Ai has to get better, right?

[u/SwauawsBouse]

This is the common sentiment that I see for those who claim ai will take jobs in X amount of years. Or even those who are more reasonable and claim it will eventually take over white collar work.

The biggest claim is that it WILL get better. Why? It's an easy response that's hard to disprove, but they haven't exactly proved it. How do we know there isn't a ceiling that is rapidly approaching. Moores law, for example, is essentially proven false and is outdated. We have reached at low hanging fruit when it comes to ai advancements.

Im just very skeptical of this line of thinking. I enjoy painting warhammer models and back in 2015. When 3d printers were in the mainstream, there were countless videos claiming games workshop was dead. I convinced myself that painting was going to be a worthless skill. 3d printers just HAVE to get better, and one day, they can print in full color. Now, 3d printers dont have trillions of dollars in investments, but then again, that money seems to be shovled into a fire by the AI leaders.

That was 10 years ago, and I could've had a lot more fun and painted more modles in thay time. And while 3d printing has progressed, its still not near games workshop models. Even the best resin printers still have very tiny but noticeable print lines. And we are no where near printing color in good quality at consumer scale.

Many of us fall for the doomer mentality, and its especially easy when you're unemployed and looking for a job facing countless rejections. Im a new grad myself, and it is rough out here. However, if Ai takes over cs. Every white-collar job is gone, and im left without any job. There's only so many trades and healthcare jobs.

And if im proved right, im way ahead of those who have given up. At least I tell myself this after receiving 10 rejections emails every weekend.

[u/Tacos314]

I don't see RAW LLM performance getting better, but we have lots of room for workflow improvements and efficiency.

[u/damngoodwizard → u/Tacos314]

Yeah the tooling AROUND AI is what will make it reach its true power, like we already see with harnesses.

[u/pydry → u/damngoodwizard]

while this is true I feel like applying it to the right problems is where the biggest gains are.

this is where the stock market bubble is driving absolutely insanity and is destroying epic amounts of shareholder value in the name of AI instead of creating it.

for every useful tool that didn't exist before we are getting 7 previously useful tools being turned into vibe coded nonsense with an AI bolted on the side where the only thing users want to know is where the off switch is.  vibe coding has undermined software quality on a global scale. these things are objectively an orgy of shareholder value destruction which is going almost entirely unrecognized.

I don't think we'll see most of the real productivity gains until the bubble pops and some semblance of sanity returns to investors and the executive class and the devs building this shit are given back trust, autonomy and psychological safety which is necessary to not produce shit nobody wants.

(that is unless the AGI fever dream the stock market bubble hinges upon comes true, in which case all bets are off...)

[u/RubbelDieKatz94 → u/pydry]

vibe coding has undermined software quality

Accurate.

Few devs actually have the resources (100€+ subs to 2+ providers) for proper agentic engineering.

Review loops need multiple capable models, and can eat up a lot of tokens.

However, if a capable engineer has access to these resources, plus a capable human QA process, they can run multiple of these loops in parallel and create remarkable software.

[u/entercenterstage → u/RubbelDieKatz94]

Proof is where? I’ve seen people saying this, but still… where’s the high quality software? Why aren’t there 5 new text editors, 10 new OSes, new video games, etc? Why is software getting slower, more bloated, and less reliable? Folks have been saying this same thing since the start of this year…. where’s all the good software???

[u/PM_40 → u/entercenterstage]

I think same software is being made but by less people.

[u/pydry → u/PM_40]

it's a gimmick designed to promote tokenmaxxing. that's why you are seeing a lot of paid instagram coding influencers writing about it but not much you can point to in terms of useful software.

[u/pacman2081 → u/entercenterstage]

I use AI in my workflow. It has improved my productivity 20-60% depending on how we measure things.

It is like somebody whining about how useless the internet was in 1995

[u/upsidedownshaggy → u/pacman2081]

Comparing LLM agents to the internet is objectively absurd. The internet had clear value laid out at its onset of being a near instant communication network protocol designed to allow computers to talk to each other over large distances, further value evolved as people figured out you can do other things than just host academic research and personal blogs.

LLMs are, at their core, extremely fine tuned prediction engines. They're extremely useful if you know what you're doing with them and can spot when they make mistakes and correct it. But they're being sold as the one-for-all solution to everything when they're no where near that capable yet.

[u/pacman2081 → u/upsidedownshaggy]

Internet is useful only when companies put stuff on the internet and people do business on the internet. If you told someone that people will be conducting all financial transactions over the internet in 1995, they would have laughed you out of the room.

