"I launched an entire product line this weekend" --> meant they created a website with a sign up, …

Getting viral on X is the current replacement for selling courses for {daytrading,amazon FBA,crypto}. The content of the tweets isn't the thing.. bull-posting or invoking Cunningham's Law is. X is the destination for formula posting and some of those blue checkmarks are getting "reach" rev share kickbacks.

“I used AI to make a super profitable stock trading bot” —-> using fake money with historical data “I used AI to make an entire NES emulator in an afternoon!” —-> a project that has been done hundreds of times and posted all over github with plenty of references

Pretty much every x non-political/celeb account with 5K followers+ is a paid influencer shill lol. Welcome to the internet

"I used AI to write a GPU-only MoE forward and backward pass to supplement the manual implementation in PyTorch that only supported a few specific GPUs" -> https://github.com/lostmsu/grouped_mm_bf16 100% vibe coded.

> "I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF There was a story years ago about someone who made hundreds of novels on Amazon, in aggregate they pulled in a decent penny. I wonder if someone's doing the same but with ChatGPT instead.

I actually read through the logs and the code in the rare instances someone actually posts their prompts and the generated output. If I'm being overly cynical about the tech, I want to know. The last one I did it on was breathlessly touted as "I used [LLM] to do some advanced digital forensics!" Dawg. The LLM grepped for a single keyword you gave it and then faffed about putting it into json several times before throwing it away and generating some markdown instead. When you told it the result was bad, it grepped for a second word and did the process again. It looks impressive with all these json files and bash scripts flying by, but what it actually did was turn a single word grep into blog post markdown and you still had to help it. Some of you have never been on enterprise software sales calls and it shows.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really get you that much if you get 70% of the way there on your initial prompt (which you probably spent some time discussing, thinking through, clarifying requirements on). Paid, deliverable work is expected to involve validation, accountability, security, reliability, etc. Taking that 70% solution and adding these things is harder than if a human got you 70% there, because the mistakes LLMs make are designed to look right, while being wrong in ways a sane human would never be. This makes their mistakes easy to overlook, requiring more careful line-by-line review in any domain where people are paying you. They also duplicate code and are super verbose, so they produce a ton tech debt -> more tokens for future agents to clog their contexts with. I like using them, they have real value when used correctly, but I'm skeptical that this value is going to tr…

The worst is Reddit these days. I pretty much never even went there for technical topics at all, just funny memes and such, but one day recently I started seeing crazy AI hype stories getting posted, and sadly I made a huge mistake and I clicked on one once, and now it’s all I get. Endless posts from subs like r/agi, r/singularity, as well as the various product specific subs (for Claude, OpenAI, etc). These aren’t even links to external articles, these are supposedly personal accounts of someone being blown away by what the latest release of this or that model or tool can do. Every single one of these posts boils down to some irritating “game over for software engineers” hype fest, sometimes with skeptical comments calling out the clearly AI-generated text and overblown claims, sometimes not. Usually comments pointing out flaws in whatever’s being hyped are just dismissed with a hand wa…

One of my favorite stories from the dotcom bust is when people, after the bust, said something along the lines of: "Take Pets.com. Who the hell would buy 40lb dogfood bags over the internet? And what business would offer that?? It doesn't make sense at all economically! No wonder they went out of business." Yet here we are, 20 years later, routinely ordering FURNITURE on the internent and often delivered "free". My point being, sure, there is a lot of hype around AI but that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of very useful projects happening.