this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
176 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
88181 readers
3206 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm finding it hard to reconcile the people who find it useless with those who find it useful. My own experience with languages is that it speeds me up for tasks I have the skills to verify, but with ones I don't it can slow me down doing the verification and fixes.
I know software developers in a Fortune 500 company who swear that overall they are far more productive with "agents". I don't know if it's a highly tailored system rather than the more all-purpose ones the general public have. So I do wonder if there are use cases for it.
It's ruining the planet and our societies, though. And it's distracting us from what really matters. Net negative for sure.
Edit: they're also not very good at their most basic tasks. Researchers have found that when the major LLMs summarise articles, it misrepresents the facts 51% of the time.
Yeah strong black/white opinions on AI annoy the hell out of me. I find some AI tooling really helpful like fancy line completions and using conversationalLLMs as a last resort to solving problems, but I hate anything to do with agents or vibe coding in general if only just because I don't want the field I enjoy so much being entirely replaced with being a project manager for a computer.
It makes me frustrated trying to talk about this stuff on Lemmy or other places though because it always ends up being two battling sides of "A SINGLE GENERATED CHARACTER MEANS THE ENTIRE PROJECT IS SLOP!!!" and "ANYONE WHO ISN'T VIBING OUT MILLIONS OF LOC WITH 100 DIFFERENT AGENTS GOING AT ONCE MAY AS WELL JUST KILL THEMSELVES!!!"
My code adjacent work is much faster, but programming itself is about the same.
So if I need to make a data visualization or UI for data input it’s way better, but if I have to do an analysis or build something it sucks all the knowledge out of the task and takes twice as long. At least. Because unless I’m forming a strong understanding of the information the task can’t progress.
I have no idea if LLMs actually make me faster in the aggregate, but I’m more interested in using them to be better. For example, having a LLM review some code, or share a plan for and have it point out all of the flaws in your reasoning or alternatives you never considered.
I find it can speed me up, but it's very easy to become lazy and find myself asking the AI to do things I could do perfectly well myself, quickly and using far less electricity. And then before I know it I have a huge pile of slop that I don't know my way around, and I spend the time on the other end trying to understand and check it all. It feels amazing up front, but you pay later.