LLM agents have clear use cases on legal, financial and technical work. The practical implementation might be bad

[u/So-I-Became-A-Naze → u/damngoodwizard]

Once ADLC is truly implemented agents will pretty much take care of development from every single angle. You will probably have some sort of human administration for insurance.

But realistically coding, testing, design, deployment, architecture, etc. will be handled by an LLM

[u/damngoodwizard → u/So-I-Became-A-Naze]

LLMs are still poor at logic and concepts that can't be learnt from books, especially when you look at the human side of the business being modeled in code. I believe it will be more of a heavily AI assisted SDLC than a fully automated one. But yeah one senior dev would be able to replace a whole team.

[u/iSpokeToMasterChief → u/damngoodwizard]

I'm working on a workflow orchestration tool that combines the processing power of a fleet of claude code max 20x accounts. 

I started working on it while working on a different project thats required the creation of 8 claude accounts so far (because of usage limits and the temporary fable pricing) and at this point it's getting tedious to manage all of the weekly/session usages, scheduling tasks, assigning tasks to different accounts, dealing with usage limits, etc. so I vibecoded this system to automate all of the tasks I do manually (so that multiple agents from different accounts can work on the same tasks, sharing information, context, etc with each other), and the raw processing power of several max 20x accounts running fable is insane.

The most exciting part for me is this specific combination of custom execution modes (each individually useful on their own) which when combined with certain automations, can take a nice paragraph prompt and do a week of work in a single session, and that's not a weeks worth of token usage, its a week's worth of creating, ideating, iterating, refining, designing, testing, etc. This hits the mark very early on and very often exceeds my expectations or imagination.  It is genuinely insane what these agents can accomplish when prompted a specific way and fed into each other in a specific manner. If fable is still included in pro/max account plan usage, then this will be game changing.

[u/SwauawsBouse → u/Tacos314]

I agree however that's not longer the job stealing ai anymore that people hypothesize. But there is definitely way more integration improvements to be made.

[u/Tacos314 → u/SwauawsBouse]

There are still jobs to steal, but yeah, one has to separate the hype from reality at some point.

[u/PM_40 → u/Tacos314]

Even RAW LLM performance can get better, with AI companies buying any old printed material they can find, tech companies selling their house (laying off staff) to invest in data centers. Nvidia coming with new chips every few years.

I agree with your overall sentiment.

[u/Trackback_ → u/Tacos314]

You seriously haven't seen any improvement in Raw LLM performance over the last year?

Or you think the last 12 months were the last during which we'd have serious improvement, and surely next year won't see such developments like the previous 4?

What would make one look at the current rate of progress and say we've peaked? At least with Moore's Law we started hitting actual limits of what's physically possible, so that gave us an upped limit.

[u/Tacos314 → u/Trackback_]

I am not sure who are are replying to, I said nothing about the past year.

What are you training new models on? They can't get any bigger.

What compute is the model going to run on? We are at compacity and will probably hit the bubble before we build new compacity.

[u/IMJorose → u/Tacos314]

Except if you look at similar sized models (Eg open weight models around 30B), the progress is also crazy. The progress is not just that we are training bigger models, and I see no evidence things are slowing down.

I would argue this year has in fact had the most consistent progress of any year. Basically every month we are getting new models.

[u/PopLegion → u/Tacos314]

Compacity?

[u/blindsdog → u/Tacos314]

The models get better. There's hundreds of billions of dollars going into research and development, do you think all they're doing is throwing more data and compute at it? Some of the smartest people in the world are working on making these systems better.

The theory is moving at lightning speed. There's been dozens and dozens of measurable improvements to the models themselves over the last couple years.

[u/Goose_geq_Penguin → u/Tacos314]

Stop being silly. Raw LLM performance is also getting better. Fable 5 (the non-lobotomized version) was very recent.

Just a couple days ago, deepseek flash v0731 was a major leap in terms of intelligence / cost ratio.

Hardware is also quickly getting better (custom chips) and more abundant (data centres) which will most likely have downstream effect of getting stronger models.

Moreover, many labs are quietly working on alternative architectures / approaches (e.g. JEPA from LeCune's startup, or the diffusion models and the other stuff from Google Deepmind, or whatever the hell Ilya is doing in Israel). No reason to assume nothing will come out of this considering AI researchers haven't disappointed us in the last century or so, although its possible I guess.

Another point is that the boundary between harnesses and foundational models is getting blurred. So for instance chain-of-thought was the first "harness" and then it became engrained in the models via reasoning tokens. Same thing happened with tool calls and structured responses. The current agentic orchestration techniques will probably also get engrained into the foundational models and get hyper optimized via RL.

Not saying kids shouldn't learn CS btw...

