My view, as someone who was flat out "AI is a hype scam" up until around Jan this year. It was hype for a while, and forms of it are still very much hype, but the reality is catching up with the hype.
I.e the reality has so far been ~2 years behind the hype.
I'm not saying I like these companies, or that I think the economics of any of them is sane. Just saying LLM's are capable.
edit. For some context, I only use open weight models these days and rather hope that big closed firms go bust.
Sure, but these are still astroturfing bots, and treating the messages as anything else but that helps them achieve their goals.
They weaponize the HN rules here. Which is frustrating, because one has to break the letter to defend the spirit.
I was out for 2 weeks, and the resident meat proxies on my team managed to half-destroy the project by doing everything the way AI wanted to, instead of how the company systems work, introduced like half a dozen cross-connections across barriers that should never be crossed, introduced a parallel artifact repo, permissions system, and different build tooling to what the rest use (including what the current project was built with), and managed to create a lot of drama with external teams who refused to work with these new systems.
AI still needs lots of guidance, and might seem like a genius that does everything on its own, until you give it to people who can't guide it and things begin spiraling out of control.