alt Hacker NewsPlease stop the AI confidence theater
Comments
The article has solid observations, but I would correct one important thing. It's not AI confidence, it's AI psychosis.
A lot of people I know are forced to use AI at work. They universally tell me that their coworkers generate awful PRs with bugs, nonsensical code and fake unit tests. But they also universally tell me that they are different, have special workflows and prompts that create good code.
The psychology behind this is obvious. Hype and the literal threat of being fired forces everyone to develop coping mechanisms. Bragging about your own adaptability is one of those mechanisms. Unfortunately, the scale and intensity of this and the fact that the mechanism is clearly weaponized for marketing means we're living in an increasingly deranged society.
My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right.
While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles a broad range of work across literally any surface you interact with today. Use voice mode & mobile app for remote control to seriously watch the friction break down.
Is it always perfect? Maybe not - but for a dramatically increasingly slate of tasks it's becoming a no brainer to offload the busywork and raise the bar on what a single person can do.
It's natural to have hype when you see where this already and where it's going.
>Show me something truly life changing.
i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing", so i find it a bit weird to hold ai up to that standard.
as a note, i found this particularly funny:
"It’s doing more harm than good." followed immediately by "This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale."
She touches on the main problem but most everyone here seems to miss.
Marketers exist because every company, every VC, and every stock holder (Wall St. and every person that has money invested for retirement or to pay for their kids college tuition, etc), demands perpetual growth. Till this changes, and it won't any time soon, marketers will exist.
No one is working on changing that. Anyone?
Startups are the worst. No one is hiring a marketer at a startup to drive 25% yearly revenue growth, the expectation is 10X or 100X. How is that supposed to happen without pushing advertising, hard?
We can blame the marketers, but this is structural problem.
As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com .
Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights).
----
My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er).
I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin.
Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?
> Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
If only journalists would ask similar questions to corporations. "Ok, you made your entire engineering department agentic. Show me how exactly that contributed positively to your bottom line"
Can someone explain to me:
I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is).
To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.
"Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH."
Did they tell it to write it differently? You can literally make it sound like a pirate if you want. You can also make it be conservative, non-hype. Just ask.
There is a lot of demand for articles like this. The sort of revenge of the humans.
I do think a small number of people have totally transformed themselves and their business using AI. But that doesn't overlap with the people who are loudest about it on LinkedIn, X, and other channels.
Hard agree with the post overall, especially on LinkedIn and X. On Bluesky at least there's not nearly as much of this crap, but it's a small community of practitioners and not flooded with sellers and resellers peddling some AI products.
For me, the big win is that it's very cheap to experiment with several approaches to something and pick what feels like a good winner. For UX work this is a boon because it shifts the bottleneck to evaluating designs, which is where the bottleneck should be. It has historically not been there.
Ok I'll take the bait.
> Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day.
Looks like OP works at dropbox. Dropbox is not an AI company. It's not remotely one.
Why does this matter? Because it undermines the entire point of the post. Later:
> And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.
AI confidence theater for me, but not for thee.
My broader team organized a 2 day hackathon and created teams of 4 each with a mix of engineers, designers, data scientists, admin, localization, and project managers from across the team and gave us 5 pain points our product was experiencing and let us loose. The amount of leverage AI tools give small interdisciplinary teams to apply their existing skill sets is kind of crazy. Lots of very impressive demos, several of which were nearly shippable and provided real value.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
- I no longer look at log files. If there's an MCP that gets access, I don't even download them
- I don't look up implementation details, just say "I want this bit to do X". In general, I don't concern myself with technical details anymore
- I don't try to debug
The way in which these examples are life changing, is that I now solve abstract problems, not technical ones. Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow, but a road sweeper could also do theirs if the sweeping trucks went away too.
> Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself.
Were it so, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they hurt others, too.
I’ve started blogging about my experience with AI. I’m not special, my workflow isn’t supercharged. I’ve just started writing about a guy(me) interfacing with these tools as if I was leaning any technology like a programming language or a new cloud tool.
And I agree with the authors thesis that the hype is actively harmful. Specifically (and this is a confession not a judgement) if you’re usage of AI is limited to mindlessly vibe coding tools all day long, your missing the actual process of just fumbling through the awkward stage of being consciously ineffective, so you can break through to eventual productivity. And the real productivity probably isn’t as exciting as the game or app you one shotted for fun.
Relax, AI is going to kill education and eliminate jobs, and changing lives, but you have to be patient. Let it cook.
