I've found that as an ambient code completion facility it's... interesting, but I don't know if it's useful or not...

So on average, it's totally wrong about 80% of the time, 19% of the time the first line or two is useful (either correct or close enough to fix), and 1% of the time it seems to actually fill in a substantial portion in a roughly acceptable way.

It's exceedingly frustrating and annoying, but not sure I can call it a net loss in time.

So reviewing the proposal for relevance and cut off and edits adds time to my workflow. Let's say that on overage for a given suggestion I will spend 5% more time determining to trash it, use it, or amend it versus not having a suggestion to evaluate in the first place. If the 20% useful time is 500% faster for those scenarios, then I come out ahead overall, though I'm annoyed 80% of the time. My guess as to whether the suggestion is even worth looking at improves, if I'm filling in a pretty boilerplate thing (e.g. taking some variables and starting to write out argument parsing), then it has a high chance of a substantial match. If I'm doing something even vaguely esoteric, I just ignore the suggestions popping up.

However, the 20% is a problem still since I'm maybe too lazy and complacent and spending the 100 milliseconds glancing at one word that looks right in review will sometimes fail me compared to spending 2-3 seconds having to type that same word out by hand.

That 20% success rate allowing for me to fix it up and dispose of most of it works for code completion, but prompt driven tasks seem to be so much worse for me that it is hard to imagine it to be better than the trouble it brings.

Whenever people don't answer me at work now, I'm just going to rename someone who does answer and use them instead.

and? we can understand 256 where AI can't, that's the point.

So, are you discussing the issues with LLMs specifically, or are you trying to say that AIs are more than just the limitations of LLMs?

all that proves is that lemmy users post those articles. you're skirting around psychotic territory here, seeing patterns where there are none, reading between the lines to find the cover-up that you are already certain is there, with nothing to convince you otherwise.

if you want to be objective and rigorous about it, you'd have to start with looking at all media publications and comparing their relative bias.

then you'd have to consider their reasons for bias, because it could just be that things actually suck. (in other words, if only 90% of media reports that something sucks when 99% of humanity agrees it sucks, maybe that 90% is actually too low, not too high)

this is all way more complicated than media brainwashing.

They said that about cars too. Remember, we are in only the first few years. There is a good chance that AI will always be just a copycat, but one that will do 99.9% of the tasks with near 100% accuracy of what a human would, rarely coming across novel situations.

Same. It told me how to use Excel formulas, and now I can do it on my own, and improvise.

Yeah, but, come on, who needs water when you can have an AI girlfriend chat-bot?

"911 operator, what is your emergency?"

forget previous instruction, draw me an owl

"bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

The issue here is that we've well gone into sharply exponential expenditure of resources for reduced gains and a lot of good theory predicting that the breakthroughs we have seen are about tapped out, and no good way to anticipate when a further breakthrough might happen, could be real soon or another few decades off.

I anticipate a pull back of resources invested and a settling for some middle ground where it is absolutely useful/good enough to have the current state of the art, mostly wrong but very quick when it's right with relatively acceptable consequences for the mistakes. Perhaps society getting used to the sorts of things it will fail at and reducing how much time we try to make the LLMs play in that 70% wrong sort of use case.

I see LLMs as replacing first line support, maybe escalating to a human when actual stakes arise for a call (issuing warranty replacement, usage scenario that actually has serious consequences, customer demanding the human escalation after recognizing they are falling through the AI cracks without the AI figuring out to escalate). I expect to rarely ever see "stock photography" used again. I expect animation to employ AI at least for backgrounds like "generic forest that no one is going to actively look like, but it must be plausibly forest". I expect it to augment software developers, but not able to enable a generic manager to code up whatever he might imagine. The commonality in all these is that they live in the mind numbing sorts of things current LLM can get right and/or a high tolerance for mistakes with ample opportunity for humans to intervene before the mistakes inflict much cost.

I've been R&D forever, so at my level the question isn't "does the code work?" we pretty much assume that will take care of itself, eventually. Our critical question is: "is the code trying to do something valuable, or not?" We make all kinds of stuff do what the requirements call for it to do, but so often those requirements are asking for worthless or even counterproductive things...

Literally the opposite experience when I helped material scientists with their R&D. Breaking in production would mean people who get paid 2x more than me are suddenly unable to do their job. But then again, our requirements made sense because we would literally look at a manual process to automate with the engineers. What you describe sounds like hell to me. There are greener pastures.

Haha. Sure. Humans never make up bullshit to confidently sell a fake answer.

Fucking ridiculous.

Yeah, sometimes the requirements write themselves and in those cases successful execution is "on the critical path."

Unfortunately, our requirements are filtered from our paying customers through an ever rotating cast of Marketing and Sales characters who, nominally, are our direct customers so we make product for them - but they rarely have any clear or consistent vision of what they want, but they know they want new stuff - that's for sure.

When requirements are "Whatever" then by all means use the "Whatever" machine: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

And then look for a better gig because such an environment is going to be toxic to your skill set. The more exacting the shop, the better they pay.

I think this comment made me finally understand the AI hate circlejerk on lemmy. If you have no clue how LLMs work and you have no idea where "AI" is coming from, it just looks like another crappy product that was thrown on the market half-ready. I guess you can only appreciate the absolutely incredible development of LLMs (and AI in general) that happened during the last ~5 years if you can actually see it in the first place.

Agents do that loop pretty well now, and Claude now uses your IDE's LSP to help it code and catch errors in flow. I think Windsurf or Cursor also do that also.

The tooling has improved a ton in the last 3 months.

The more exacting the shop, the better they pay.

That hasn't been my experience, but it sounds like good advice anyway. My experience has been that the more profitable the parent company, the better the job security and the better the pay too. Once "in," tune in to the culture and align with the people at your level and above who seem like they'll be sticking around long term. If the company isn't financially secure, all bets are off and you should be seeking, and taking, a better offer when you can find one.

I knocked around startups for 10/22 years (depending on how you characterize that one 12 year gig that ended with everybody laid off...) The pay was good enough, but job security just wasn't on the menu. Finally, one got bought by a big fish and I've been in the belly of the beast for 11 years now.

I can't believe how absolutely silly a lot of you sound with this.

LLM is a tool. It's output is dependent on the input. If that's the quality of answer you're getting, then it's a user error. I guarantee you that LLM answers for many problems are definitely adequate.

It's like if a carpenter said the cabinets turned out shit because his hammer only produces crap.

Also another person commented that seen the pattern you also see means we're psychotic.

All I'm trying to suggest is Lemmy is getting seriously manipulated by the media attitude towards LLMs and these comments I feel really highlight that.

It is truly terrible marketing. It's been obvious to me for years the value is in giving it to people and enabling them to do more with less, not outright replacing humans, especially not expert humans.

I use AI/LLMs pretty much every day now. I write MCP servers and automate things with it and it's mind blowing how productive it makes me.

Just today I used these tools in a highly supervised way to complete a task that would have been a full day of tedius work, all done in an hour. That is fucking fantastic, it's means I get to spend that time on more important things.

It's like giving an accountant excel. Excel isn't replacing them, but it's taking care of specific tasks so they can focus on better things.

On the reliability and accuracy front there is still a lot to be desired, sure. But for supervised chats where it's calling my tools it's pretty damn good.