alt Hacker NewsMy anxiety about falling behind with AI plummeted after I realized many of these tweets are overblown in this way. I use AI every day, how is everyone getting more spectacular results than me? Turns out: they exaggerate.
Here are several real stories I dug into:
"My brick-and-mortar business wouldn't even exist without AI" --> meant they used Claude to help them search for lawyers in their local area and summarize permits they needed
"I'm now doing the work of 10 product managers" --> actually meant they create draft PRD's. Did not mention firing 10 PMs
"I launched an entire product line this weekend" --> meant they created a website with a sign up, and it shows them a single javascript page, no customers
"I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF
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> "I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF
There was a story years ago about someone who made hundreds of novels on Amazon, in aggregate they pulled in a decent penny. I wonder if someone's doing the same but with ChatGPT instead.
People say outrageous things when they’re follower farming.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really get you that much if you get 70% of the way there on your initial prompt (which you probably spent some time discussing, thinking through, clarifying requirements on). Paid, deliverable work is expected to involve validation, accountability, security, reliability, etc.
Taking that 70% solution and adding these things is harder than if a human got you 70% there, because the mistakes LLMs make are designed to look right, while being wrong in ways a sane human would never be. This makes their mistakes easy to overlook, requiring more careful line-by-line review in any domain where people are paying you. They also duplicate code and are super verbose, so they produce a ton tech debt -> more tokens for future agents to clog their contexts with.
I like using them, they have real value when used correctly, but I'm skeptical that this value is going to translate to massive real business value in the next few years, especially when you weigh that with the risk and tech debt that comes along with it.
“I used AI to make a super profitable stock trading bot” —-> using fake money with historical data
“I used AI to make an entire NES emulator in an afternoon!” —-> a project that has been done hundreds of times and posted all over github with plenty of references
I actually read through the logs and the code in the rare instances someone actually posts their prompts and the generated output. If I'm being overly cynical about the tech, I want to know.
The last one I did it on was breathlessly touted as "I used [LLM] to do some advanced digital forensics!"
Dawg. The LLM grepped for a single keyword you gave it and then faffed about putting it into json several times before throwing it away and generating some markdown instead. When you told it the result was bad, it grepped for a second word and did the process again.
It looks impressive with all these json files and bash scripts flying by, but what it actually did was turn a single word grep into blog post markdown and you still had to help it.
Some of you have never been on enterprise software sales calls and it shows.
"I used AI to write a GPU-only MoE forward and backward pass to supplement the manual implementation in PyTorch that only supported a few specific GPUs" -> https://github.com/lostmsu/grouped_mm_bf16 100% vibe coded.
Pretty much every x non-political/celeb account with 5K followers+ is a paid influencer shill lol.
Welcome to the internet
Getting viral on X is the current replacement for selling courses for {daytrading,amazon FBA,crypto}.
The content of the tweets isn't the thing.. bull-posting or invoking Cunningham's Law is. X is the destination for formula posting and some of those blue checkmarks are getting "reach" rev share kickbacks.