I’ve noticed this too. I’ve seen a ton ai defenders and hype people here. It’s embarrassing.
If you did not perceive a step change in model capabilities in late 2025, it's possible you are working on problems that are just too hard or not well aligned (e.g., arts and crafts). If you are working on software and need to move the occasional mountain, it's really hard to argue with the capabilities of contemporary models and harnesses.
This space is evolving rapidly. Faster in some areas than others, but you should still keep an open mind and adapt to the new realities as they emerge. Wishing for a thing to fail can blind you to more opportunities than you would probably be willing to reject if they were presented directly.
The commenters refer to the slightest skepticism or criticisms of "AI" hype as an argument that "AI is useless"
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160303181716/http://web.uvic.c...
Rejecting exaggerated claims doesn't mean that someone is not seeing any value.
> It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.
The things some people say, how they talk about "outraged AI critics" what they would prefer those to be, would be fucking stupid even in first grade.
These, and things like "AI-generated news sites to attack critics" really speak for themselves. There is something worth really calling out here, and it fell out naturally.
I say this as someone that uses LLMs on a daily basis. It is a moderately useful tool for software development, but it was already useful in January 2025 (to pick a random date). Check what models were available by then. There were improvements since them, but they were mostly marginal.
The thing is, ever since ChatGPT 4 days there are people claiming on a daily basis exactly what you are claiming now, and it feels pretty silly. Sometimes it's hard to not imagine the accounts breathlessly claiming 100x productivity as bots.
In other words, I presume that if you are 100x more productive now, you were a 1/100x developer before LLMs. I actually question the capabilities of anyone making claims like that.
If you didn't notice a difference between AI assisted coding in Jan 2025 and now beyond "marginal" improvements... well to be frank I don't think you've really been paying very close attention. It's a combination of the way we interact with the models and the models themselves, and this really did get much more effective in late 2025.
You can say the model improvements in that year were incremental, but the degree to which the overall capabilities have changed and what that means for software development is more than the sum of those parts.
> If you didn't notice a difference between AI assisted coding in Jan 2025 and now beyond "marginal" improvements... well to be frank I don't think you've really been paying very close attention.
Those are the same claims, just phrased differently. If the first is a bogeyman, so is the second.
And of course, if someone disagrees that the improvements since 2025 were not dramatic, they can only possibly not be paying attention. Except we have been seeing the same claims on a daily basis for years.
It’s all influencer and hustle culture now. The joy of technical creation and understanding has evaporated from the mainstream in mere months. We’re surrounded by AI meat puppets wearing the masks of engineers.
LLMs are clearly world changing technology. I'm no fan of the big corporations but I'm very excited to see the models themselves develop. I'm looking forward to the day I can self host these things.
The imbalance is what is off.
My life is affected for better or worse because of AI - I’m forced to use it at my day job as an R&D. It is perfectly rational and expected and preferable for AI to be the front news in a technology forum.
You probably don’t like AI but that is completely different from being affected by it.
Suffice it to say that HN is not well-suited for people obsessing over a pet topic, like you seem to be. Many of us have nothing against LLMs, and are embarrassed by your passionate and fruitless defense of the technology. If AI is so great, go make a name for yourself with it and stop bothering us for attention. Go on, stop wasting your valuable time and change humanity. We'll wait.
In a technology forum where we speak about technology, a new technology significantly changed our way of working - obviously it is expected that people speak about it.
I think you are unable to cope with AI encroaching your life and you are hiding away from it.
And you think people speaking about LLMs are naive or something? I think you haven’t come to terms with it. Or you have but you want to not speak about it because you don’t like it?
That would be the case if you were doing anything impressive or noteworthy with it. Can you show me your AI magnum opus, or are you also struggling to adopt it?
> And you think people speaking about LLMs are naive or something?
No, just you. Your rhetoric is entirely emotional and relies on authority that you haven't earned as a developer. You've neglected the logical appeal of your argument so I'm laughing at your inability to highlight AI's most influential contributions to humanity. Relative to actual hard-tech, it's a nothingburger sandwich.
My job has completely transformed because of AI.
> so I'm laughing at your inability to highlight AI's most influential contributions to humanity
AI recently helped solve open problems in mathematics that would have normally been awarded a Fields medal for.
You think it’s a nothingburger when a fields medalist has said that it is reshaping mathematics, what does that say about your ability to grasp the importance of it?
I don't what your life is like, but I don't salivate with disbelief when various conjectures are disproved. It's quite literally a waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence to read through them, because it's an expected part of the development pipeline for proofs. We see results like this from children and undergraduates, I'm not really blown away by most LLM mathematics.
Got any other examples?
Do you first agree on this?
llama.cpp has gotten so good that you can really get optimized performance with a few flags or none at all, and serve any model on-demand. Spend $45 to have your own GLM 5.2 machine for an hour. If you can’t manage full utilization you’d get 33.2M tokens, retailing for $128.
It takes some smarts to use dumb models, but renting time for frontier tokens is easy math. Vast also lets you run on spot which is great for training or agents with harnesses that can accommodate uncertain model availability.
It should really not surprise you that Hacker News, a community with an extremely technical audience, is interested in a bleeding edge technical tool that is literally completely reshaping the industry.
The primary difference is that hypebros brag about incoming promised apocalypse, 40% unemployment, economy ruled by unaccountable monopolies and permanent underclass. Luddites think that such development would be a bad thing.
I dont think apocalypse will happen, but I do think AI companies are massive assholes who deserves all the pushback they can get for the way they doom hype themselves up.