Comment by LOCNE55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LOCNE55 | Hacker News Reader

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there.

There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly.

The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".

Maybe maybe not. In large organisations for each person creating value with LLMs there are probably more destroying value. Bob used to only waste one person time with LLMs he can waste the entire organisations time.

Anyone can use an LLM make a bad ideas sound like a good idea. I imagine this will lead to insane amounts of productivity loss as the entire organisation ends up pivoting to follow the bad idea of a mediocre VP etc.

Don't agree with the hyperbole in the article but I think the broad strokes are there. I'm the same as you, AI has excelled at small tasks and daily chores. Like writing a complex query in seconds that used to take an hour to work out.

Doing feature development seems to take just as long or productivity gains are modest (where I work at least) and I think the reason is touched on in the article. Most orgs are just terminally bad at building software.

When executives say "AI", they basically seem to mean LLMs right now.

AI that just, does something, like extract text from scanned documents, is apparently boring. They don't seem interested in bragging about boring things.

The companies tracking AI usage don't seem to be tracking usage of that sort of thing either.

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