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Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

I’m so tired of people talking about AI like this but only looking at it from the perspective of a consumer. AI is so big because it allows people like me, who only dabble in code, to automate with very little learning curve.

My life has been irrevocably changed by AI and I’m tired of people saying it hasn’t done anything when reality is that they just don’t know what to use it for.

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Can you share an example of what you have automated or plan to automate using AI?

It's beyond "automating"; it's being able to go from idea to prototype without having to have a bunch of underlying knowledge.

I feel like there's a subset of "awesome programmers" who are going to be the people run over by AI, because they seem to be the ones who are saying, "why would I use this?"

We can't all be good at everything; the fact that I can use AI to catch up in some places means I have a leg up in others.

The underlying knowledge you can skimp on right now is the most absolute basic understanding of a simple problem. I just don't see things like replicating a bare-bones version of 2048 in HTML as "catching up" to anything worthwhile.

For busy-work tasks like restructuring JSON as YAML and writing one-off bash scripts, current AI is amazing. Code review in limited contexts is also pretty decent.

But solving actual, difficult problems seems frustratingly out of reach. GPT5+ really need to deliver much better logic and problem solving.

Can you please share an example of one such difficult problem? It will be useful for me, thanks.

What problem domain are you interested in?

Going with my 2048 example, how about "add a fun meta mechanic to the 2048 difficulty progression." Or maybe, "make a multi-player version of 2048." Or, "add a physics gameplay interaction to the 2048 controls."

I mean, just imagine doing anything potentially cool or interesting and that's your difficult problem that current AI can't help with.

Thanks!

I am interested in difficult programming problems that require logic or problem solving skills that AI wouldn't be able to handle well. In my experience with using AI for programming the quality of prompt affects the quality of the output quite a bit. I'm not sure if someone has done open research on problems that it can handle and cannot viz a viz quality of prompts.

Having it generate really complicated code involving lots of math and physics typically fails.

If you're looking at 2048, thinking you don't need one, and concluding it can't do anything worthwhile because it can't do <whatever problems it's failed at for you>, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Yet another 2048 clone is itself, not super interesting, and because of that, there's very little economic value in creating one. An yet the person who created this 2048 clone was able to create it over a couple of hours of not focusing too hard on if, with the help of ChatGPT. The real question is how many computer programs as tools don't exist because they've previously been too expensive to develop. There's no way I'd pay someone else to develop a 2048 clone, because I could just write one myself, but if I wasn't capable of programming and needed an important workflow tool as, say, a graphics designer, I could muddle through it using ChatGPT, or I could pay someone else to do it, at a rate that was previously too expensive. Senior devs at FAANGs aren't going to be doing a whole lot of that at the rates they can command, but that's a whole lot of new programming work that existed but want getting satisfied prior to LLMs aiding programming.

That's what that anecdote* is about, not how invaluable someone else's 2048 clone is to you.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40869881

It’s not just software folks who are going to be run over. I use it to answer all sorts of questions I have in a variety of fields I know nothing about. It truly is a deflationary force.

I wrote a python script that checks a folder on my Dropbox for m4a files, then calls whisperapi to transcribe them, then reformats exactly how I need them reformatted, and finally moves them to a syncthing folder.

I took maybe two python classes about 20 years ago. I don’t know that language.

I also wrote two python scripts that use imagemagick to automate two different resizing/reformatting jobs for large groups of images for my work. Saved hours of manual labor.

And it’s not just the finished code. It’s also learning how code works in general. I’d have stupid questions/concerns all the time that I could just straight up ask AI and they’ll show me how I was thinking about it all wrong.

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