> I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I recently listened to a podcast (probably The Verge) talking about how an author was suddenly getting more purchases from his personal website. He attributed it to AI chatbots giving his personal website as the best place to buy rather than Amazon, etc. An AI browser might be a way to take power away from all the big players.
> And it's not for a lack of trying, the results are just not what I need or want, and traditional browsing (and search engines, etc.) does do what I want.
I suspect I only Google for about 1/4 of things I used to (maybe less). Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
While I am a techie and I do use Firefox -- that's not a growing niche. I think AI will become spectacularly better for non-techies because it can simply give them what they ask for. LLMs have solved the natural language query issue.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
Sure, but people also told me I'd be using crypto for everything now and (at least for me) it has faded into total obscurity.
The biggest difference for me is that nobody (the companies making things, the companies I worked for...) had to jam smartphones down my throat. It made my life better so I went out of my way to use it. If you took it away, I would be sad.
I haven't had that moment yet for any AI product / feature.
Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
> Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
I think half the people who think AI is incredibly dumb and can't understand why anyone is using it is because they're using the free samples. This whole thing is so horribly expensive that they lose money even on people who pay therefore the free samples are necessarily as minimal as they can get away with.
The free samples worked famously initially to get people to try it initially, though.
But whenever that free Gemini text pops up in my search, I know why people think it's stupid. But that's not the experience I have with paid options.
> Why ... wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
Funnily enough, this is exactly how I justify Googling stuff instead of asking Gemini. Different strokes I guess!
> > I use zero so-called "AI" features in my day to day life. None. Not one.
> I know so many people who made that same argument, if you can call it that, about smartphones.
I had to use a ledger database at work for audit trails because they were hotness. I think we were one of the few that actually used AWS QLDB.
The experience I've had with people submitting AI generated code has been poor. Poor performing code, poor quality code using deprecated methods and overly complex functionality, and then poor understanding of why the various models chose to do it that way.
I've not actually seen a selling point for me, and "because Google is enshittifying its searches" is pretty weak.
I've been posting recently how I refactored a few different code bases with the help of AI. Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller. AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe: incredibly powerful but only if you understand exactly what you're doing otherwise it will happily make a big mess.
if you have to understand exactly what you're doing, why not just... do it?
That question completely misunderstands what AI is for. Why would I just do it when the AI did it for me in less time that I could myself and mechanically in a way that is arguably harder for a human to do? AI is surprisingly good at identifying all the edge cases.
i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?
but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.
It seems to me you're coming in with a negative preconceptions (e.g. "insipid, pandering chatbot"). What part about coding is fun for you? What part is boring? Keep the fun bits and take the boring bits and have the LLM do those.
> Faster code, higher quality code, overall smaller.
I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
> AI is not a hammer, it's a Lathe
I would liken it more to dynamite.
> I'll have to take your word for it, I have yet to see a PR that used AI that wasn't slop.
How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
Why would I accept slop out of the AI? I don't. So I don't have any.
I don't understand the disconnect here. Some people really want to be extremely negative about this pretty amazing technology while the rest of us have just incorporated it into our workflow.
> How would you know a non-slop PR didn't use AI?
I don't, hence why I have to take your word for it.
The PRs that people have submitted where they either told me up front or admitted to using AI after the review probed as to why they would be inconsistent in their library usage were not good and required substantial rework.
Yes, some people may submit PRs that used AI and were good. But if so, they haven't told me but I would have hoped that people advocating it would have either told me or got me to review, said it is good, and then told me it was a test and the AI passed. So far that hasn't happened, so I'm not convinced it's a regular occurrence.
Maybe the problem with understanding the benefits of AI is that you are relying on other people to use AI properly. As the direct user myself, I don't have that problem.
I'm using it to make things better rather than just producing. Even just putting it in agent mode and saying "look at all my code and tell me where I can make it better" is an interesting exercise. Some suggestions I take, some I don't.
> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?
For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.