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Comment by rishabhaiover | Hacker News Reader

A recent one is the RCA of a hang during PostgreSQL installation because of an unimplemented syscall (I work at a lab that deals with secure OS and sandboxes). If the search of the RCA was left to me, I would have spent 2-3 weeks sifting through the shared memory implementation within PostgeSQL but it only took me a night with the help of Opus 4.5.

To me, that's intelligence and a measurable direct benefit of the tool.

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By that example, PostgreSQL itself is a form of intelligence relative to a physical filing system. It doesn't seem like your working definition of intelligence has a large overlap with a layman's conception of the word.

Plus by that example, computers have always been intelligent considering that they were created to, well, compute things several orders of magnitude faster than even the smartest human can do by hand.

You do realize that you need a human, a "SWE", to do the task that I just described? A computer can't do it.

You had a human to prompt the LLM to do the RCA, didn't you?

Your argument is not meant to tackle my core claim, it is to poke pedantic holes. What a waste of my time.

The argument I and others here are making is that what you call "intelligent" is a property that also other tools exhibit which are rarely called "intelligent". You can certainly do that, but that does not prove us wrong (and also doesn't fit what most people would consider "intelligence", as fuzzy as that concept might be).

I agree, thanks for clearing it up.

I use a compiler daily. It consumes C++ source files and emits machine code within seconds. Doing that myself would take months.

I just did my taxes using a sophisticated spreadsheet. Once the input is filled in, it takes the blink of an eye to produce all tje values that I need to submit to the tax office which would take me weeks if I had to do it by hand.

Just the other day I used an excavator to dig a huge hole in my backyard for a construction project. Took 3 hours. Doing it by hand would have taken weeks.

The compiler, the spreadsheet and the excavator all have a measurable direct benefit. I wouldn't call any of them "intelligent".

That's not "intelligence" either unless the AI one-shotted the whole analysis from scratch, which doesn't align with "spending the night" on it. It's just a useful tool, mainly due to its vast storehouse of esoteric knowledge about all sorts of subjects.

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