Find a way to make sure workers get the value of ai labor instead of bosses and the workers will like it better. If the result is "you do the same work but managers want everything in 20% of the time" why would anyone be happy?
I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit, but the only thing that would allow this to happen are systems and incentive structures that allow that to happen. A manager's job is to increase revenue and cut costs, that's how they get their job, how they keep their job, and how they are promoted. People very rarely get free benefits outside the range of what the incentive structures they exist in allow them to.
> I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit
And if they don't, then you'd understand the anger surely. You can't say "well obviously everybody should benefit" and then also scold the people who are mad that everybody isn't benefiting.
And people don’t like this. Something being logical doesn’t mean people have to accept it.
Also AI has been basically useless every time I tried it except converting some struct definitions across languages or similar tasks, it seems very unlikely that it would boost productivity by more than 10% let alone 400%.
You’re assuming how i would respond before i even respond. Please allow inquiries to happen naturally without polluting the thread with meritless cynicism.
With all due respect, with a response like "What AI coding tools/models have you been using?" to a complaint that AI tools just don't seem to be effective, what difference does a reply to that even make? If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics.
FWIW, my own experiences with AI have ranged from mediocre to downright abysmal. And, no, I don't know which models the tools were using. I'm rather annoyed that it seems to be impossible to express a negative opinion about the value of AI without having to have a thoroughly documented experiment that inevitably invites the response that obviously some parameter was chosen incorrectly, while the people claiming how good it is get to be all offended when someone asks them to maybe show their work a little bit.
Some people complain about AI but are using the free version of ChatGPT. Others are using the best models without a middleman system but still see faults, and I think it’s valuable to inquire about which domains they see no value in AI from. There are too many people saying “I tried AI and it didn’t work at all” without clarifying what models, what tools, what they asked it to do, etc. Without that context it’s hard to gauge the value of any value judgement on AI.
It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc. Of course its more difficult to provide specifics than just say it was good or bad, but there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.
> It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc.
That's an interesting comparison. That kind of statement can be reasonably inferred to be made by someone just learning to drive who doesn't like the experience of driving. And if I were a motorhead trying to convert that person to like driving, my first questions wouldn't be those questions, trying to interrogate them on their exact scenario to invalidate their results, but instead to question what aspect of driving they don't like to see if I could work out a fix for them that would meaningfully change their experience (and not being a motorhead, the only thing I can think of is maybe automatic versus manual transmission).
> there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.
Also, do remember that this holds true when you s/bad/good/g.
We're still in the early days of LLMs. ChatGPT was only three years ago. The difference it makes is that without details, we don't know if someone's opinion is still relevant, because of how fast things have moved since the original GPT-3 release of ChatGPT. If someone half-assed an attempt to use the tools a year ago, and hasn't touched them since, and is going around still commenting about the number of R's in strawberry, then we can just ignore them and move on because they're just being loudmouths who need everyone else to know they don't like AI. If someone makes an honest attempt, and there's some shortcoming, then that can be noted, and then the next version coming out of the AI companies can be improved.
But if all we have to go on is "I used it and it sucked" or "I used it and it was great", like, okay, good for you?
> With all due respect, with a response like "What AI coding tools/models have you been using?" to a complaint that AI tools just don't seem to be effective, what difference does a reply to that even make?
"Damn, these relational databases really suck, I don't know why anyone would use them, some of the data by my users had emojis in them and it totally it! Furthermore, I have some bits of data that have about 100-200 columns and the database doesn't work well at all, that's horrible!"
In some cases knowing more details could help, for example in the database example a person historically using MySQL 5.5 could have had a pretty bad experience, in which case telling them to use something more recent or PostgreSQL would have been pretty good.
In other cases, they're literally just holding it wrong, for example trying to use a RDBMS for something where a column store would be a bit better.
Replace the DB example with AI, same principles are at play. It is equally annoying to hear people blaming all of the tools when some are clearly better/worse than others, as well as making broad statements that cannot really be proven or disproven with the given information, as it is people always asking for more details. I honestly believe that all of these AI discussions should be had with as much data present as possible - both the bad and good experiences.
> If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics.
