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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I don't think his point is that everyone should be using AI, it's that if you haven't used the agentic tools with a frontier model in the past month or so, you have no frame of reference for the current level of capabilities. Most people only use the chat interface with the free-tier models and based on that experience they're making strong conclusions about where AI is headed (it's still just fancy autocomplete, the whole thing is a scam or a bubble, etc.).

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> if you haven't used the agentic tools with a frontier model in the past month or so

We keep hearing versions of this same drivel since late 2025. This time it's different! Now it's really super duper amazingly awesome powerful and if you don't believe it, just trust me bro.

I mean, the parent poster is not wrong though. It’s crazy the level of stuff you can offload to your agents. People who haven’t used these tools in the last short while are operating on old, outdated frames of reference.

I’m just about to tell opus or sol to go make a custom watch holder that fits kiddo’s bed frame. I’ll give it the measurements of the bed frame. It already knows the dimensions of my printer. I’m prepared for it to absolutely fail at the task, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if it came up with something I can send to my printer and just work. Part of me wonders if I could instruct it to simply generate the raw gcode and skip the entire stl -> slicer pipeline. Probably would blow its context window though.

If you haven’t used these tools, you really don’t understand their capabilities. It’s pretty crazy stuff.

We keep hearing versions of your comment, despite recent breakthroughs in hundreds of open problems that mathematicians have been trying to solve for the past century. Skepticism is good up to a point, but it needs to be amenable to new evidence. You need to keep your mental model up to date with reality.

Don't trust me, experimenting is cheap; get a $20 subscription at Anthropic or OpenAI, download Codex or Claude Code, and try the heaviest model on a project that you estimate will take you around a week to complete without AI. I was a skeptic until I did exactly that and it shifted my perspective by quite a lot.

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