this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Yeah, the sellout.

[–] grapefruittrouble@lemmy.zip 82 points 2 days ago (4 children)

From reading all the comments from the community, it’s amazing (yet not surprising) that all these managers have fallen for the marketing of all these LLMs. These LLMs have gotten people from all levels of society to just accept the marketing without ever considering the actual results for their use cases. It’s almost like the sycophant nature of all LLMs has completely blinded people from being rational just because it is shiny and it spoke to them in a way no one has in years.

On the surface level, LLMs are cool no doubt, they do have some uses. But past that everyone needs to accept their limitations. LLMs by nature can not operate the same as a human brain. AGI is such a long shot because of this and it’s a scam that LLMs are being marketed as AGI. How can we attempt to recreate the human brain into AGI when we are not close to mapping out how our brains work in a way to translate that into code, let alone other more simple brains in the animal kingdom.

[–] iglou@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago

I agree with almost all of your comment. The only part I disagree on is:

How can we attempt to recreate the human brain into AGI when we are not close to mapping out how our brains work in a way to translate that into code, let alone other more simple brains in the animal kingdom.

An implementation of AGI does not need to be inspired from the human brain, or any existing organic brain. Nothing tells us organic brains are the optimal way to develop intelligence. In fact, I'd argue it's not.

That being said, it doesn't change the conclusion: We are nowhere near AGI, and LLMs being marketed as such is absolutely a scam.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

One of the best written comments I've seen about this. LLMs are cool for what they can do, but anyone comparing them to AGI is just shilling and trying to make a fortune off of selling pickaxes in a gold rush.

[–] ziproot@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago

From reading all the comments from the community, it’s amazing (yet not surprising) that all these managers have fallen for the marketing of all these LLMs

This is probably related to automation bias and wishful thinking

[–] sobchak@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't think LLMs will become AGI, but... planes don't fly by flapping their wings. We don't necessarily need to know how animal brains work to achieve AGI, and it doesn't necessarily have to work anything like animal brains. It's quite possible if/when AGI is achieved, it will be completely alien.

[–] grapefruittrouble@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

We don't necessarily need to know how animal brains work to achieve AGI, and it doesn't necessarily have to work anything like animal brains.

100% agree. Definitely thinking inside the box, inside the brain, when I went down that path.

I think better way to explain my thinking is that LLMs can not operate like a human brain in that they fundamentally lack almost all qualities of a human brain. They are good but not perfect at logic just like humans, but they completely lack creativity, intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense, qualities that would make AGI.

Without humans being able to understand how our brains process those qualities, it will be very hard to achieve AGI. But again, very wrong of me to think we need to translate code from our brains to achieve AGI.

[–] qaeta@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day ago

Aircraft wings operate on pretty much the same principle as bird wings do. We just used a technology we had already developed (fans, essentially) to create the forward movement necessary to create the airflow over the wings for lift. We know how to do it the bird way too, but restrictions in material science at scale make the fan method far easier and less error prone.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 262 points 2 days ago (4 children)

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Yep.

Management is often out of touch and full of shit

[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 7 points 1 day ago

If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

Eggs-mothafucking-zackly!!!

There are no daily pressure campaigns to convince you to use a laptop or a smartphone. The value of those are self-evident.

AI on the other hand... -_-

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 90 points 2 days ago (3 children)

You wanna know who really bags on LLMs? Actual AI developers. I work with some, and you've never heard someone shit all over this garbage like someone who works with neural networks for a living.

[–] exu@feditown.com 45 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There's this great rage blog post from 1.5 years ago by a data scientist

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

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[–] Peekashoe@lemmy.wtf 30 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Management: "No, that doesn't work, because employees spend so much time doing the actual work that they lack the vision to know what's good for them. Luckily for them I am not distracted by actual work so I have the vision to save them by making them use AI."

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[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 92 points 2 days ago (6 children)

I can’t wait until billionaires realize how worthless they actually are without people doing everything for them

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

We can't to wait for them to realize this themselves. We need to demonstrate this by actively creating a society which excludes them.

