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Yeah, I think the missing piece on this is that the first thought they had was "we can do the same with less" instead of the growth mindset that made me interested in technology in the first place.

And it's amazing they didn't, because most of the tech industry only gets paid in a world where there are offices (either physical or virtual) full of people with money to spend during and after work.

It's still very rare for anyone to be asking "how do we do more with more?" But the person who figures that out is going to be the winner (and if no one figures it out we will all lose, even if you manage to transition to a job that still exists the world around you will be a nightmare).

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Because it takes actual creative talent to do more with more. Optimizing costs is far easier.
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What's really easy - and what, in my own mouse's eye perspective seems to be dominating at present - isn't even optimizing costs. It's pushing the costs elsewhere, often a net loss for a company, but for the benefit of the ones making the change.
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I remember in the weeks and months after ChatGPT was released, there were plenty of comments here - seemingly respected comments getting plenty of upvotes - about exponential grown meaning that all programmers - or even all knowledge workers - would have their jobs made unnecessary in, wow, two weeks! Or, well, maybe two months! Wait, actually, two years! Always two of something.

It’s the full-self-driving of the 2020s (complete with the never-ending ‘we actually have it now you just don’t understand!’)

[Edit: I don’t mean it’s useless, just that its boosters are overhyping it - expanding on and agreeing with Had they been more realistic with the promises and didn’t frame it as replacing all of us within 2 years, I would have been more excited about the tech.]

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> the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months

Just keep in mind that you're likely hearing from a limited subset of all tech CEOs.

"CEO Expresses Moderate Confidence that AI Can Enable Modest Productivity Gains" is not an article that gets written, because it would not generate clicks.

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I think if they were more honest it would have been a nonstarter.

The amount of money these companies need seems to be all of nothing, they’re raising like it’s life or death and if you read their books or tweets they’re not shy about it

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> Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-day issue that makes it impossible for me to trust agents with anything.

I often hear this. Can you give me a question where a major LLM hallucinates or provides poor guidance? Reproducible would be great

Just a question to stump it.

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Just today, the LLM based auto-review that my company enabled for all PRs edited my PR description to confidently assert that I had added a new RPC. I had not. I deleted code and nothing else. Nothing was added. The RPC it claimed I added did not exist.

This is a common occurrence.

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LLMs are nondeterministic, so it’s impossible to make something 100% reproducible. Even if it has an issue, it might do it in a different way. If it’s well publicized, they’ll patch that very specific example, but the foundational issue is still there (like counting the R’s in strawberry).

I still regularly run into the issue where it just makes up API endpoints, CLI commands, or add flags that simply don’t exist.

I also regularly ask it things and it gives me a bad answers, so I push back, and it says something to the effect of “you’re right, I didn’t consider that, let me look at that more”… then tells me the exact opposite of the previous response.

Or it “thing X has never happened”, and I ask what about <insert example>, and it goes to look it up and says, “oh, thing X actually did happen.”

I run into this daily. Multiple times per day. How can I trust a system like this? Are people just blindly accepting what the LLM says as truth? Is that why people think it’s good?

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> Reproducible would be great

Wouldn’t it be great? I’m still waiting for reproducibility from LLMs.

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Can you reproduce irreproducibility?

Give me a question which the LLM answers vastly differently on runs.

I keep hearing how it's dumb and wrong but no one ever shares the chat or prompt

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Try this with ChatGPT or GROK or Claude

How many days of the week contain the letter d?

The answer I get with ChatGPT, and Grok is 3 and 6 with Claude.

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I just used ChatGPT only, twice. Web interface in a Firefox private window, and in a Chrome incognito window. I asked them both the identical question "How many names of the days of the week contain the letter D?"

In Firefox I got 6. In Chrome I got 7. LLMs are not even self-consistent.

I have the screenshots if anyone cares.

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Bad example but since it literally just happened a few hours ago:

Teams Copilot meeting assistant auto-renamed a meeting title/summary that’s now prominently placed at the top to “Month end close wrap up discussion“ because someone posted in chat “sorry can’t make the meeting, we’re wrapping up month end close”.

Really confused the next guy who joined the meeting and derailed things for a minute or two before we could get back on topic.

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> I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp.

Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see?

Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based

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The expectation confirmation theory[0].

Someone else’s unrealistic assessment frame expectations, especially when they are attempting to speak from a place of authority, which they were. When reality doesn’t meet or exceed those expectations it creates disappointment. The expectations they set were impossibly high.

This is a pretty common thing. I’m sure we’ve all been disappointed by a movie or restaurant that a friend hyped up endlessly, which really didn’t live up to the expectations that were set. It’s the same deal here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_confirmation_theor...

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Pokemon Go was pitched as Pokemon on your phone with AR to integrate into day to day life. There's no reason to expect anything but the Pokemon games I've played, now natively on my phone with AR integration.

What came out was a clone of Ingress with a skin and a shop. It lacked the full set of Pokemon, which all the assets for already exist. It lacked having a six-Pokemon team. It lacked trading, a core feature of Pokemon in every generation of games. Gyms weren't even gyms, they were some sort of checkpoint XP farm thing.

If it had been pitched as what it was, I may have enjoyed it more. Instead, I found myself vastly disappointed with what I was able to achieve playing it compared to Pokemon on my Nintendo DS or some other handheld console.

I don't think this was a politics-based decision. I feel misled and disillusioned.

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This is not uncommon when becoming disillusioned with something that has been hyped up and forced upon you for an extended period.

The fatigue of the product (and sting of false promises) causes the negatives to overshadow anything positive to say.

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I'm thinking it's a game of CEO-bullshit-detector vs AI-bullshit-generator and the CEOs demonstrated from 2024-current that they're not good at detecting bullshit, especially if it comes from a computer and goes very fast.
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