I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of pro-AI posts on this platform.
Various posts with titles similar to “When will people stop being afraid of AI” or “Can we please acknowledge AI was very needed for X”
Can’t tell if its the propaganda machine invading, or annoying teenage tech-bros who are detached from reality.
I have been expecting there to be some softening and some people who use AI for coding on the DL here. It really has gotten significantly more common to at least try out tools like Claude Code. But those people aren’t writing articles like that and I’m not seeing them.
If anything it seems to be the reverse. The two most anti-slop people I know in real life are developers that are now unemployed due to slop. Anecdotes, though.
I’ve been encouraged to use Claude Code for work, and by a lot of genuinely very talented engineers. It’s absolutely overhyped if you look at twitter tech bros, and absolutely under hyped if you only read Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, why have you been expecting a softening? From what I’ve seen AI tools for coding have gotten worse recently, not better. And companies are now jacking up the prices, to be more in line with costs. I’ve heard people irl complaining they went from $10 per month to $1000 if they were to continue using it the same way. Most have capped themselves or stopped altogether, as with that price it isn’t worth it anymore.
So my personal experience is more people complaining, but I’m interested in your view.
You have a good point that I missed about pricing that will keep many hobbyists away who can’t run something like Qwen Code locally. I don’t think the models have gotten worse although I don’t have data to back that up, but what I do know is a lot of devs in the private sector I know have gotten onboard recently and they had positive experiences with using it for coding tasks.
So given that it is more likely to me that opinion would soften even here. Most people just don’t care that much about the ethical or philosophical problems of LLMs and pragmatism for solving problems they care about will win out.
Thanks for responding. It’s good to get different people’s opinion about it.
Running stuff locally is really cool, I’ve messed about with it. I think the tech is super interesting, it’s just a shame about all the downsides in the way it’s used right now. Unfortunately what I can run is very limited, my most powerful machine has a 4070 GPU with 12GB of VRAM. The lack of VRAM really limits it to very small models which are fun to play around with, but not for anything serious.
I would love to get my hands on something with more VRAM or one of those unified memory ARM systems. However AI has pushed prices for anything like that into the stratosphere.
I like to hear opinions of people who find it interesting; myself I’ve tried Claude and did not like the experience and don’t use it. I have a similar gaming GPU that could run small models but not ones powerful enough to be very interesting.
Companies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.
The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.
Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.