I'm vibe coding now, after work. I am able to much more quickly explore the landscape of a problem, get into and out of dead ends in minutes instead of wasting an evening. At some point I need to go in and fix, but the benefit of the tool is there. It is like a electric screwdriver vs. normal one. Sometimes the normal one can do things the electric can't, but hell if you get an IKEA deliver you want the electric one.

It's incredible that on Hacker News we still encounter posts by people who will or cannot differentiate mathematics from magic.

>I can run claude code on my laptop with an instruction like "fix the sound card on this laptop" and it will analyze what my current settings are, determine what might be wrong, devise tests to have me gather information it can't gather itself, run commands to probe hardware for it's capabilities, and finally offer a menu of solutions, give the commands to implement the solution, and finally test that the solution works perfectly. Can you do that?

Yes, I have worked in small enough companies in which the developers just end up becoming the default IT help desk. I never had any formal training in IT, but most of that kind of IT work can be accomplished with decent enough Google skills. In a way, it worked the same as you and the LLM. I would go poking through settings, run tests to gather info, run commands, and overall just keep trying different solutions until either one worked or it became reasonable to give up. I'm sure many people here have had similar experiences doing the same thing in their own families. I'm not too impressed with an LLM doing that. In this example, it's functionally just improving people's Googling skills.

It is the imitation of intelligence.

It works because people have answered similar questions a million times on the internet and the LLMs are trained on it.

So it will work for a while. When the human generated stuff stops appearing online, then LLMs ll quickly fall in usefulness.

But that is enough time for the people who might think that it going to last for ever to make huge investments into it, and the AI companies to get away with the loot.

Actually it is the best kind of scam...

EDIT: Another thought. Thus it seems that AI companies actually have an incentive to hinder developements, because new things mean that their model is less useful. With the widespread dependence on AI, they might even get away with manipulating the population to stagnate.

There are dozens of definitions of "intelligence", we can't even agree what intelligence means in humans, never mind elsewhere. So yes, by some subset of definitions it is intelligent.

But by some subset of definitions my calculator is intelligent. By some subset of definitions a mouse is intelligent. And, more interestingly, by some subset of definitions a mouse is far more intelligent than an LLM.

I also cannot calculate the square root of 472629462.

My pocket calculator is not intelligent. Nor are LLMs.

I did that when I was 14 because I had no other choice, damn you SoundBlaster! I didn't get any menu but I got sound in the end.

I don't think conflating intelligence with "what a computer can do" makes much sense though. I can't calculate the X digit of PI in less than Z, I'm still intelligent (or I pretend to be).

But the question is not about intelligence, it's a red herring, it's just about utility and they (LLM's) are useful.

Everything is magic when you don't understand how things work.

[dead]

In a way LLMs are intelligence tests indeed.