Hacker News Reader

Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I think this comment is premature. It hasn't really been 2-3 years accelerated LLM development. Even 6 months ago, LLM development was much less refined than it is now. There's been a few years of figuring out how to use these tools (which are constantly changing) and maybe a year of using them effectively.

You point all these new software but some of them are literally only a few months to a few weeks old and complaining that they aren't up to standard yet. Even if LLMs didn't get any better than they are right now, these projects have barely even begun, and there is plenty of time and resources to build them up.

I've written a bunch of cool new software with LLMs in my spare time -- are you sure you even have a way to notice all the new cool software that exists?

View on HN

>are you sure you even have a way to notice all the new cool software that exists?

This might be a problem in itself. I find myself unable to have the time to even investigate new software because even newer software with even more features comes around a week later. I bookmark so many Show HNs that I'm impressed by and only ever go back to a rare few.

My projects are so niche that almost nobody would ever care... but think that might be the point. Maybe there aren't any decent MS Office or Photoshop clones but there's also a bunch of really interesting niche software being created nobody else would ever care about.

I personally (no LLM) wrote some open source software a few years ago that maybe has a dozen to a hundred users and somebody used an LLM to port it to MacOS and Linux.

I worked for mid size Insure tech company that has good footprint in the industry and two years ago, LLM were good enough for us to refactor & rewrite major tech debt. Even two years ago, models were already impressive & capable. For me, the timeline been two years and counting.

A year ago I was also doing major refactoring and it saved several months of time (probably wouldn't have even attempted it otherwise). But LLMs still weren't as capable as they are now for more interesting tasks than that. I struggled with an LLM assisted conversion project, eventually just shelved it, and started it again recently and the difference is quite noticeable.

But even so, the entire ecosystem has been changing over this entire time. You might be using an entirely different set of LLM tools now and/or those tools themselves have gotten a lot better and easier to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com