Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

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> ignore it at your own peril

I’m not arguing for ignoring it, my point is different.

> but I think it will profoundly change software development.

The point is that this is said every time, together with “the previous thing to which the exact same praise was given, wasn’t it”. So it’s several rounds of “yes yes, the previous time the criticisms were right, but this time it’s different, trust me”. So everyone else is justified in being skeptical.

No one wants AI to have the problems it has (technical, ethical, and others). If they didn’t it would be better for everyone. Criticism is a way of surfacing issues so they can be fixed.

And sure, I’ll grant that some people want to bash the other side more than they want to arrive at the truth, but those exist in all sides of the argument (probably in roughly equal measure?). So to have a productive conversation we need to go in with the mindset of “we’re on the same side in the goal of not having this suck”.

So what is your thesis? The tools keep getting better, so that’s some kind of gotcha that the emporer has no clothes? Some people prefer the absolute latest and greatest so people on the previous gen were all fakers making Pelican svgs?

Maybe the productive thing is actually to ignore naysayers and goalpost movers and use the tools.

You aren’t enlightened for not liking a tool. “Oh, hammers? Absolutely a bubble, after all they never fixed the hit-your-thumb issue i blogged about, and nail guns just let you hurt your thumbs faster”

No, that is not my thesis, and nowhere in my post do I talk about a dislike for a particular tool or “being enlightened”.

I’ll say it again:

> So to have a productive conversation we need to go in with the mindset of “we’re on the same side in the goal of not having this suck”.

If you’re unwilling to engage in those terms and steel man the argument, I don’t see the point in engaging in conversation. If what you want is to straw man and throw unsubstantiated jabs at someone, there are other communities better suited for that.

> So it’s several rounds of “yes yes, the previous time the criticisms were right, but this time it’s different, trust me”. So everyone else is justified in being skeptical.

True, but even the boy who cried wolf too many times eventually got his sheep eaten by the wolf.

I have my own personal anecdotal benchmarks and I never hyped LLMs before GPT-5.

Things that simply did not work before GPT-5 no matter how many shots I gave them, GPT-5 breezed through.

For me, it would take at least 2 generations of no felt progress in the models to call for diminishing returns, and I'm not seeing them.

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