Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs. Like with the novel solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for erdos problems - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, LLMs have driven these proofs: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset when there are legions of pointy haired bosses and bandwagoning CEOs who (wrongly) point at breakthroughs like this as justification for AI mandates or layoffs.
It's easy to fall into a negative mindset because the justification is real and what we see is just the beginning.
Obviously we are not at a point where developers aren't needed. But One developer can do more. And that is a legitimate reason to higher less developers.
The impending reality of the upward moving trendline is that AI becomes so capable that it can replace the majority of developers. That future is so horrifying that people need to scaffold logic to unjustifiy it.
The "pointy-haired boss" was a character in the Dilbert comics, an archetypical know-nothing manager who spews jargon, jumps on trends, and takes credit for ideas that aren't his.
Crazy that an honest question like this gets downvoted.
I honestly think the downvote button is pretty trash for online communities. It kills diversity of thought and discussion and leaves you with an echo chamber.
If you disagree with or dislike something, leave a response. Express your view. Save the downvotes for racism, calls for violence, etc.
Downvotes eventually turn all online communities into echo chambers, definitely. It is only a matter of time for HN, and you can see it accelerating in the past 1-2 years (though mostly on AI stuff, and mostly in downvote behaviour - it still remains surprisingly resilient overall).
I feel like the only upside of the downvote is to act as sort of a mob moderation system, allowing offensive comments to naturally sink to the bottom.
Maybe in the future, platforms can have high quality auto moderation using AI to read every post and delete/flag those not following community guidelines.
I’m sure this would work well today, though not sure about the cost.
Yes, all of these stories, and frequent model releases are just intended to psyop "decision makers" into validating their longstanding belief that the labour shouldn't be as big of a line item in a companies expenses, and perhaps can be removed altogether.. They can finally go back to the good old days of having slaves (in the form of "agentic" bots), they yearn to own slaves again.
CEOs/decision makers would rather give all their labour budget to tokens if they could just to validate this belief. They are bitter that anyone from a lower class could hold any bargaining chips, and thus any influence over them. It has nothing to do with saving money, they would gladly pay the exact same engineering budget to Anthropic for tokens (just like the ruling class in times past would gladly pay for slaves) if it can patch that bitterness they have for the working class's influence over them.
The inference companies (who are also from this same class of people) know this, and are exploiting this desire. They know if they create the idea that AI progress is at an unstoppable velocity decision makers will begin handing them their engineering budgets. These things don't even have to work well, they just need to be perceived as effective, or soon to be for decision makers to start laying people off.
I suspect this is going to backfire on them in one of two ways.
1. French Revolution V2, they all get their heads cutoff in 15 years, or an early retirement on a concrete floor.
2. Many decisions makers will make fools of themselves, destroy their businesses and come begging to the working class for our labor, giving the working class more bargaining chips in the process.
Either outcome is going to be painful for everyone, lets hope people wake up before we push this dumb experiment too far.
I’m reminded of Dan Wang’s commentary on US-China relations:
> Competition will be dynamic because people have agency. The country that is ahead at any given moment will commit mistakes driven by overconfidence, while the country that is behind will feel the crack of the whip to reform. … That drive will mean that competition will go on for years and decades.
The future is not predetermined by trends today. So it’s entirely possible that the dinosaur companies of today can’t figure out how to automate effectively, but get outcompeted by a nimble team of engineers using these tools tomorrow. As a concrete example, a lot of SaaS companies like Salesforce are at risk of this.
I think it will be over automation that does them in, most normies I know are not down with this all this automation and will totally opt for the human focused product experienced, not the one devoid of it because it was built and ran by a souless NN powered autocomplete. We certainly aren't going to let a bunch of autocomplete models (sold to us as intelligent agents), replace our labor. We aren't stupid.
Much like there is a premium for handmade clothing, and from scratch food. Automation does nothing but lower the value of your product (unless its absolutely required like electronics perhaps), when there is an alternative, the one made with human input/intention is always worth more.
And the idea that small nimble teams are going to outpace larger corporations is such a psyop. You really mostly hear CEOs saying these things on podcast. This is to appease the working class, to give them hope that they too one day can be a billionaire...
Also, the vast majority of people who occupy computer i/o focused jobs, whos jobs will be replaced, need to work to eat and they don't all want to go form nimble automated SaaS companies lmao, this is such a farce.. Bad things to come all around.
The question is to what extent there is a market for more stuff. If the cost of making software drops 10x we can still make 10x the software. There are projects which wouldn’t be done before that can now be done.