> Marketing, Finance, and HR
Having this hype ingested fully by finance is lethal. Ive witnessed CFOs fully believing a lot of the hype and that directly leads to massive chopping of random teams on a spreadsheet with 'use ai' directives.
What a no-content, useless (and sponsored) post. I am tired of the “AI isn’t changing anything” theater when my job went from manually writing code to Claude writing 100% of my code in less than a year.
> It used to be that if someone started talking about vector databases, MCP, agents, memory, or RAG you
I find it hard to take seriously, if someone talks about MCP and "it used to be" in the same sentense. This protocol is not even 2 years old!
As much as I grew up with and lived my useful working years around computers, if they went away tomorrow, there'd be a period of adjustment, and then I'd happily up my amateur game with power tools and automobiles. I have a need to tinker and build, but there are many ways to satisfy it.
That said, as long as there's still technology, it's awfully nice and a bit gamechanging to have an effective junior engineer who follows orders and who's happy to wade through stack overflow and customize solutions for my problems. It's not that I couldn't do it myself, it's that doing so for one shot weird config issues and arbitrary UI/OS changes sucks the very life blood out of my soul.
AI is a tool, an amazing tool IMO, your own personalized philosophical zombie ready to do your bidding. Social media and mobile devices OTOH, they both suck the life out of me moreso than chasing config issues. Unfortunately, some of the best sources of info about some of my interests are trapped on FB in a swamp of rage bait, sigh.
Marketing has always been about overpromising and underdelivering, no? OK, show me when it wasn't. And if overpromising on hot tickets like the AGI and FSD didn't get people the big bucks and engagement, maybe they'd dial it back a notch, but that's just not how it's played out so far. See the current crop of contenders to disrupt the leading maker of AI HW with their noisemaking CEOs for the evidence thereof.
I can e-mail wise now with my bill and pay it. it's AWESOME. I've used a bill that was in Hungarian for a EUR account in Austria. No issue.
My swiss banks won't be able to do this in the next 5 years.
I am not affiliated with wise, just a happy user.
Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.
It's somewhat ironic coming from someone that openly states they use AI all day, everyday. Regardless, the message is correct. I don't think that people have become dumber over the last 15 years. At large, they were always dumb. People got access to social media which exposed their stupidity and that was seen as a success(which I still find baffling). Until it wasn't: milking the influencer economy only gets you so far. The new wave is people who believe that slopping something together is them doing the work and that they are the smart ones. In practice, I constantly see people genuinely believing they know what they are doing while some slop machine floods their screens with text. Just go over some "I vibe coded this thing in a weekend", run some basic security tests on it and the results are almost always frightening. All of this is the whole plot of Idiocracy (holy shit, that movie was ahead of it's time and optimistic af for saying that was 500 years away). Slop that appears to work on the surface is quickly becoming the single point of failure for entire industries. And honestly, I am all for it: if the house has to burn down for things to get better, let it burn.
>And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude.
This alone will improve the lives of so many people. The real issue with AI commentary is that everyone is guilty of the hedonistic treadmill. We constantly need it to do more and more to get that sense of awe.
AI is like a therapist, it will only change your life if you want to change. I set up python scripts at work to automatically triage, assign and if straightforward fix bugs assigned to me so I have time for complex feature work. At home, I have a script that sends me daily invites to local events based on my interests. Also put together a Japanese voice tutor powered by several local models, can have long free form conversations to learn the language. Planning to go on a long trip around less visited corners of Japan once I feel I can enjoy conversations with locals. Speaking of trips, on my last vacation I had a coding agent find flights/hotels/activities for me using APIs and browser control and just clicked buy buttons. Agent then read my inbox for booking confirmations and added itenary to my Google calendar to stay organized. All in all pretty awesome. But you do have to explain what you want from AI in some detail, it can't decide how you want to live for you.
Please stop this linkedin relatability theater.
> But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
Descript. I edit video for work and I am not ever going back to manually seeking to edit video. I am about 8x faster with Descript.
This isn’t even a raw praise post: Descript is wildly unstable and shitty at times but I STILL won’t use anything that doesn’t have transcription-based editing.
But but but... 1000x engineer who can out compete your 50 person startup with their agent flow.
AI can be used in classification, extraction, and synthesis quite effectively. Not to speak of code generation, or like the author says, for research and strategy.
In enterprise workflows these are essentially super generalizable NLP and CV models that can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost.
