Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.

Unlike the author, I'm an LLM optimist; but this take doesn't make sense to me. The thing you show cannot be "hey look at this LLM-based workflow, that's so much better than last year".

Where is the big browser, operating system, or other piece of work that has been able to quickly compete with the existing entries in the market due to LLMs?

The only one that I can think of off the top of my head is the rewrite of Bun in Rust. I think the fact that Claude Code runs on millions of devices on top of that rewrite is the sort of impressive demonstration that would prove that LLMs have lasting, systemic effects -- but it is telling that the only one I can think of was made by the extremely well funded lab that also happens to build the LLM.

It's worth noting that the bun rewrite of rust is still not actually released to users, and has run to a total cost north of a million dollars now (factoring in tokens and CI costs)

It should still be taken with a grain of salt IMO

I thought they'd switched Claude Code over to the rust branch already. Hardly a shining example but there it is.

> Where is the big browser, operating system, or other piece of work that has been able to quickly compete with the existing entries in the market due to LLMs?

Why would it "quickly compete"? What if AI gives you a 100x leverage but not a 100000x leverage?

With the 100000x leverage, you could spin up a full browser and compete, but not with the 100x. With 100x, you could use fewer people or do it in less time, but the amount of effort that goes into browsers still doesn't make it "an afternoon for one person".

I think it's undeniable that an excavator is ridiculously more powerful than a human at digging holes. Let's say it's 100x more efficient.

But if you had 1000 people work on a big hole every day for 5 years, the excavator wouldn't manage to do the same in a day, but it would allow you to do the same with 10 people and 10 excavators in 5 years, or with 50 people and 50 excavators in one year.

I don't think it scales linearly the more complexity grows, but "it hasn't been done, therefore it isn't possible" seems wrong. Maybe the big labs could build a browser, but they'd much rather spend the attention of 50 engineers on something else.

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