Yeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.
Your analysis by account age might be telling
Your analysis by account age might be telling
No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.
Edit: ok, i guess this account is from 2024, but been around a while. I guess can’t defend myself like this :)
Obviously, in my opinion, based on reporting of truthfulness someone like Sam Altman would not be entirely opposed to astroturfing here.
But people should probably appreciate at the least running free local software that has a few tricks up its sleeve.
LLMs in 2023, from what I remember, were slightly better auto complete. It's pretty different now.
The time I previously spent writing code is now spent reviewing code and giving feedback so that it gets written differently if don't like it.
The skills required have changed completely imo. You need to be able to context switch efficiently and review "better". Also identify which tasks require lots of supervision of what the AI generates and which don't.
I think AI is here to stay. Open models keep the costs at a certain level. If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost. Even if models never improve beyond today, the open ones are good enough at this point to provide immense value.
Just my opinion of course.
I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR. Instead of reading PRs, we're all telling the AI to do more work to create even more PRs. It's not a good way forward, and I'm looking for another job.
>If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost.
To self-host a frontier-adjacent model at speed comparable to a commercial API, you're looking at roughly $250k-500k to buy or $20-35k/month to rent the GPUs. And that's only enough to operate at current "frontier" model capability, and buying also doesn't include the massive amounts of electricity it will cost every month to run that hardware. Admittedly I used AI to come up with those figures, so take it with a grain of salt, but judging from how much these AI companies are spending, it tracks that they are consuming massive amounts of money on a per-user basis just to gain market share. I've tried to self-host AI and it sucks. I wouldn't use it for coding.
>I think AI is here to stay.
Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.
That sucks, may as well auto approve with a script.
> Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.
You can go on open router and see what 3rd parties are hosting open models for. There are some pretty capable models (not frontier, but probably opus 4.5 level) for pretty cheap.
Those companies have no incentive to lose money. They are nameless, they are making a profit just providing the service, and it's cheaper than the frontier models of today.
So I think we have a pretty good idea about what the price can be, even without VC subsidizing.
The AI companies are doing the exact same thing - operating at massive losses (far more than Uber ever did, to an extreme extent), trying to "win" the AI arms race, playing a game of chicken with their competitors.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151732
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151719
Multiple comments made by this account in a timeframe I at least would personally have a hard time reading the comment I’m responding to and then and replying to this quickly, and from an account made in 2025.
Kind of making the point for the people you disagree with, assuming you are an actual human and not a bot tasked with pushing a narrative.
Sure, it's obvious to all how the GP comment reads, just as it's obvious to all how this rapid defensiveness appears. <shrug>