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[–] bhamlin@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Might be a minute. The brain damage that lets them think they've "earned" those billions kinda hides the work of others. Especially the poors.

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[–] hector@lemmy.today 27 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They will never realize that, they will blame any failures on others naturally. They truly believe they are better than everyone else, that their superior ability led them to invest in a company that increased in value enough for them to become filthy rich.

Surrounded by yes men and woman that agree with everything they say and tell them what a genius they are. Of course any ill outcome isn't their fault.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 6 points 1 day ago

"All my successes are thanks to my superior intellect and skill! All my failures are the fault of bad serfs who didn't follow my vision!" - Every billionaire

When you think about it, it's not too different from how some people treat the current crop of AI, so it makes sense that they're so hypnotized by the promises.

[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Eh, as the world goes to shit there will always be desperate people willing to work for them, probably cheaper than before even with the AI failures, so they wouldn't care.

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Very few billionaires built from their own effort. Authors and Musicians? The guy who made Minecraft? Khaby Lame?

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[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 85 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I had a meeting with my boss today about my AI usage. I said I tried using Claude 4.5, and I was ultimately unimpressed with the results, the code was heavy and inflexible. He assured me Claude 4.6 would solve that problem. I pointed out that I am already writing software faster than the rest of the team can review because we are short staffed. He suggested I use Claude to review my MRs.

[–] sepi@piefed.social 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

One big problem with management is their inability to listen. Folks say shit over and over but management seems deaf because we're not people to be listened to. We're the help. And management acts like they know better.

[–] portifornia@piefed.social 1 points 21 hours ago

This has been my life for the last nine months. I'm thinking of getting of software development all together for fear that no other place will be any different regarding AI.

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 4 points 1 day ago

This is a major issue with capitalism. It is a massively inefficient way to organize society. The people with the most money do not necessarily make good decisions. They usually make selfish decisions.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 day ago

If you were so smart you'd have wads of cash like them. They got where they are through sheer grit and bootstraps and a paltry $50 million from their family.

[–] mPony@kbin.earth 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

next time, tell your boss that Claude should replace him, not you.

[–] BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

It's not like MIT and the Harvard business review have published studies that have shown that AI is actually best suited to replacing executives and management in order to flatten organizations. But unfortunately, management and executives make the decisions on who AI replaces, and they don't want to be replaced. Hell at the company I'm at right now they've been axing low level workers and bringing on or promoting the ladder climbers (read: AI sycophants who do the least work) to manager or department head roles, saying that us grunts can "10x" to fill the gaps, and that all we need is good and creative leadership to direct our AI use. I could go off on things this business is doing to shoot itself in the foot for hours, even without mentioning AI

[–] TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The trick is to tell them you've been using it more than they have and that it's not as good as chatGPT for task A, but that for task B claude does okay 25% of the time so we'll need to 4x the timeline in order to get a good claude output based on that expected value.

But not as good as your personal local LLM that you've been training on company data. No one else can use it because it's illegal to clone. (your personal local LLM is your brain)

[–] mech@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Telling your boss you trained a personal LLM with company data will lead to nothing but you holding a box full of your stuff about 10 minutes later.

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[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Ralph Wiggum loop that shit

Numbers go up, Claude won’t bother you 👍🏻

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[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 125 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (12 children)

At work today we had a little presentation about Claude Cowork. And I learned someone used it to write a C (maybe C++?) compiler in Rust in two weeks at a cost of $20k and it passed 99% of whatever hell test suite they use for evaluating compilers. And I had a few thoughts.

