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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes, totally agree, it's like if you have a very experienced programmer sitting next to you.

He still needs instructions on what to do next, he lacks a bit of "initiative", but from a pure coding skills it's amazing (aka, we will get replaced over time, and it's already the case, I don't need help of contractors, I prefer to ask Claude).

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More like an insanely knowledgeable but very inexperienced programmer. It will get basic algorithms wrong (unless it's in the exact shape it has seen before). It's like a system that automatically copy-pastes the top answer from stackoverflow in your code. Sometimes that is what you want, but most of the time it isn't.

This sentiment is so far from the truth that I find it hilarious. How can a technically adept person be so out of touch with what these systems are already capable of?

LLMs can write a polite email but it can't write a good novel. It can create art or music (by mushing together things it has seen before) but not art that excites. It's the same with code. I use LLMs daily and I've seen videos of other people using tools like Cursor and so far it looks like these LLMs can only help in those situations where it is pretty obvious (to the programmer) what the right answer looks like.

With all of that, ChatGPT is actually one of the top authors in Amazon e-books.

But I agree that for some creative tasks, like writing or explaining a joke, or some novel algorithms, it's very bad.

The LLM generated e-book thing is actually a serious problem. Have you read any of it? Consumers could lose trust unless it’s fixed. If you buy a book and then realise nobody, not even the seller, has ever read it, as it turns into incomprehensible mush regularly, are you more or less likely to buy a book from the same source?

Hilarious (or even shocking) is the sentiment that people are actually so overhyped by these tools.

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