How can you still can't distinguish between using LLMs as tools and a non technical person vibe coding? I have yet to run into any serious software engineer that had to dive into a legacy codebase or an unknown tech stack and found no value in e.g. Claude Code for general understanding and refactoring. Not even talking about coding, just the capacity of generating custom contextualised documentation and examples tailored to your constraints and skills on the fly is ridiculously helpful.

The tool being useful sometimes does not support the statement that we are "past the point" of not using LLMs.

I’m not sure because in many modern open world games you are just like a Uber driver following GPS from checkpoint to checkpoint. It would with old school games that relied on memorizing the world and had minimal or even no map indications.

I feel like a dark souls game has a similar learning pattern where you need to memorize the move sets of bosses. It taps into that dynamic pattern recognition that traffic would cause for taxi drivers

DayZ is another one because there is no in-game GPS. You have to use maps and compasses to figure your route and many people can spot an exact area on the massive map by a picture of a bush

The reasoning is by being polite the LLM is more likely to stay on a professional path: at its core a LLM try to make your prompt coherent with its training set, and a polite prompt + its answer will score higher (gives better result) than a prompt that is out of place with the answer. I understand to some people it could feel like anthropomorphising and could turn them off but to me it's purely about engineering.

Edit: wording

> The reasoning is by being polite the LLM is more likely to stay on a professional path

So no evidence.

> If the result of your prompt + its answer it's more likely to score higher i.e. gives better result that a prompt that feels out of place with the answer

Sure seems like this could be the case with the structure of the prompt, but what about capitalizing the first letter of sentence, or adding commas, tag questions etc? They seem like semantics that will not play any role at the end

Writing is what gives my thinking structure. Sloppy writing feels to me like sloppy thinking. My fingers capitalize the first letter of words, proper nouns and adjectives, and add punctuation without me consciously asking them to do so.

Why wouldn't capitalization, commas, etc do well?

These are text completion engines.

Punctuation and capitalization is found in polite discussion and textbooks, and so you'd expect those tokens to ever so slightly push the model in that direction.

Lack of capitalization pushes towards text messages and irc perhaps.

We cannot reason about these things in the same way we can reason about using search engines, these things are truly ridiculous black boxes.

> Lack of capitalization pushes towards text messages and irc perhaps.

Might very well be the case, I wonder if there's some actual research on this by people that have some access to the the internals of these black boxes.

That's orthography, not semantics, but it's still part of the professional style steering the model on the "professional path" as GP put it.

For me it is just a good habit that I want to keep.

I remember studies that showed that being mean with the LLM got better answers, but by the other hand I also remember an study showing that maximizing bug-related parameters ended up with meaner/malignant LLMs.

Surely this could depend on the model, and I'm only hypothesizing here, but being mean (or just having a dry tone) might equal a "cut the glazing" implicit instruction to the model, which would help I guess.

Uber and Airbnb have network effects. You cant increase price when there is no cost in switching.

I dont see how network effects applies to Uber/Airbnb because nothing stops drivers/hosts from listing their property in multiple such apps

People continue using Airbnb because that's where the properties are listed. And owners keep listing properties because that's where the users are.

My point was that nothing stops hosts from listing their properties in AirBnb as well as a competitor. Unless AirBnb penalizes delisting or enforces price parity I guess?

Do you understand network effects? It’s not hand cuffs. I can also sell my rare baseball cards outside of ebay. But…

When the incumbent shoot themselves in the foot. Google and Microsoft are consultancy driven bureaucracies with abysmal product culture. At best Google will be the one providing the back end, but it’s very unlikely to me they’ll win the end user product space.

The problem is not that individual action is not useful, it’s that governments and companies are actively discouraging it, because every success for climate change is a bad news item. People buying less cars? Climate change win, economic problem. People buying less stuff, consumption down? Huge climate change win, very bad economic news. Even on progressive news outlets they’re doing it.

Here in Europe even before Trump’s second mandate it was clear governments didn’t really want individual action to take off. And it’s even worse now. Because short and mid term it’s a choice between climate and GDP. And western governments and companies are fundamentally incapable of long term action that is painful short term.

I would agree with you, except that the government (eg. in Germany) even battle climate tech when it’s good for the country and the economy. WHO wouldn’t want to be energy independent?

And yet, the Conservative Party in germany once killed the entire solar industry (who then moved to china); and is about to do it again, now! Both times we are losing about 50k jobs in that sector.

The question is: why would they do that, if the economy is oh so important to the conservatives?

I get your general point but specifically regarding :

> have it diarized, send out minutes, grab relevant info and surface it before the next relevant meeting

Slack already has this integrated and it works quite well.

Also, since AI will mean most are just let go, why would they need meeting minutes? AI would be so crucial as to be the make or break phone/laptop feature, but people would still have meetings?

At best they will use it to tell them for special offers that they can buy with food coupons.

> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

No, it's more like some folks like me are passionate about building/creating things that are useful or enjoyable, not about the tooling itself. I learned to use computers because I wanted to make things with them, like music. I got into programming because I wanted to create video games and apps. I enjoy programming because I'm passionate about the end result, but not about programming itself. Look at other engineering disciplines, do civil engineers complain that they are not paving the roads themselves?

I don't find it's a new mentality on Hacker News, to me it was always about broadening the hacker mentality outside of programming. Maybe it's more like the Venn diagram of people passionate about computers and programming for the sake of it and software engineers and builders used to completely overlap, but it is starting to drift, so the fact that we belong to different crowd is becoming more apparent.

Except this time it's the main banks doing it?