Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barathkanna | Hacker News Reader

Interesting take. His argument is basically that LLMs have hit their architectural ceiling and the industry is running on hype and unsustainable economics. I’m not fully convinced, but the points about rising costs and diminishing returns are worth paying attention to. The gap between what these models can actually do and what they’re marketed as might become a real problem if progress slows.

View on HN

I think the unsustainably cheap consumer-facing AI products are the spoonful of sugar getting us to swallow a technology that will almost entirely be used to make agents that justify mass layoffs.

And surveil and rat on us, sometimes incorrectly.

Yeah that’s a good point. I’m always astonished that people give anything even vaguely personal to a “free” saas service, but boy do they ever. Not that payments stop them but at least the incentives are a little different.

The existence of an AI hype train doesn’t mean there isn’t a productive AI no-hype train.

Context: I have been writing software for 30 years. I taught myself assembly language and hacked games/apps as a kid, and have been a professional developer for 20 years. I’m not a noob.

I’m currently building a real-time research and alerting side project using a little army of assistant AI developers. Given a choice, I would never go back to how I developed software before this. That isn’t my mind poisoned by hype and marketing.

If you're using cloud AI assistants, they're being heavily discounted to you by investors, for now. Those discounts won't exist forever.

I think we are not even close to using the potential of current LLMs. Even if capabilities of LLMs would not improve, we will see better performance on the software and hardware side. It is no longer a question of "if", but of "when" there will be a Babelfish like device available. And this is only one obvious application, I am 100% sure that people are still finding useful new applications of AI every day.

However, there is a real risk that AI stocks will crash and pull the entire market down, just like it happened in 2000 with the dotcom bubble. But did we see an internet or dotcom winter after 2000? No, everybody kept using the Internet, Windows, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and all the other "useless crap". Only the stock market froze over for a few years and previously overhyped companies had a hard time, but given the exaggeration before 2000 this was not really a surprise.

What will happen is that the hype train will stop or slow down, and people will no longer get thousands, millions, billions, or trillions in funding just because they slap "AI" to their otherwise worthless project. Whoever is currently working on such a project should enjoy the time while it lasts - and rest assured that it will not last forever.

claude code + opus4.5 does exactly what it says on the box.

Today I pasted a screenshot of frontend dropdown menu with a prompt "add a an option here to clear the query cache". Claude found the relevant frontend files, figured out the appropriate backend routes / controllers to edit, and submitted a PR.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com