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Comment by budsniffer952 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

He's on to us, boys! Call in a code 43.

(Sorry, I'm in a crappy mood, but what on Earth are we supposed to take away from this? Everyone who disagrees with you is secretly an idiot, or worse, they're smart enough to know they're idiots but too proud to admit it?)

On a more helpful note, I think your "confusion" if honest can probably be resolved by realizing that "skeptics" are not a monolith.

I think it's the same thing as it was with googling. "Oh you're such a wizard problem solver, how did you fix my printer??" "I just typed the most important words about the problem as you told it to me, the printer's model number and 'solution' and a forum link was on the first page, searched the page for 'solved' and followed the 3 simple steps of which buttons to press."

Then you saw how other people used Google, by filling the search bar with utterly irrelevant words, missing the one key word that's most important to what they are trying to do, then not be able to evaluate the returned search results and triage for which is most "solution-shaped", and they get drawn into wrong search hits, reading a clearly irrelevant page instead of quickly backing out to the search results page to try another page etc.

Or see how people couldn't formulate questions on StackOverflow, other than dumping a huge code chunk and saying "it doesn't work".

Now, AI makes these easier. You can now really just type natural language into the textbox, not just key words, you don't have to know about quote marks and plus signs etc. You can paste the code and say it doesn't work, and the AI just might actually spot a bug.

But having general problem solving common sense will still give you very good dividends.

This is becoming such a common statement on here it’s almost copy pasta.

Maybe the answer is more along the lines of “people are using them for different things and getting different results”?

Why does it have to be snark and “these people must be stupid”

Or even that people are using them for the same things, but there is a chaotic element to how it works, and people are getting different outcomes due to small differences that we humans don't think ought to matter.

It's because in many cases it exactly sounds like what happened. They asked something one shot, then seeing that the AI didn't quite solve the same task that the prompter had in mind, he just closes it and decides that AI is stupid and can't even do the task and it's all hype. I say, "what you just told me right now, did you even try typing that into the chat with the AI?", and they just stare at me. You have to iterate! You have to provide context, you have to provide access to the tools you also use to do your job.

The other day someone complained here on HN that AI failed to optimize his code speed. Turns out he just pasted in the code, didn't use an agentic harness with end-to-end benchmarking ability for the model to ground its changes in and to hill-climb on. But even as a human you need to test your hypotheses and measure things, and sometimes something you thought would help actually makes it slower.

It happens over and over, but it's no skin off my nose. If they don't want to learn to use it, it's on them.

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