My personal experience:
* most self-hosted models kind of suck, use cloud ones unless you can get really beefy hardware (e.g. waste a lot of money on them)
* most free models also aren't very good, nor have that much context space
* some paid models also suck, the likes of Mistral (like what they're doing, just not very good at it), or most mini/flash models
* around Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4 they start getting somewhat decent, GPT 5 feels a bit slow and like it "thinks" too much
* regardless of what you do, you still have to babysit them a lot of the time, they might take some of the cognitive load off, but won't make you 10x faster usually, the gains might definitely be there from reduced development friction (esp. when starting new work items)
* regardless of what you do, they will still screw up quite a bit, much like a lot of human devs do out there - having a loop of tests will be pretty much mandatory, e.g. scripts that run the test suite and also the compilation
* agentic tools like RooCode feel like they make them less useless, as do good descriptions of what you want to do - references to existing files and patterns etc., normally throwing some developer documentation and ADRs at them should be enough but most places straight up don't have any of that, so feeding in a bunch of code is a must
* expect usage of around 100-200 USD per month for API calls if the rate limits of regular subscriptions are too limiting
Are they worth it? Depends. The more boilerplate and boring bullshit code you have to write, the better they'll do. Go off the beaten path (e.g. not your typical CRUD webapp) and they'll make a mess more often. That said, I still find them useful for the reduced boilerplate, reduced cognitive load, as well as them being able to ingest and process information more quickly than I can - since they have more working memory and the ability to spot patterns when working on a change that impacts 20-30 files. That said, the SOTA models are... kinda okay in general.
Start a worker-owned tech co-op? Not much point though, since people are going to pay AI to write their code instead, and so the market for consultants will dry up. Probably lots of market space for fixing up broken AI code though :)
Angry entitled people who are raving about off topic stuff should quiet down! -- Sincerely, other angry entitled people of opposite alignment who prefer to control topics under discussion.
I wondered whether you had a track record of promoting "creative solutions to problems through code" and saw your last submission was an attempt to drum up outrage about google trials, suggesting someone "should be investigated for conflicts of interest, and perhaps disbarred". Yes, purely items of technical interest for hackers, very un-politicized.
Look this isn't a forum for general advocacy of Marxist political thought, it just isn't. That's off topic.
Whereas it IS a forum for discussing the biggest tech court case of the century.
The site was not established to give equal time to all political ideologies in all threads, which is what you seem to be implying.
This is all in the Hacker News guidelines. Let me paste the relevant part for you since you don't seem to know about it:
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
About those rules. Any high-profile court case is by definition crime/politics, and all over TV news. Have you recently mentioned the name of any famous person(s) in your comments, offering opinions and critiques perhaps? But that's another way of saying "celebrities". So I'd say you're unambiguously failing on 4 of these criteria. In terms of forming teams and bitching about the refs decisions, not much difference between court-cases and sports either, neither are big on inspiring curiosity. But hey.. rules are for other people right boss?
And stop telling people to "look". You look. Because listen, I know that phrases like this one are well-loved by a certain type of person. Shows who's the adult in the room, and also frightens subordinates into silence, right? But understand me now when I say that it's much too transparent when used too often. Realize that there are other adults in the room, and when you toss out too many imperatives too fast then it's easy to see how much you want to control people as well as the topics under discussion.
You are just throwing ad hominems around, distorting facts in order to attack me, and contributing nothing that other people would want to read at this point. The fact of the matter is that the Google case is relevant to this forum and random political baiting is not. I hope it is actioned and your slop is dealt with as it detracts from the quality of this community.
Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me.
However, I did something which virtually none of them did. I wanted to get out. So I identified a skillset that the world desperately wanted, and I spent thousands of hours learning how to build and sell with that skillset. Frequently I was criticized or ridiculed or simply ignored, but it worked and I made money. Then I used that money to amass assets.
This doesn't mean I think Elon Musk is my friend or a good guy or something or even that I think the system is just, I don't. But I correctly identified the ladder out of the working class trap. I have Marxist friends who didn't. They're still poor. They still won't listen. Their lives still suck.
The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people. They seem to think that will work but I saw in my own life that concentration of wealth and power always fails the little guy. My philosophy is that it's better to bust all the big guys down (don't mistake this for an endorsement of unregulated capitalism, it isn't) and give everybody the ability to amass their own wealth by creating businesses. I think this idea is way more hackerish than Marxism, because it's all about people building and creating without needing someone else's permission.
If you are a worker, you should want to become an owner. You should not want to appeal to a higher authority for a distribution, because the hand that feeds you will always control you. You will not be free. You should strive to own and control your own slice of the pie because that is the only thing which will make you free. The more workers we can convert into owners, the better, and I'm not talking some fantastical idea of collective ownership here (at least in today's system, it basically doesn't exist).
> The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people.
legit question, what kind of marxist wants large corporations controlling everything?
Ironically, this is actually pretty close to what Marx writes in capital. Small owner operated businesses for artisans are a model he talks about, and owning your own tools and means of creating value and so on.
The state owning things on your behalf is not very true to the spirit of it at all, I would say.
> Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me.
It wouldn't be false consciousness if you would be from wealthy family.
Yes, working people should climb the ladder, but without government intervention and putting collars on wealthy necks there won't be any ladder for them. There would be no small business owners like you. This is why I think you are very wrong when stating you are not one of them. In a sense that is true, but in other you have more common interest with those without any capital that with those really wealthy. But those really wealthy definitely want you to think otherwise.
And I have an impression your view of Marxism is forged on Reddit posts and not Marxists literature.