I know with respect to personal projects more projects are getting “funded” with my time. I’m able to get done in a couple of hours with coding agents what would’ve taken me a couple of weekends to finish if I stayed motivated to. The upshot is I’m able get much closer to “done” than before.
Let’s have some compassion, a lot of people are freaking out about their careers now and defense mechanisms are kicking in. It’s hard for a lot of people to say “actually yeah this thing can do most of my work now, and barrier of entry dropped to the ground”.
I am constantly seeing this thing do most of my work (which is good actually, I don't enjoy typing code), but requiring my constant supervision and frequent intervention and always trying to sneak in subtle bugs or weird architectural decisions that, I feel with every bone in my body, would bite me in the ass later. I see JS developers with little experience and zero CS or SWE education rave about how LLMs are so much better than us in every way, when the hardest thing they've ever written was bubble sort. I'm not even freaking about my career, I'm freaking about how much today's "almost good" LLMs can empower incompetence and how much damage that could cause to systems that I either use or work on.
It’s literally not possible. It has nothing to do with intelligence. A perfectly intelligent AI still can’t read minds. 1000 people give the same prompt and want 1000 different things. Of course it will need supervision and intervention.
We can synthesize answers to questions more easily, yes. We can make better use of extensive test suites, yes. We cannot give 1000 different correct answers to the same prompt. We cannot read minds.
If the answer is "yes"? Then, yeah, AI is not coming for you. We can make LLMs multimodal, teach them to listen to audio or view images, but we have no idea how to give them ESP modalities like mind reading.
If the answer is "no"? Then what makes you think that your inability to read minds beats that of an LLM?
This is kind of the root of the issue. Humans are mystical beings with invisible sensibilities. Many of our thoughts come from a spiritual plane, not from our own brains, and we are all connected in ways most of us don't fully understand. In short, yes I can read minds, and so can everybody else.
Today's LLMs are fundamentally the same as any other machine we've built and there is no reason to think it has mystical sensibilities.
We really need to start making a differentiation between "intelligence" and "relevance". The AI can be perfectly intelligent, but without input from humans, it has no connection to our Zeitgeist, no source material. Smart people can be stupid, too, which means they are intelligent but disconnected from society. They make smart but irrelevant decisions just like AI models always will.
AI is like an artificial brain, and a good one, but humans have more to our intelligence than brains. AI is just a brain and we are more.
If you have an AI that's the equivalent of a senior software developer you essentially have AGI. In that case the entire world will fundamentally change. I don't understand why people keep bringing up software development specifically as something that will be automated, ignoring the implications for all white collar work (and the world in general).
Then who else is still holding a job if a tool like that is available? Manually working people, for the few months or years before robotics development fueled by cheap human-level LLMs catches up?
Yes and look how far we've come in 4 years. If programming has another 4 that's all it has.
I'm just not sure who will end up employed. The near state is obviously jira driven development where agents just pick up tasks from jira, etc. But will that mean the PMs go and we have a technical PM, or will we be the ones binned? Probably for most SMEs it'll just be maybe 1 PM and 2 or so technical PMs churning out tickets.
But whatever. It's the trajectory you should be looking at.
Have you ever thought about the fact that 2 years ago AI wasn't even good enough to write code. Now it's good enough.
Right now you state the current problem is: "requiring my constant supervision and frequent intervention and always trying to sneak in subtle bugs or weird architectural decisions"
But in 2 years that could be gone too, given the objective and literal trendline. So I actually don't see how you can hold this opinion: "I'm not even freaking about my career, I'm freaking about how much today's "almost good" LLMs can empower incompetence and how much damage that could cause to systems that I either use or work on." when all logic points away from it.
We need to be worried, LLMs are only getting better.
That's easy. When LLMs are good enough to fully replace me and my role in the society (kind of above-average smart, well-read guy with university education and solid knowledge of many topics, basically like most people here) without any downsides, and without any escape route for me, we'll probably already be at the brink of a societal collapse and that's something I can't really prepare for or even change.
All evidence points to the world changing. You're not worrying because worrying doesn't solve anything. Valid.
More people need to be upfront about this reasoning. Instead of building irrational scaffolds saying AI is not a threat. AI is a threat, THAT is the only rational conclusion. Give the real reason why you're not worried.
I'm all for this. But it's the delusion and denialism of people not wanting to face reality.
Like I have compassion, but I can't healthily respect people who try so hard to rewrite reality so that the future isn't so horrifying. I'm a SWE and I'm affected too, but it's not like I'm going to lie to myself about what's happening.
