David GerardNov 10

The key weakness in AI agents is that they're a lie. They don't work. They just don't fuckin' work. You can't set a hallucination engine to work doing tasks. It's pants on head stupid. The hype pretends this isn't the case and hypothesises a fabulous future where they work *at all*. This is a lie.

A useful model for "AI agents" is that they're the current excuse meme for AI. They're not a thing that works at all, now or in the fabulous future. But they're *such* good material for hypecrafting. No sausage at all, but *my god* that sizzle.

Show threadgigantosNov 10

@davidgerard I don’t know what you base this on. It most definitely work for some things, at least some of the time.

For example, someone I know needed to do some stuff with an Arduino to make it show a pretty wave pattern using unevenly distributed led lights. This person was a crafter, not a coder. However, by oploading a hand drawn picture of where the leds where placed it generated a web based simulator with sliders to tweak parameters. Then, when he was happy with the result after tuning the sliders, it generated code for the arduino that compiled and ran perfectly. First try.

It might have been an incredible amount of luck, but this non-technical person got his art project to work without needing to learn anything about code.

Show threadRussellNov 10

@gigantos @davidgerard If they had searched for their exact scenario they probably would have found a blog post with something very similar to what they asked for.

Someone at work showed off their usage of AI so I searched on their question and got an article (from before GPT) with nearly identical results.

Maybe it's enabling some folks to stop thinking inside the box, or self-limiting their capabilities, but that's a different problem than it's being sold as solving.

Show threadgigantos

@zimzat @davidgerard sure. All I’m saying is that it is basically the modern day excel, where everyone and their uncle can get their hacky one time project to do something that resembles what they want.

So it does generate value for some, some of the time.

I’m not arguing it is a replacement for hiring a human

Nov 10 at 2:00pmWeb