Fuck AI

Generally I equate positivity about LLMs with people’s technical ability. I find the more they say AI is good the worse programmer they are.

My experience is that it can work reasonabky well, but you have to waste absurd amount of tokens and have the 1m token context window.

I only do gamedev, which means a little bit more simple scriots, but it could handle even more involved systems.

If i force it to first document and explain the wholw architecture and data flow.

Did it help? Yes, but it still did take only a slightly faster. I could do it in a day more, probably.

It also cost like 50$ in tokens, in today's prices - where every AI company is loosing trillions of money, so the costs will get a lot worse. And if I tried to conserve tokens, it's shit. You have to feed it 10$ of data to be useful.

Add to that the fact that it also causes skill attrition, so once the expensive-cost future arrives, you probsbly won't be able to afford it, and good luck getting your skills back after that.

Our company wants us to use it, and the average token consumption is like 100$ per day in consumer prices. How is that even considered for such a minor gain?

So, I'll pass.

you're obviously prompting it wrong, and/or not using the latest models ~/s~

every time I use it, i waste hours

Yes, exactly this. It looks good, I ask for it to tweak something. It tweaks, but now something else needs adjustment. Then it comes back unusable.

It ends up taking the same time as doing it myself. There’s some value perhaps in either the novelty or engagement that keeps me focused but it’s not more efficient.

When it does work, I’m always worried it is an illusion I’ve missed something. Like how you send an email and immediately see the typo.

People who love it, love it because they don’t need to or care about having accuracy and precision in their work. Sales and marketing, management, etc. Business idiots.

I recently used it to install Nvidia l40s drivers on redhat 9 and pass it through to my Frigate instance. Took me a few minutes. Would have been a lot of reading to find the exact answers manually.

It really depends on the task and the tool. Current MOE models that have agentic hooks can actually be really useful for doing automated tasks. Generally, you don't want to be using AI to create things. What you want to do is hand it a very clear set of instructions along with source material. And then tell it to either iterate build on summarize or in some cases create from that.

I created a simple script with the help of AI to automate scanning files in from an automatic document reader. Convert them to OCRD PDFs. Scan through the document properly. Title the file based on the contents, then create a separate executive summary and then add an index to a master index file of a growing json.

Doing this allowed me to automate several steps that would have taken time and in the end I'm able to just search through my folders and my PDFs and very quickly find any information I need.

And this is only scratching the surface. I wouldn't have AI write me a resume or write me an email or a book. I might use it to generate an image that I then give to a real artist saying this is kind of what was in my head.

But boring stuff repetitive stuff. Things that really benefit from automation with a little bit of reasoning and thinking behind it. That's where we are right now with AI.