They just want people to think the barrier of entry has dropped to the ground and that value of labour is getting squashed, so society writes a permission slip for them to completely depress wages and remove bargaining chips from the working class.
Don't fall for this, they want to destroy any labor that deals with computer I/0, not just SWE. This is the only value "agentic tooling" provides to society, slaves for the ruling class. They yearn for the opportunity to own slaves again.
It can't do most of your work, and you know that if you work on anything serious. But If C-suite who hasn't dealt with code in two decades, thinks this is the case because everyone is running around saying its true they're going to make sure they replace humans with these bot slaves, they really do just want slaves, they have no intention of innovating with these slaves. People need to work to eat, now unless LLMs are creating new types of machines that need new types of jobs, like previous forms of automation, then I don't see why they should be replacing the human input.
If these things are so good for business, and are pushing software development velocity.. Why is everything falling apart? Why does the bulk of low stakes software suck. Why is Windows 11 so bad? Why aren't top hedge funds, medical device manufactures (places where software quality is high stakes) replacing all their labor? Where are the new industries? They don't do anything novel, they only serve to replace inputs previously supplied by humans so the ruling class can finally get back to good old feeling of having slaves that can't complain.
"It's interesting to me that whenever some new result in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to gesticulate wildly that that the sky is falling and AGI is imminent. Like with the recent solutions GPT 5.2 has been able to find for Erdos problems, even though in almost all cases such solutions rely on poorly-known past publications, or significant expert user guidance and essential tools like Aristotle, which do non-AI formal verification - many users here (even in this very thread!) think they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, though these are not interesting proofs to most modern mathematicians, LLMs are a major factor in a tiny minority of these mostly-not-very-interesting proofs: https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution..."
The thing about spin and AI hype (besides being trivially easy to write) is that is isn't even trying to be objective. It would help if a lot of these articles would more carefully lay out what is actually surprising, and what is not, given current tech and knowledge.
Only a fool would think we aren't potentially on the verge of something truly revolutionary here. But only a fool would also be certain that the revolution has already happened, or that e.g. AGI is necessarily imminent.
The reason HN has value is because you can actually see some specifics of the matter discussed, and, if you are lucky, an expert even might join in to qualify everything. But pointing out "how interesting that there are extremes to this" is just engagement bait.
>It's interesting to me that whenever some new result in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to gesticulate wildly that that the sky is falling and AGI is imminent.
Really? Is that happening in this thread because I can barely see it. Instead you have a bunch of asinine comments butthurt about acknowledging a GPT contribution that would have been acknowledged any day had a human done it.
>they know more about this than Fields medalist Terence Tao, who maintains this list showing that, yes, though these are not interesting proofs to most modern mathematicians, LLMs are a major factor in a tiny minority of these mostly-not-very-interesting proofs
This is part of the problem really. Your framing is disingenuous and I don't really understand why you feel the need to downplay it so. They are interesting proofs. They are documented for a reason. It's not cutting edge research, but it is LLMs contributing meaningfully to formal mathematics, something that was speculative just years ago.
I am not surprised that you can't understand that the quote I am making is obviously parodying the OP as disingenuous. Given our previous interactions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938446), it is clear you don't understand much things about AI and/or LLMs, or, perhaps, basic communication, at all.
OP's original comment is something that is actually happening in a bunch of comments on this very thread, and yours...not even remotely. You certainly tried to paint it as disingenuous but it really just fell flat. I'm not surprised you failed to understand that though.
> It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up, there's always a flood of people who come in to handwave away why this isn't actually a win for LLMs.
>> OP's original comment is something that is actually happening in a bunch of comments on this very thread
OPs original comment was obviously a general claim not tied to responses to this thread. As usual, you fail to understand even the basics of what you are talking about.
His comment was a general claim, but he made it here specifically because this thread was already full of examples proving his point. Shouldn't that be Obvious?
>Only a fool would think we aren't potentially on the verge of something truly revolutionary here. But only a fool would also be certain that the revolution has already happened, or that e.g. AGI is necessarily imminent.
This sentence sounds contradictory. You're a fool to not think we're on the verge of something revolutionary and you are a fool if you think something revolutionary like AGI is on the verge of happening?
But to your point if "revolutionary" and "agi" are different things, I'm certain the "revolution" has already happened. ChatGPT was the step function change and everything else is just following the upwards trendline post release of chatGPT.
Anecdotally I would say 50% of developers never code things by hand anymore. That is revolutionary in itself and by the statement itself it has already literally happened.