This is not what the tech bros promised but it’s still pretty damn good!
> Show me something truly life changing
Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?
The bullshit will continue until the grifters move on to something else. If you can figure out what that is, you'll make some serious bank!
Remember, folks, AI is mainly just statistics. You know, as in what comes after "lies" and "damned lies".
I honestly believe that folks confuse disappointment with an inability to notice their own window for what should be considered impressive continues to shift further into legitimate sci-fi territory.
Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.
> Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater?
But then how will the investors justify having poured over a Trillion USD into AI?
Confidence theater will continue until morale improves.
> AI Confidence Theater
That's a benign term for it. Actually, it's lies, damn lies, and fucking god-damn lies. It's the super-mega-overdrive version of every principle that ads are based on. Like they are afraid we still haven't understood what makes ads tick, so they give us the practical in-your-face demo. And they were successful. I'm not believing a single word anyone remotely related to that business says anymore.
People seem to think the world works like this: there’s an innovation committee and they plan innovations. Then they get the approval from the masses democratically. And it would involve debates and the innovation is promoted only until we convince everyone. And then we would have randomised controlled trials applied everywhere to prove adoption confidence.
Hilarious! People think we are in a socialist economy lol.
No: you don't need the broad masses for any confidence. Put your product to the free market and judge whether people like it. That's how it should work and that's how it always works. No one has to convince Jane Doe that AI enhances productivity by 20% and get her approval before deploying data centers.
> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic.
Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white text into resume PDFs to cheat AI resume filters" is reality, not just a meme.
> What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic.
Meetings themselves and emails have gone the full bullshit circle. AI agents fluff up prompts into Powerpoint slides so incoherent everyone forced to sit through it eventually nods off and reads the AI summary later on. For emails, similarly AI agents fluff up prompts, send it over the wire, only for another AI agent to distill it back into something consumable by a human. Humans creating engaging content by hand seems to be a lost art these days.
Frankly... I can only recommend, leave for some sort of job that is not corporate BS or can otherwise be replaced by a human. Learn a classic trade, to operate heavy machinery or whatever else. Maybe join a firefighter or EMS corps, saving lives is an experience of its own class. Anything IT or corporate is a dead end.
First, you can see at the end of the day with your eyes what you have accomplished (which is way better for your mental health), second, it will take quite some time until there's a robot physically capable of the required dexterity to pull and wire cable and an AI capable enough to coordinate that robot, or find and clean a clog in 100 meters of sewer line. Once AI is good enough to replace a clogged shitter... invest in a good gun and target practice, because the rate things are going, society will break down at that point.
Or, move towards the countryside and raise some chicken, goats or whatever. A ton of tech people have done so in the last years, fed up with the bullshit.
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Sounds funny coming from someone at Lovable!
It's an interesting illustration of the state of the AI market that immediately after arguing that AI cannot do anything complex...we have an ad arguing that AI can actually do those things. Even the people telling you that AI is a hype cycle buy into the hype cycle.
First, we have this section:
But the noise continues on volume 11/10. So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Then immediately after:
This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.
(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)
What these discussions frequently seem to miss, is discussing the exact method, tool and model they're using.
> Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
I'm not doubting the author this is their experience, but is this with the trash free/instant ChatGPT or something else? If even "Thinking" was working like that, together with proper prompting, then I'd be surprised by the author's experience.
But until people start showing exact examples and exactly what they're using, all the navel-gazing around this, positive, negative or neutral, will all just be empty words we can't really know what to do with.
As someone who has worked closely to the marketing space, there’s a saying that goes something like: ‘then the marketers found about it and ruin everything’. Quick example: when amazon launched kindle self publishing, there was a golden age where wannabe writers could self-publish their books, and let the market dictate what survived and became successful. Eventually, some people got good money out of it. Then marketers found out about it. They realized they could game the system by hiring ghost writers to pump out low quality ebooks to fill every single niche. Then they found out how to game the reviews, even going as far as paying people to leave 5 star reviews on competitors to get amazon to flag the competitors for buying reviews! Forward a few years, and no matter what you search for, there’s a million low quality books fir a couple high quality high effort books who get lost in the sea of garbage. AI just made that problem 100x worse. The same thing is happening with higher effort content creation. These same mindless marketers found out how to exploit video creation, social media marketing, etc. so, the appeal this article is making for people to stop the hype will not be listen to, because once marketers find about something where there’s money to be made, they will absolutely find a way to go scorched earth on it