AI is snake oil. It sells you a slot machine in the guise of a colleague.

Oh, not using it right? Not the right model? Insert coin to continue.

Snake oil, total snake oil.

Good for you, son. I've just spent the whole f*king day screaming at an agent on a deadline.

This right here. People simp for LLM companies as if their experience of using the out-of-pocket top-of-the-line "team of PhD's" paid models will be what is deployed when trying to contact your bank, insurance, etc. No,... once tech companies stop playing the "no/some revenue until we own the world" VC game, we'll all be stuck trying to talk to GlueSnifferGPT when reporting an emergency.

That will never happen. You know that. It will only become more and more. there is no return. My advise: don't stick with those blocker ideas.

Not sure I follow; more and more what? And what do you mean by blocker ideas?

you did none of this. Did you personally learn something from that experience? Other than how to use your agent

Of course I learned from it. I mean the reverse engineering part which is basically try and error is something I rather skip. The remaining things like wiring the hardware is still there. The boring stuff is what the LLM can do for me. I still find the process to get stuff working challenging and interesting. It's not only about the end result. It's just a different approach than the old school low level one

This doesn't even make sense. Maybe if you fleshed it out?

It makes perfect sense to me. Type in a prompt like “how can I make the cheese on my pizza stringier” and maybe it’ll tell you to use different cheeses, but maybe it’ll tell you to add glue.

If you don’t like the answer, don’t worry, they’re building more data centers in poor neighborhoods so you can keep submitting the prompt until you get a better one.

What year is it, that you're getting frontier model responses saying to put glue in your pizza?

I trust that you can use your reading comprehension skills to understand that by referring to a famous example of LLMs producing garbage, I’m simply using it to illustrate the phenomenon at large, rather than to suggest that I am still struggling to find glue-free ways to make my pizza stringier.

If you still need help breaking down what I meant in the previous post, feel free to ask. Sentences can be tricky.

On a related note, just because Gemini doesn’t tell you to put glue in your pizza anymore, by no means implies that this particular problem is solved: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-t...

I'm sorry, I could have said this more plainly: no, no frontier model for the past several years has told you to put glue in your pizza.

Snake oil is something not medicine sold as medicine.

AI is something not a colleague (a slot machine), sold as a colleague.

Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?

Variable intermittent reward. Pull the lever, get something nice or something bad. I've had far too much bad today and I'm furious.

There will be no peace till Bibi is dead or behind bars.

It would be a big mistake to assume that whoever succeeds Bibi will take a less aggressive stance than he has. Those hoping to replace him are mostly trying to one-up him.

It's horrifying how many people I see here being threatened into using AI. I guess I'm fortunate in that I have a choice.

I've used it plenty, more recently than ever before, but I'm coming more and more to the conclusion I don't want anything to do with it.

Botsitting is low-skilled. Low-mental reward work will become low-financial reward work before long.

I was initially worried that I had to keep up, learn the new tools or get left behind. But I'm beginning to see it as an entirely different domain of work, and one I'm fine not doing.

I think I'm best off preserving my skills and autonomy, rather than fighting with an agent and fretting about tokens for the foreseeable. I've no desire to be a botsitter.

Worst case scenario, this really is the future, and I become unemployable in tech: I've done other sorts of work in the past, things I'm happy returning to if this is the future.

I've a hunch that's still going to be a while off. I hope so anyway.

I can't believe "prioritise context switching" is now advice being doled out on HN.

Agents allow for delegation, that’s something we aren’t used to as devs. But it’s very useful.

It’s why the execs get so excited about these tools: they understand how to delegate.

I still do deep work, but I actually enjoy a session bouncing between agents. And I can chose how much focus to give each tasks.

Be real, most of that flow state was typing boilerplate

My experience has been that I can't.

I've just started up a new gig where I'm swearing off any agents, I'm even not looking up answers with an LLM. There's nothing so crazy I'm doing SO still doesn't have the answer.

So far, I'm having a great time. I'm progressing quickly, understanding the domain better.

I'm also finishing an older job at the moment, which has been almost 100 percent agent-driven. Real brain-dead drudge work, there's no flow to get into with these things. I'm not sure it's been any quicker than the old-fashioned way. Certainly a lot less fun.

A strange game.

I'm a consultant, and had my first conversation about an AI clean-up job this week. I'm also just starting another gig analysing LLM output, my sell is that the analysis is hand-coded, as they weren't able to do it themselves with LLM support.

On the other hand, I'm just finishing an agent-heavy piece. After getting it set up, it's been some of the most mindless and soul-destroying work I've had the displeasure of in a while. This stuff will be near minimum wage in a few years, totally unskilled babysitting.

AI really hasn't been all that bad for work, by volume at least. I know where I want to focus my efforts though.

As a fellow freelancer where do you see that you could survive this into the future?

I operate in a bit of a niche, in terms of my clients. They're all typically people I've worked for full time in the past, or closely related. There are some fundamentals of that business I worry about, but I'm able to do things they can't, and I'm looking alright for the year. That's as good as I can generally wish for.

Longer term, I don't know. I'd happily take something more secure if it came along, as long as it's not childminding for an agent. Super busy and bored out my mind the last few weeks, the worst sort of work.

I love my Surface laptop. I use arch, BTW.

Surface Pro with Debian KDE here. I just dressed it up like Windows 7, because I need more Fruitiger Aero in my life.

Does the btw version have a changelog published somewhere?

The older I get, the less interested I am in seeing big bands. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great local music scene, plenty of independent venues.

I can't think of a single band I'd pay these extortionate prices for, I'd much rather support a local band and local venue.

I'm saying I don't need to give sleazy American companies money in order to enjoy great music, and that I put money back into my local economy when I go out for a gig.

Regardless of taste, it's mostly up to consumers to keep prices in check, by saying No at some point

Yes

Yeah, flash is crazy fast, but I've found performance variable.

Flash is amazing if you know the domain really well.

E.g. occasionally it makes the dumbest mistakes you've ever seen and can't correct them. However it's fairly rare, and if you know the domain really well, occasionally popping in the code and pushing it towards the correct solution takes like 20seconds or whatever.

So the speed you can move with flash + high domain knowledge beats opus by a mile in my experience.

I tried to switch back to 4.8 for a bit when it came out, feels so bad waiting 20mins for a mediocre solution when I could have had everything complete - with multiple iteration cycles - in flash in like 3-5mins.

Yes, you don't need much domain knowledge to use Opus, but it's just way too expensive.

For losers who can't put together a program to save their life, have no real skills and were always not really interested in programming (hence their poor skills), renting a robot buddy to do it for them is a good deal, until the buddy cuts in materially into their salary, and until their bosses realize that they really just have robot operators on staff instead of people who can actually do things.

It's nice when I want to be lazy though.

Or when I'm working two contract gigs. I can spec things out for one and turn it loose and trust it. Then work more closely with deepseek on the other project.