alt Hacker News> Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving.
Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding. Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits. We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics.
It can one shot a web frontend, just like v0 could in 2023. But that's still about all I've seen it work on.
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Sure, but think about what it's replacing.
If you hired a human, it will cost you thousands a week. Humans will also fail at basic tasks, get stuck in useless loops, and you still have to pay them for all that time.
For that matter, even if I'm not hiring anyone, I will still get stuck on projects and burn through the finite number of hours I have on this planet trying to figure stuff out and being wrong for a lot of it.
It's not perfect yet, but these coding models, in my mind, have gotten pretty good if you're specific about the requirements, and even if it misfires fairly often, they can still be useful, even if they're not perfect.
I've made this analogy before, but to me they're like really eager-to-please interns; not necessarily perfect, and there's even a fairly high risk you'll have to redo a lot of their work, but they can still be useful.
>Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding
I haven't heard that at all. I hear about models that come out and are a bit better. And other people saying they suck.
>Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits.
Is it bringing you any value? I find it speeds things up a LOT.
> We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics.
If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them.
The rest of us learn how to be productive with them despite these problems.
There’s a subtle point a moment when you HAVE to take the driver wheel from the AI. All issues I see are from people insisting to use far beyond the point it stops being useful.
It is a helper, a partner, it is still not ready go the last mile
You’re doing exactly the thing that the parent commenter pointed out: Complaining that they’re not perfect yet as if that’s damning evidence of failure.
We all know LLMs get stuck. We know they hallucinate. We know they get things wrong. We know they get stuck in loops.
There are two types of people: The first group learns to work within these limits and adapt to using them where they’re helpful while writing the code when they’re not.
The second group gets frustrated every time it doesn’t one-shot their prompt and declares it all a big farce. Meanwhile the rest of us are out here having fun with these tools, however limited they are.