But most seem to be faster at producing lines of code, not faster at completing the goal. I see a lot more slop and frequently that slop just results in work being outsourced to others. Which, to be fair, does mean they're "faster". But their speed is not on the intended metric.

Maybe I'm the one hallucinating. But maybe you are too. All I know is that when I use AI tools I feel faster but I've also found a get a lot less done.

I don't need to vibe my productivity improvement, I can see it in the 18 projects and 3 scientific papers I've gotten close to complete in the last 2.5 weeks.

Great! If you got more to go off of than vibes then that's a great sign. Tons of people measure their performance in vibes. Frankly, because performance is a really difficult thing to measure.

But we're all just talking to "some random dude on the internet" and that context isn't shared. I'm certain you see both people where AI is helping as well as people where it isn't. Maybe in different proportions than others. But if you're upset that I don't know you, well... that's a bit hard to do in forums like this.

I'm not upset that you don't know me, and I'm fine with people saying AI isn't for them. I even acknowledge that cursor jockeying is only marginally better than hand coding in many cases.

That's a very different situation from having an intensive conversation with an AI to generate a formalized CUE spec with correctness guards, E2E testing specifications, etc, then decomposing that spec into lanes and dispatching a swarm of agents to build it, review work, implement e2e tests/QA, etc. They're both AI, but one is vibe coding and one is autonomous engineering.

Ah, there it is. The excuses, it's scrum all over again.

Mystical practitioners discount the studies done in the open as not fair or not being done right, or the people participating not believing in it hard enough.

My man, 95% of AI pilots failed.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

> As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that

Studies and evidence mean nothing to cults and religious believers, so yeah, I am happy that you feel and believe like you have your personal connection to the higher being that is the LLM. Keep the faith!

I don't care about the failures of others. I am succeeding. A study in 1920 would have proved that a man couldn't run a 4 minute mile, imagine if people had stopped trying.

You are using LLMs to do your work for you. The analogy with runners who actually trained to improve is hilarious.

You just described getting into a car and letting it "run" the sub 4 minute mile for you. Great success!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com