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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how you could compare crypto, which has no utility and no fair value, with AI which is used by hundreds of millions of people every day to achieve real outcomes.

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Crypto bros claim that crypto is super useful, revolutionary tech too. The proof is in the pudding, and AI has yet to show any real utility.

> and AI has yet to show any real utility

Ummm ... have you not tried using LLMs for coding work?

Not OP, but I have, and I'm not impressed. Perhaps it would be good if you are doing things in the training data (like churning out yet another bland website). But if you are doing things that are not well represented in publicly available code, or in unusual languages, then LLMs are not great currently.

They are great for finding the right ffmpg command line arguments though, and not having to deal with that mess must count for something.

> But if you are doing things that are not well represented in publicly available code, or in unusual languages, then LLMs are not great currently.

Have you tried since November 2025?

>have you tried since $date

You guys have been saying that every few months.

And you guys have been consistently replying with that exact same comment.

Have you been consistently replying with the same answer to that comment? Or have you genuinely tried using coding agents?

Maybe because not everyone works on trivial shit and it still doesn’t work for them?

Does the Linux kernel qualify as trivial shit?

They did get better around that time but there are some things that they are legitimately bad at for now.

For what it's worth, engineers at proprietary trading firms are finding that they can get substantial productivity boosts by using LLMs and it'd be hard to find a domain that's less represented in the training data.

Does definitely require more steering than if you're churning out slop apps/websites though.

I've built 4 pretty novel features where the LLM didn't know how to solve the problem, but with design/decision input from me was able to implement it. Between the two of us it was done, I would estimate, 10 - 20 times faster in terms of man hours than the same implementation would have taken without the use of LLMs. Like it's team level productivity from a single developer. In my case it was done infinity times faster because I just wouldn't have done these things, it would have been cost-prohibitive.

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