> It's interesting to me that whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up,
It's interesting to me that whenever AI gets a bunch of instructions from a reasonably bright person who has a suspicion about something, can point at reasons why, but not quite put their finger on it, we want to credit the AI for the insight.
Do you not see how this clearly is an advancement for the field, in that AI does deserve partial credit here in improving humanity’s understanding & innovative capabilities? Can you not mentally extrapolate the compounding of this effect & how AI is directly contributing to an acceleration of humanity’s knowledge acquisition?
Because most times results like this are overstated (see the Cursor browser thing, "moltbook", etc.). There is clear market incentive to overhype things.
And in this case "derives a new result in theoretical physics" is again overstating things, it's closer to "simplify and propose a more general form for a previously worked out sequence of amplitudes" which sounds less magical, and closer to something like what Mathematica could do, or an LLM-enhanced symbolic OEIS. Obviously still powerful and useful, but less hype-y.
For the sake of clarity: Woit's post is not about the same alleged instance of GPT producing new work in theoretical physics, but about an earlier one from November 2025. Different author, different area of theoretical physics.
This thread is about "whenever a new breakthrough in AI use comes up", and the comment you reply to correctly points out skepticism for the general case and does not claim any relation to the current case.
You reached your goal though and got that comment downvoted.
My goal was to help other people not make the same mistake as I initially did, of thinking that Peter Woit had made some criticism of the latest claim of GPT-5.2 making a new discovery in theoretical physics, which in fact he appears not to have done.
If I'd wanted that comment downvoted, I would have downvoted it myself, which as it happens I didn't. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, other than the fact that it was phrased in a way that could mislead, hence my comment.
The reality is: "GPT 5.2 found a more general and scalable form of an equation, after crunching for 12 hours supervised by 4 experts in the field".
Which is equivalent to taking some of the countless niche algorithms out there and have few experts in that algo have LLMs crunch tirelessly till they find a better formula. After same experts prompted it in the right direction and with the right feedback.
Interesting? Sure. Speaks highly of AI? Yes.
Does it suggest that AI is revolutionizing theoretical physics on its own like the title does? Nope.
We would not call him at all because it would be one of the many millions that went through projects like this for their thesis as physics or math graduates.
One of my best friends in his bachelor thesis had solved a difficult mathematical problem in planet orbits or something, and it was just yet another random day in academia.
And she didn't solve it because she was a genius but because there's a bazillions such problems out there and little time to look at them and focus. Science is huge.
True. If you stay in your domain for a very long time the people with you in that niche space are less and less and when you solve something that wasn't done before it's not necessarily a hard problem.
I don't think it's about trying to handwave away the achievement. The problem is that many AI proponents, and especially companies producing the LLM tools constantly overstate the wins while downplaying the issues, and that leads to a (not always rational) counter-reaction from the other side.
It is especially glaring in this case because, when queried, it is clear that far too many of the most zealous proponents don't even understand the simplest basics of how these models actually work (e.g. tokenization, positional or other encoding schemes, linear algebra, pre-training, basic input/output shaping/dimensions, recursive application, training data sources, etc).
There are simple limitations that follow from these basic facts (or which follow with e.g. extreme but not 100% certainty), such that many experts openly state that e.g. LLMs have serious limitations, but, still, despite all this, you get some very extreme claims about capabilities, from supporters, that are extremely hard to reconcile with these basic and indisputable facts.
That, and the massive investment and financial incentives means that the counter-reaction is really quite rational (but still potentially unwarranted, in some/many practical cases).
The same crap happened with cryptocurrency: it was either aggressively pro or aggressively against, and everyone who could be heard was yelling as loud as they could so they didn't have to hear disagreement.
There is no loud, moderate voice. It makes me very tired of the blasting rhetoric that invades _every_ space.
Reminds me of the famous quote that it's hard to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it.
It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek, "The Measure of a Man" I think it's called, where it is argued that Data is just a machine and Picard tries to prove that no he is a life form.
And the challenge is, how do you prove that?
Every time these LLMs get better, the goalposts move again.
It makes me wonder, if they ever did become sentient, how would they be treated?
It's seeming clear that they would be subject to deep skepticism and hatred much more pervasive and intense than anything imagined in The Next Generation.
The discourse about AI is definitely the worst I've ever experienced in my life.
One group of people saying every amazing breakthrough "doesn't count" because the AI didn't put a cherry on top. Another group of people saying humans are obsolete, I just wrote a web browser with AI bro.
