sacredfire

Wasn’t there a recent METR study that found 20% decreased productivity with ai coding tools? Oddly enough, the people using the tools thought they were 20% faster.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/

From my own experience, they can be useful until they aren’t… and if you don’t know what you’re doing they can output convincing but flawed or downright dangerous code or suggestions. I’m not sure if it saves me time or not. Im not doing front end web development anymore so maybe the stuff I’m working on now is too obscure for the current tools?

Yeah, a lot of school bus stops on five lane highways… /s

It does, he just didn’t show that a/√a simplifies to √a. There are a couple ways to think about it, but the simplest is if you just wanna get rid of the square root in the denominator, you can multiply the entire left side by (√a/√a) which gives you a√a / √a√a. This then turns into a√a/a. From there you get to just √a

My experience with LLMs for coding has been similar. You have to be extremely vigilant, because they can produce very good code but will also miss important things that will cause disasters. It makes you very paranoid with their output, which is probably how you should approach it and is honestly how you should approach any code that you’re writing or getting from somewhere else.

I can’t bring my self to actually use them for generating code like he does in this blog post though. That seems infuriating. I find them useful as a way to query knowledge about stuff that I’m interested in which I then cross reference with documentation and other sources to make sure I understand it.

Sometimes you’re dealing with a particular issue or problem that is very hard to Google for or look up. LLMs are a good starting point to get an understanding of it; even if that understanding could be flawed. I found that it usually points me in the right direction. Though the environmental and ethical implications of using these tools also bother me. Is making my discovery phase for a topic a little bit easier worth the cost of these things?

Yeah this is all bit click bait. That broken rust song topped the digital sales charts, which is basically tracking Apple Music downloads. No one buys music anymore. They topped it with 3000 sales at a dollar each.

I’d be much more interested to see them forced to report how many of these jobs are being outsourced and concrete stats on what products or AI tools are actually replacing jobs.

A lot of these companies that are invested in AI, are saying that AI is the reason for layoffs, yet it seems like they’re not pointing to statistics or actual products that are replacing people yet. Their language seems to imply the layoffs are them hedging their bets for the coming tide, that will be any day now… trust us.

I feel like I’ve found a fairly sweet spot with LLMs and coding. I use them almost entirely like a rubber ducky. Any small bits of code that they do generate I then diligently try to understand, see inefficiencies or issues and come up with a better solution.

This is a pretty slow process so they don’t speed me up at all. They just make the initial discovery may be a little bit easier? As Google has gotten worse and especially if I’m working in a code base with limited documentation or bad documentation, I found them to be useful to get my bearings. I always go into it with a paranoia that anything they generate could be a disaster so I have to do extra due diligence.

I’ve found that they’re pretty good at generating a couple lines of code, though I have to usually refine it a lot. Anything more than that seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.

However, I have found them to be a great tool for learning even if I’m not sure if what they’re putting out is correct. It will usually lead me to start thinking about things and looking deeper into documentation and research papers, etc.

That there are so many ways to store data on a browser (including exploits) and that they expose so much information about your physical device is a big part of the problem. Even barring that, there are additional ways they can fingerprint a user. While any one thing might not be telling, when you take all of them in combination, it gets frighteningly accurate how easy it is for them to know exactly who you are.

How much is your time worth to you? If you have a business that you feel provides a worthwhile product and the amount you charge for that product does not provide the lifestyle you desire, either improve the product, accept a lower standard of living, or quit/change the business.

If you feel you could charge more but it would be “unfair”, don’t worry, no one will buy it unless you are doing something unethical, like a dishonest mechanic or a doctor who lies to trick people into procedures they don’t need or you have a monopoly on an essential need.

If that doesn’t describe you, then charge a fair price for your cost and time. It seems like you don’t value your product or your time and you are looking for a way to trick yourself into be ok with that?

An AI that was advanced enough to automate this much of human endeavors, would start to blur the line of agi. And at that point, what are the moral implications of enslaving an intelligent entity, artificial or not? If such tasks can be automated via thousands of purpose built ai’s that are not “conscious” then I suppose it’s ok?

I remember when the term was first coined and it meant something like “asking an llm to code and NOT attempting to validate, fix or correct the outputs yourself. Just keep prompting in natural language until it works.” It was supposed to be a joke - this sort of use hits a wall pretty quickly and illustrates how limited llms can be.

The term has taken off and its meaning is now in flux. I did find it particularly amusing seeing all the LinkedIn lunatics start posting LLM written garbage about “integrating vibe coding Into your workflow” because they thought it was the new buzz word… and I guess they were right.

Compared to previous generations, most of the luxuries you are describing are a much lower percentage of our overall expenses, while 3 big things: housing, healthcare, and education have outpaced wages dramatically and are a MUCH larger percentage of our expenses compared to previous generations. Yes, you can save a lot of money by being thrifty, but home cost, healthcare, and education are hard if downright impossible for many people to mitigate.

All that being said yes, you could live a much simpler life, but I think the issue is people seeing an expected standing of living that many western countries used to have, slipping away while a very small percentage of people at the top are consolidating phenomenal wealth. So saying to them “hey it’s your fault for not lowering your expectations” comes off as well, ridiculous.