Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.
I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.
I had one prominent "influencer" publicly challenge me to a coding competition over it. It was very weird.
I dont know if that would even matter because it’s not like AI is whispering to people about how good it is. There’s some cult like quality, like with blockchain or whatever, people want to be part of what they think is a major societal revolution, and anything that challenges their world view really shakes them. Presumably they say the same thing about no-coiners or denialists or whatever the AI equivalent is.
Their frame of reference was that, and this was at a time when opus 4.5 was around. Hard to expect a reasonable conversation when one person has such a different view of what the tools are capable of.
But "OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED THE OLD WAY IS DEAD 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE" - no. If that were true, we'd notice it in the software all around us.
I've shipped three software projects in the last two months. I shipped zero in the preceding year.
Right now I'm building a system to decompile MAME ROM games into idiomatic JavaScript. It completes one game in about 3 days - complete with extensive commenting. I started it about 2 weeks ago.
I'm not sure "EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED" but if you're not seeing dramatic change, I suspect you're not looking.
I am not. Congratulations on your side project.
If the people claiming that everything has changed were even a fraction as productive as they think, then it would be visible even to people who weren't looking.
As it is, a lot of people are actively looking but still not seeing it.
In 2 weeks I've built a system to do exactly that. Autonomously.
https://github.com/qarl/arcade-js
If you can't see this - you should probably get your eyes checked.
EDIT: It's doing TimePilot right now. You watch the progress in the commits.
Don't be a jerk. A lot of people have had bad experiences with these systems from people basically saying exactly what you're saying. This "you should get your eyes checked" mentality is pervasive with the nerds who confidently say that their analysis is solid when it's... not. It's a big problem in communities that have non-conventional videogame puzzles for example. Someone will come in, announce some novel solution.... leading to a four hour fight about the efficacy of LLMs, only to find a mistake in their code the next day.. never to be seen again.
Mind you, I'm not saying that these systems aren't great at reverse engineering and whatnot. They're spectacularly good at that. But RE is a relatively constrained problem because everything is still right in front of you. For complicated problems where the signal is mixed between noise... less so.
Where's the rest of it?
And your response was "So what - show me another one."
Even granting that framing though, the claimed increase in productivity isn't a one-off, but asserted for everyone using them; you're claiming mass-produced miracles but trying to depend on a single example.
It must take a binary executable and derive English names for the memory addresses.
The software around us seems worse than ever, constantly breaking and significantly worse than 1-3 decades ago.
Ironically, this is the inverse of the very thing you complained about people doing to you.
I believe this is a larger problem than just AI.
The internet has helped people surround themselves with only voices that agree with them and validate them, often to their detriment.
There are entire online communities urging people to cut others out of their lives over the slightest disagreement.