  • 99% pass rate? Maybe that's super impressive because it's a stress test, but if 1% of my code fails to compile I think I'd be in deep shit.
  • 20k in two weeks is a heavy burn. Imagine if what it wrote was... garbage.
  • "Write a compiler" is a complete project plan in three words. Find a business project that is that simple and I'll show you software that is cheaper to buy than build. We are currently working on an authentication broker service at work and we've been doing architecture and trying to get everyone to agree on a design for 2 months. There are thousands of words devoted to just the high level stuff, plus complex flow diagrams.
  • A compiler might be somewhat unique in the sense that there are literally thousands of test cases available - download a foss project and try to compile it. If it fails, figure out the bug and fix it. Repeat. The ERP that your boss wants you to stand up in a month has zero test coverage and is going to be chock full of bugs — if for no other reason than you haven't thought through every single edge case and neither has the AI because lots of times those are business questions.
  • There is not a single person who knows the code base well enough to troubleshoot any weird bugs and transient errors.

I think this is a cool thing in the abstract. But in reality, they cherry picked the best possible use case in the world and anyone expecting their custom project is going to go like this will be lighting huge piles of money on fire.

[–] CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wanna make sure I got this right. They used $20,000 in fees in 2 weeks to make a compiler? Also, to what end? Like what's the expected ROI on that?

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well it's Anthropic, creators of Claude. It's a way to show off and convince people AI can do it. $20k is what it would cost you or me, but it's just free for them.

I don't even hate AI but it's kinda sickening the way they overstate the capabilities. But let me tell you how excited the top leadership at my company is about this...

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

$20k is what it would cost you or me, but it’s just free for them.

No it isn't. This is not regular software where the bulk of the price is the licensing. With slope-as-a-service, the bulk of the price is the data center operation cost - which Anthropic is certainly not getting for free.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean there is a cost associated with it, just like there is a cost associated with having free soda in the break room, but it was free for the person doing the project. It's absorbed into operational costs.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Considering how these companies are losing money because they subsidize these tokens - I doubt that cost is really absorbed.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It's even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can "solve" simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Hey, so I started this comment to disagree with you and correct some common misunderstandings that I've been fighting against for years. Instead, as I was formulating my response, I realized you're substantially right and I've been wrong — or at least my thinking was incomplete. I figured I'd mention because the common perception is arguing with strangers on the internet never accomplishes anything.

LLMs are not fundamentally the plagiarism machines everyone claims they are. If a model reproduces any substantial text verbatim, it's because the LLM is overtrained on too small of a data set and the solution is, somewhat paradoxically, to feed it more relevant text. That has been the crux of my argument for years.

That being said, Anthropic and OpenAI aren't just LLM models. They are backed by RAG pipelines which are verbatim text that gets inserted into the context when it is relevant to the task at hand. And that fact had been escaping my consideration until now. Thank you.

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[–] SMillerNL@piefed.social 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)
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[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

99% pass rate? Maybe that’s super impressive because it’s a stress test, but if 1% of my code fails to compile I think I’d be in deep shit.

Also - one of the main arguments of vibe coding advocators is that you just need to check the result several times and tell the AI assistant what needs fixing. Isn't a compiler test suite ideal for such workflow? Why couldn't they just feed the test failures back to the model and tell it to fix them, iterating again and again until they get it to work 100%?

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

Maybe they did, that's how they got to 99%. The remaining issues are so intricate/complex the LLM just can't solve them no matter how many test cases you give it.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 35 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Agree with all points. Additionally, compilers are also incredibly well specified via ISO standards etc, and have multiple open source codebases available, eg GCC which is available in multiple builds and implementations for different versions of C and C++, and DQNEO/cc.go.

So there are many fully-functional and complete sources that Claude Cowork would have pulled routines and code from.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 27 points 2 days ago (2 children)

A C compiler in two weeks is a difficult, but doable, grad school class project (especially if you use lex and yacc instead of hand-coding the parser). And I guarantee 80 hours of grad student time costs less than $20k.

Frankly, I'm not impressed with the presentation in your anecdote at all.

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 58 points 2 days ago

Man, corporate layoffs kill productivity completely for me.

Once you do layoffs >50% of the job becomes performative bullshit to show you’re worth keeping, instead of building things the company actually needs to function and compete.

And the layoffs are random with a side helping of execs saving the people they have face time with.

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