Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

This. The main blocker in AI proliferation I see is that people don't even consider it can do more than they thing it can.

Just yesterday, my wife recounted to me a conversation with her friend, where the friend mentioned they felt lazy and had some piece of copywriting done by AI this time. To which my wife said, "TeMPOraL would've also had AI upload it to the website afterwards".

Yes, I would have, and I would've also had it install the tools needed to upload it too, because why not. The only difference between me and my wife's friend here is that I know I can ask AI that, and I know it will work.

View on HN

People have gotten very used to breaking down tasks into separate things they know how to do on a computer. Asking an LLM to do each of those individual tasks is easy but feels both lazy and also ‘so what?’ - I knew how to do that task.

The thing people are slow in realizing is that you don’t need to break the task down, and you don’t need to know how to do the task. You don’t even need to have the software installed on your computer to do the task, or even know that software to do the task exists - a sufficiently motivated LLM can pull down the needed open source tools and use them, or even build its own.

Exactly. It takes some... willingness to break through your own mindset (I don't want to call this "courage", but at times feels like it), to just tell the LLM, "I need <this and that> to be <like this>, make it so".

Two years ago, that was unthinkable. A year ago, it was a quick way to set a lot of tokens on fire. Today, well, I'm yet to find a thing Opus 5.5 doesn't do at least passable (and usually stellar) job on.

This is why hosted agents (muse, dots, grok bot) will succeed. Organizations won't relax their PC security policies, so they'll need a platform where the agent actually has permissions to develop and install software.

On the hosted-agent point, Grok Bot specifically: Tried Grok Bot for customer support, auto-trading, and research. None of it holds. The machine resets without warning about every 1-2 weeks, packages and mid-run jobs gone. Unlike OpenAI's reusable env, you rebuild from scratch. Past ~50 minutes you get kicked. What's left is markdown and a box that dies mid-task. They still sell "persistent computer." Until that product choice changes, leaving is the honest protest; right now it's only fit for throwaway use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com