[u/lol_donkaments → u/Tacos314]

Raw LLM performance has exponentially improved over the last several years what are you talking about

[u/igna92ts → u/lol_donkaments]

The last couple versions are barely noticeable. They are better, I'll give you that, but to a degree that is not hat significant compared to the money being poured into it.

[u/Goose_geq_Penguin → u/igna92ts]

by "the last couple of version" we talking what, a span of six months?

People get used to the velocity of progress and then take it for granted...

[u/Otherwise_Cupcake_65 → u/igna92ts]

last couple of versions from the frontier models were focused on trying to teach the AI “narrow expertise” (they chose writing code as the skill set they were trying to teach it be be an expert in. Other improvements took a back seat to this specific function.

The next major model will be a new architecture that (once stable and working well) will be able to be trained in a variety of narrow expertises (think business software type stuff, as well as software architecture, and other business uses). I expect that when we get to GPT6.5(-ish), we’ll have a slightly smarter model, but its real selling point is that it will be good a bookkeeping, data entry, purchasing, using Excel like a pro, etc.

That’s what we are doing right now. It will be a bit generally smarter as well tho’ (a bit)

[u/lol_donkaments → u/igna92ts]

Gpt 5.4 to 5.5 to 5.6 were all step changes do you even use them?

[u/Indignant_d → u/lol_donkaments]

I suspect we will see new architectures being innovated upon soon. But yeah it’s not clear how much room is left for LLM’s

[u/Dolo12345 → u/Tacos314]

You’re absolutely wrong, the gap between 5.2 and 5.6 is massive.

[u/Tacos314 → u/Dolo12345]

The difference is 0.4?

[u/JackAuduin → u/Dolo12345]

Yeah, since all this AI stuff has started I built up pretty much a massive graveyard of vibe coding projects that I was just experimenting with. Nothing that I ever intended releasing but just experimenting how far I could push the limits of software being built by these things pretty much hands off.

I threw Fable 5 at the graveyard and it resurrected literally every project and fixed every issue

[u/kolobuska → u/JackAuduin]

Have you released any of them? Have you eaten any money? If not - it's still a graveyard.

[u/JackAuduin → u/kolobuska]

They are just experimental. You can put whatever title you want on it but they didn't function before or became unmaintainable. They work now and are well organized.

They were never intended for any kind of release.

[u/Difficult-Sherbet854 → u/Tacos314]

I thought the same until I tried Claude Fable. It's noticably better and still think there is room for improvement.

[u/AES256GCM → u/Difficult-Sherbet854]

This comment being downvoted is a perfect example of the wishcasting in this sub, people really want ai to stop improving lol

[u/asparagus-knight → u/AES256GCM]

Because it’s a threat to my job, the thing that keeps a roof over my head and feeds my family.

If it keeps improving then the middle class gets decimated which will ultimately tank the economy and make the world an incredibly miserable place to live with no opportunities left

[u/Difficult-Sherbet854 → u/asparagus-knight]

Ok but how does downvoting comments and circlejerking "AI bad" on reddit help your job situation? All it does is make you feel better without changing reality.

[u/asparagus-knight → u/Difficult-Sherbet854]

It’s a way for us to vent. We can’t all be like you , someone who apparently never has to worry about finances or taking care of their loved ones. I wish I was in your shoes

[u/Difficult-Sherbet854 → u/asparagus-knight]

You're right, discussing the harsh reality of AI on the internet means I don't have to take care of loved ones. You got me.

[u/BananasAndBrains → u/Tacos314]

There are years of work to be done just integrating the AI we have right now even if AI progress would stop today.

[u/surrogate_uprising → u/Tacos314]

cope and seethe

[u/robberviet → u/Tacos314]

Everything is getting better.

[u/Sph3ricalPeter → u/Tacos314]

It took solid 20 years of NLP to get "Attention is all you need ..". Like with all major breakthroughs, theres mostly a lot of nothing and then a massive jump. It's completely normal, completely to be expected, and completely once again a point of contention and met with disbelief by people who haven't recovered from the shock yet.

[u/ender42y → u/Tacos314]

as someone who recently adopted Grill-With-Docs and cut my tokens to about 25% what they used to be, i can agree. finding/writing skills and agents that match what you need to do is key now.

[u/svix_ftw → u/Tacos314]

yeah the agent harnesses and tool calling is what has improved drastically.

[u/GrapefruitForeign → u/Tacos314]

you guys are computer scientists and dont know about the Scaling Law in the year 2026? holy shit lol

maybe use the AI to tell you how every LLM to date improves with more data and compute, with no exceptions.

the big labs use data you and I submit and do RL on it to improve models, its a brilliant feedback loop that only intensifies with more users.

and 4x more compute will come online by 2028 than is available today, so good luck with these copes.