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Comment by zerosizedweasle | Hacker News Reader

It's not that it doesn't have some use cases that "work", it's that a lot of the output is at "AI slop quality" It's more work to turn it into something good than start from scratch. Look at all those lawyers and judges submitting stuff that has laughable citations on non-existent cases.

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Sure but OP said that it doesn't even work in trivial cases.

Most of the anti-AI people have conceded it sometimes works but they still say it is unreliable or has other problems (copyright etc). However there are still a few that say it doesn't work at all.

If something isn't reliable, I don't think it works at all. I'm trying to work, not play a slot machine.

Are all the tools you use 100% reliable?

Cause I use things like computers, applications, search engines and websites that regularly return the wrong result or fail

I’m not really sure how you envision AI use at your job but AI can be the extremely imperfect tool it is now and also be extremely useful. What part of AI use to you feels like a slot machine?

damn! with this attitude I’d be left using abacus…

It just totally is different from my own personal experience which leads me to believe people just are lamenting poor usage of AI tools which is very understandable.

But nuanced and effective AI use, even today with current models, is incredible for productivity in my experience

I’ve been hacking since the ‘90’s, it is the most remarkable productivity boost we’ve ever had. I feel awful for people that don’t take time to learn…

I expect it makes a big difference what kind of work one does. For me, working with a legacy codebase for firmware, with 1000s of lines of C in each module, AI is very slow (~5-10s response time) and almost none of the code is acceptable.

I do however find it useful for getting an overview of dense chunks of confusing code.

Intellij guesses the functions I want to write plenty. I don't think it's useful to try to use AI for complex or nuanced needs (although it gets close in middling cases). I think it's useful enough.

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