> why don´t we stop pretending that we as users are stupid and don´t know how to use them
This is in response to someone who saw a bunch of URLs coming out of it and was surprised at a bunch of them being wrong. That's using the tool wrong. It's like being surprised that the top results in google/app store/play store aren't necessarily the best match for your query but actually adverts!
If you're trying to one shot stuff with a few sentences then yes you might be using these things wrong. I've seen people with PhDs fail to use google successfully to find things, were they idiots? If you're using them wrong you're using them wrong - I don't care how smart you are in other areas. If you can't hand off work knowing someones capabilities then that's a thing you can't do - and that's ok. I've known unbelievably good engineers who couldn't form a solid plan to solve a business problem or collaboratively work to get something done to save their life. Those are different skills. But gpt5-codex and sonnet 4 / 4.5 can solidly write code, gpt-5-pro with web search can really dig into things, and if you can manage what they can do you can hand off work to them. If you've only ever worked with juniors with a feeling of "they slow everything down but maybe someday they'll be as useful as me" then you're less likely to succeed at this.
Let's do a quick overview of recent chats for me:
* Identifying and validating a race condition in some code
* Generating several approaches to a streaming issue, providing cost analyses of external services and complexity of 3 different approaches about how much they'd change the code
* Identifying an async bug two good engineers couldn't find in a codebase they knew well
* Finding performance issues that had gone unnoticed
* Digging through synapse documentation and github issues to find a specific performance related issue
* Finding the right MSC for a feature I wanted to use but didn't know existed - and then finding the github issue that explained how it was only half implemented and how to enable the experimental other part I needed
* Building a bunch of UI stuff for a short term contract I needed, saving me a bunch of hours and the client money
* Going through funding opportunities and matching them against a charity I want to help in my local area
* Building a search integration for my local library to handle my kids reading challenge
* Solving a series of VPN issues I didn't understand
* Writing a lot of astro related python for an art project to cover the loss of some NASA images I used to have access to.
> the folks pushing or better said
If you don't want to trust them, don't. Also don't believe the anti-hype merchants who want to smugly say these tools can't do a god damn thing. They're trying to get attention as well.
> Trust me, it sucks
Ok. I'm convinced.
> and under-delivers.
Compared to what promise?
> I am sure we will see those 10x apps rolling in soon, right?
Did I argue that? If you want to look at some massive improvements, I was able to put up UIs to share results & explore them with a client within minutes rather than it taking me a few hours (which from experience it would have done).
> It's only been like 4 years since the revolutionary magic machine was announced.
It's been less than 3 since chatgpt launched, which if you'd been in the AI sphere as long as I had (my god it's 20 years now) absolutely was revolutionary. Over the last 4 years we've seen gpt3 solve a bunch of NLP problems immediately as long as you didn't care about cost to gpt-5-pro with web search and codex/sonnet being able to explore a moderately sized codebase and make real and actual changes (running tests and following up with changes). Given how long I spent stopping a robot hitting the table because it shifted a bit and its background segmentation messed up, or fiddling with classifiers for text, the idea I can get a summary from input without training is already impressive and then to be able to say "make it less wanky" and have it remove the corp speak is a huge shift in the field.
If your measure of success is "the CEOs of the biggest tech orgs say it'll do this soon and I found a problem" then you'll be permanently disappointed. It'd be like me sitting here saying mobile phones are useless because I was told how revolutionary the new chip in an iphone was in a keynote.
Since you don't seem to want to read most of this, most isn't for you. The last bit is, and it's just one question:
Why are you paying for something that solves literally no problems for you?
The CEO of Anthropic said I can fire all of my developers soon. How could one possibly be using the tool wrong? /s
