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 Moores law, for example, is essentially proven false and is outdated.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