> I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations

You see what you choose to focus on. I come across many people who are excited about the possibilities of AI-assisted coding, who are frustrated by its limitations, who share strategies for overcoming or avoiding those limitations, and s on. For a concrete and famous example, I would put Andrej Karpathy in this category. Where are you looking that you're not finding any of these people? linkedin?

In my experience the people who are excited about ai assisted coding are people who aren't good at coding in the first place and don't care about quality, consistency, or understanding what they are having it write, and people who have a vested interest in ai coding tools being used (leadership who want to say "my team uses ai" and "ai experts" who have a personal brand dependent on ai being successful)

AI assisted coding is really good as an enhanced auto-complete, often better as it picks up patterns in the code and will complete whole lines or chunks of code. There, I'll assess the results like any other auto-completed suggestions.

For other things like when asking questions I won't just blindly copy what the LLM is suggesting. I'll often rewrite it in a style that best fits the style of the codebase I'm working on, or to better fit it into what I'm trying to achieve. Also, if I've asked it for how to do a specific one-line query and it has rewritten a whole chunk of code, I'll only make use of that one line, or specific fix/change. -- This also helps me to understand the response from the LLM.

I'll then do testing to make sure that the code is working correctly, with unit tests where relevant.

Yes, I try to avoid the evangelism topics but they're much worse than blockchain and are taking up most of HN now.

Can't help but click sometimes, always see the same arguments, so why not post the same thing as well?

By the way, I never check user names, I just reply to the post content.

> Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.

You always have people at both sides of the aisle though - people who say it can do much more than it can, and people who say it can do much less.

It's the same with all technologies - robotics, crypto, drug discovery, the internet, digital cameras, quantum computing, 3D Television, self-driving cars - it was probably the same with the steam engine. All of these will have had people who said that the technology would be useless and die (e.g. Napoleon and the steam engine), and others that would have said it was totally transformative.

Pointing to people who hold extreme opinions 'for' a particular technology that are overly-bullish, and then dismissing the technology based on that, isn't a particularly good strategy in my opinion.

> Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

Who's "they"?

> If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you when the wolf actually comes.

Who's "you"?

You seem to believe all AI advocates are of the same hivemind and they somehow think and behave collectively. Have you considered that they might be different people with individual opinions and motivations?

It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.

AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early on, many thought chess would be one of the last things mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a waste of time.

In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically mean the AI DJ is bad at everything.

    > Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!

> Who is "they"?

Anthropic IIRC?

Here's the post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler. It was written by a researcher at Anthropic.

This appears to be a troll account, that only ever engages in heated discussions. Please, do not engage with it, folks :) On a related note, has anyone noticed actual bots commenting on HN? I sometimes feel discussions are a bit weird here.