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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.

MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.

Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.

I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.

Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.

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I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.

Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?

I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.

It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"

Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.

But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.

All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.

> write an article dismissing ai

> usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini

the jokes write themselves

That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.

As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.

Have you tried a coding agent such as claude code or codex?

Yes. And, again, they look amazing and make you feel like you're 10x.

But then I look at the code quality, hideous mistakes, blatant footguns, and misunderstood requirements and realise it is all a sham.

I know, I know. I'm holding it wrong. I need to use another model. I have to write a different Soul.md. I need to have true faith. Just one more pull on the slot machine, that'll fix it.

The web? GLP-1s? 5G? The newton was mega-hyped, failed but Apple came back with the iPhone. All the dot com failures that eventually became viable businesses (so viable in-fact that sfgate has to reach back 26 years to write their stinkpiece [1])

Hype is often early, in 10-20 years we'll start seeing the value as the rest of the world catches up

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/rise-fall-bay-area-start...

Unrelated to the conversation but:

> Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.

I like that, going to use it as the motivation to get some things out of my own head.

Yes! More blogging :-)

Why do you think that solar+battery technology or MRNA vaccines haven't been written about in excited, hype-filled ways? If a technology is successful, then looking at past accounts of that technology and why it will change the world don't come across to you reading it now as hype, they come across as a description of something normal about the world.

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