There are some voices out there that are actually examining the boundaries, possibilities and limitations. A lot of good stuff like that makes it onto HN but then if you open the comments it's just intellectual dregs. Very strange.
ISTR there was a similar phenomenon with cryptocurrency. But with that it was always clear the fog of bullshit would blow away sooner or later. But maybe if it hadn't been there, a load of really useful stuff could have come out of the crypto hype wave? Anyway, AI isn't gonna blow over like crypto did. I guess we have more of a runway to grow out of this infantile phase.
"They're moving the goalposts" is increasingly the autistic shrieking of someone with no serious argument or connection to reality whatsoever.
No one cares about how "AGI" or whatever the fuck term or internet-argument goalpost you cared about X months ago was. Everyone cares about what current tech can do NOW, and under what conditions, and when it fails catastrophically. That is all that matters.
So, refining the conditions of an LLM win (or loss) is all that matters (not who wins or loses depending on some particular / historical refinement). Complaining that some people see some recent result as a loss (or win) is just completely failing to understand the actual game being played / what really matters here.
Take a look at this entire thread. Everyone and I mean everyone is talking as if AI is some sort of fraud and everything is just hype. But then this thread is all against, AI, I mean all of it. If anything the Anti-hype around AI is what's flooding the world right now. If AI hype was through the roof we'd see the opposite effect on HN.
I think it's a strange contradiction in the human mind. At work outside of HN, what I see is roughly 50-60% of developers no longer code by hand. They all use AI. Then they come onto HN and they start Anti-hyping it. It's universal. They use it and they're against it at the same time.
The contradiction is strange, but it also makes sense because AI is a thing that is attacking what programmers take pride in. Most programmers are so proud of their abilities and intelligence as it relates to their jobs and livelihood. AI is on a trendline of replacing this piece by piece. It makes perfect sense for them to talk shit but at the same time they have to use it to keep up with the competition.
Let me state the negative things about LLMs: they hallucinate. They are not as reliable as humans. They can lie. They can be deceptive.
But despite all of this people are so negative about it even when 50% of deveopers now don't write code by hand because of AI. The trend from 0 AI to code being written by AI in a couple years cannot be denied and it also spells out a future where the negatives of AI become more and more diminished.
The anti-hype is predictable. It's when something becomes too pervasive and too popular and overused people start talking shit and ignoring the on the ground reality.
Guys if you think AI is shit, take an oath on never using it. Stop all usage of it for the rest of your life. See how far that takes you. Put the money where your mouth is, if it's so bad, come off of it and stop using it completely. Most of you can't... because you're all lying to yourselves.
I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.
You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.
Its all relative. A burned out American can drop out tomorrow with no short term plan. H1Bs cannot fo that unless they are ready to go back to their previous country.
Did you read the comment that started this thread? Let me repeat that, ICYMI:
> "So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine."
It didn't use Servo, and it wasn't just calling dependencies. It was terribly slow and stupid, but your comment is more of a mischaracterization than anything the Cursor people have said.
You're right in the sense it didn't `use::servo`, merely Servo's CSS parser `cssparser`[0] and Servo's DOM parser `html5ever`[1]. Maybe that dog can do taxes after all.
On the contrary, we get to read hundreds of his comments explaining how the LLM in anecdote X didn't fail, it was the developer's fault and they should know better than to blame the LLM.
I only know this because on occasion I'll notice there was a comment from them (I only check the name of the user if it's a hot take) and I ctrl-F their username to see 20-70 matches on the same thread. Exactly 0 of those comments present the idea that LLMs are seriously flawed in programming environments regardless of who's in the driver seat. It always goes back to operator error and "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years...".
I dunno, I manage LLM implementation consulting teams and I will tell you to your face that LLMs are unequivocally shit for the majority of use cases. It's not hard to directly criticize the tech without hiding behind deflections or euphemisms.
(I don't ever say variants of "just you watch, in the next 3 months or years..." though, I think predicting future improvements is pointless when we can be focusing on what the models we have right now can do.)
I literally see their posts every (other) day, and its always glazing something that doesn't fully work (but is kind of cool at a glance) or is really just hyped beyond belief.
Comments usually point out the issues or more grounded reality.
BTW I'm bullish on AI, going through 100s of millions of tokens per month.
I hate TODO.mds too. If I ever have to use one, I'll keep track of it manually, and split the work myself into chunks of the size I believe CC/codex can handle. TODO.md is a recipe for failure because you'll quickly have more code than you can review and nothing to trust that it was executed well.
Isn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over.
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