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.
> 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.
I suspect the majority of users won't be aware of what their current setting is.
Even though you're right, we can't know what to do with their words.
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.
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"
interdisciplinary teams/person + SOTA AI + Right context (customer/ internal pain points, access to the code, focussed Hackathon) = amazing cool things.
I’ve had Claude do stuff like interrogate IoT devices, look into proprietary file formats and even assisted debugging electronics from a text description and datasheets. It has stupidly broad knowledge as long as you watch out for things like getting part numbers/boards correct. Have you ever tried to ask for help on an electronics forum full of miserable greybeards? $20/mo for getting ballpark answers immediately is excellent value.
Do assess if you want the learning experience or not, and whether you care if the problem is solved for you.
For writing I get the appeal to bloggers, but I can’t stand reading anything that has the hallmarks of generative AI.
This is 100% true, and this type of building is where AI is adding real value beyond the "I automated my entire business" hype.
Unfortunately, most companies don't have small interdisciplinary teams who have autonomy to scope and ship software. I spent 10 years at IDEO telling clients this was the way, but it's virtually impossible to replicate on the client side.
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.)
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.
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."
I think the author made this point because earlier they mention how people tell them AI changed their life.
> So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
yeah but people say that in casual conversation all the time. my wife, not long ago, said her new facewash changed her life. its a figure of speech.
Every week there is some new method to make LLMs produce code, ranging from Langchain, MCP, Agents, Ralph loops, gas town, just loops.
You are stating its hyperbole, when people are walking around without closing their laptops, or are awake all night running agents.
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.
(I'm unaffiliated with them.)
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.
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.
Also at work: the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis, Gell-Mann Amnesia and motivated reasoning.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).
Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.
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.
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!
Louis CK's wifi on a plane bit is funny because it's true.
- 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.
> Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow
So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
It's awkward because you can feel how much he means every word. Of course it's part of the act and you're supposed to find it funny, but at the same time, he very much means what he's saying.
how many times have we all seen marketing departments or sales departments in our companies entirely misrepresent the abilities or purpose of a product we built?
it’s fucking unreal how many times i’ve seen on here where the engineers of a product were like “don’t blame us, our team was screaming trying to be heard that the marketing/sales departments are outright lying about the capabilities.”
at which point they’ve often twisted and bastardized the product opposite of the reasons we built it to begin with.
1) cool people do cool things, start a scene
2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word
3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass
4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.
5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs
It’s the culture of the org and that decides how the ammo is used. What you want is good devs AND good marketers building and promoting great product.
Anyone in any role who works at facebook holds culpability. Marketers aren’t building all those user hostile features.
Sure, HN has changed over time, but this tends to be a place where people field technical questions and get technical answers.
Every software purchase process I have been involved in I have asked the vendor to demonstrate their claims against our requirements.
With AI, I am expected to defend myself from claims that my requirements are wrong.
For context
Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.
Web browsers truly changed the lives of giant majority of people on this planet.
I don't think there is any software on the planet that has accumulated 1.5 trillion dollars of otherwise-useful money!
I think the combination of web server and web browser comes close.
Surely you're kidding right?
You can have a medical emergency while sitting on the can in a bathroom, and then call up your doctor who can magically see exactly whats wrong as if they are looking through a literal crystal ball portal, and then they can immediately search through a corpus of billions of medical papers to find the best solution, and relay that back to you. Then when the call ends, you can summon a car to come drive you home like a magic carpet, and the dude driving it gets paid automatically with coins that you weren't even carrying at the time.
Magic is real. We are f***ing wizards.
Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.
Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM. The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.
Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.
gregoryl•1h ago
altmanaltman•1h ago
ben_w•1h ago
im_down_w_otp•1h ago
The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
pclmulqdq•47m ago
MichaelZuo•1h ago
And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.
atonse•14m ago