What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”
For fuck’s sake.
To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as “AI”. I think it’s fairly useful now, and suspect we’re at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.
What I don’t like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo’s front end, which anonymizes prompts.
As for agents, it’s pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I’m confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.
Yeah “AI” stuff gets a lot of hate around here but I think it works pretty well as a tool for things like information gathering and analysis. Wouldn’t trust it to go off taking actions by itself either though.
It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.
Aka reliable technology
Most people didn’t even trust algorithmic automation before agents came along. lol
So you’re decided not to use a useful tool, because you don’t like it. Gotcha.
I once thought the fediverse was full of cool, techsavy people. Turned out it’s full of old people yelling at clouds.
You have your definition of useful, I have mine. Maybe predictability is important to many others, but not to you.
Besides, “not liking it” sounds like a pretty legit reason for not using something, lol. Would you listen to music if you didn’t like it?
Music is NOT a tool.
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
And this argument about different definitions is fundamentally dishonest under a comment that say broadly we don’t like AI. I have my definitions of interesting, useful and fun. But if I would make a post about, I would be torn apart here, lol.
Music is NOT a tool.
I use music as a tool to relax. If the music isn’t relaxing, I don’t like it, and I won’t listen to it. See how that works?
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
No, it’s like using a jackhammer when you need a chisel. You have to repair most of the shit instead of doing it right the first time.
And you get progressively worse at using the chisel when you only use a jackhammer for everything.
I think music is so much more than a tool. But I‘m not here to argue over music. I get your point.
So you don’t see any merit in current AI at all? Do you thin it will vanish like the blockchain fad?
I think music is so much more than a tool.
Of course it is, I also listen to music other times when I don’t treat it as a tool, but for pleasure and entertainment. But I also use it at times only as a tool, that’s all.
So you don’t see any merit in current AI at all? Do you thin it will vanish like the blockchain fad?
I see plenty of merit in AI. AI has already been used to do really meaningful things for humans, such as in medicine, mathematics, etc, lots of stuff in the research fields and stuff.
But it’s very important to remember that the more work we offload to robots, the worse we’ll become at doing that work ourselves. Neural pathways deteriorate when not used. And I don’t want to become an expert in code review, because I don’t think that’s fun. I want to remain an expert in producing code. And when AI does the reviewing part, too, what the fuck am I left with? Being some kind of DevOp, orchestrating the agents of my laptop? That’s not fun for me.
Maybe in the future AI will actually be able to do quality code and quality software development methods the entire way from idea to production, but I want to code. I am a software engineer. It’s what I was trained to do, and it’s my craft.
It’s like asking someone who is into pottery for a living and has a small business where they do everything by hand, to give that up in order to make cheap ceramic/porcelain plates with no ornamentation, no soul, in a factory. They wouldn’t be interested. That’s me.
Some tools are useless, period.
I think AI is like being given an automatic screwdriver with the speed maxed to shit. If you pay super close attention, you might be able to do things faster, with hypervigilance and expert knowledge. In most cases, though, you won’t. Congratulations, you have screwed in 100 screws, mostly incorrectly and stripped, when everyone else did 30, and you have fucked over the people who have to fix your shit.
Good analogy! But I disagree.
Tech savvy groups have always included a significant amount of well established people unhappy with how technology is being implemented or used - who then, yes, yell at clouds. Hell, a lot of us still literally yell about the Cloud.
Paraphrasing a management quote I found a few decades ago - if the engineers aren’t complaining about something, it’s not because they’re happy. It means they’re complaining where you can’t hear them.
I‘m not fully in favour of LMMs by the way. They have their quirks, to put it mildly and are not suited for everything. I think they’re most effective with with someone who knows how to use them and when not to use them. I’m also highly suspicious against those AI companies and their CEOs.
I’ve had Gemini downright lie or completely fuck up before and it’s not a rare occurrence. That means you have to verify everything anyway and hell at that point maybe you should have just looked it up yourself.
First of: When? Few months make a huge difference. Development happens fast.
Second: Gemini is not the top of the line. You could do worse - if you use the fucking LLMs from meta.
Use it two years ago. It is wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Use it a month later. It is still wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Repeat for months on end. It is always wrong in different ways. It even finds new and unique ways to be wrong.
“It’s getting better EVERY DAY!”
Every time.
Personally, I just think the dipshits who use LLMs are just fucking morons that don’t realize it’s wrong, or they wouldn’t use it because it is still shit. But, fuck me for not wanting to use the planet-destroying technology that lies for pennies.
At first I was bit mad to be called a dipshit, but hey, what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed. Lol, you’re right of course. It’s just ChatGPT 3.5 that finds all those bugs in the Linux kernel.
You just don’t know, don’t you. You probably even don’t know the difference between a chatbot and an Agent. All you know is empty phrases and hyperbolic statements. You know, it’s fine. Get your upvotes from your ignorant, uninformed circlejerk and yell at the clouds. Good luck.
…what do you say to someone who can’t grasp the concept of something being actively worked on and improved. You know, of something being developed.
In that case, maybe they should take down what they’ve released to production until they finish the development. It isn’t finished yet.
Those bugs that generative AI found in Linux were some old bugs that, and I cannot stress this enough, required elevated access to your system and only crashed the machine. Basically, it wasn’t found because it never actually affected anybody, but sure, take your win. You were lacking them.
And hey man, if you caught some strays on that comment, maybe consider going outside. There are people out there that could enjoy being around you if you stopped talking about AI! They are rather nice because they typically like other people and don’t call them Luddites for not wanting to kill the planet tp avoid writing an email.
But, sure, let’s play the dumbfuck game where AI proponents use their definitions to pretend that a chatbot (a thing that doesn’t really matter to LLMs in general since they’ve existed for fucking decades) and an agent (basically the same shit as an LLM but directed) are things that truly matter in the discourse. They don’t. People that don’t want their brain rotted from the inside out just hate AI. Not wanting to turn your brain off seems pretty fucking normal to me, but maybe it doesn’t to you because the thoughts in your head are a nightmare to experience.
My issue is that people have been saying “yeah, it’s a bit iffy, but it’ll get better” since 2022. It’s been four years. When is it actually gonna get better… enough?
Based on my understanding of the underlying tech, it will always have some level of making shit up. That, combined with the fact that all of these companies are spending more money running data centers than they have coming in, implies to me that this tech (at least in the current form of cloud-based chatbots) isn’t staying around long-term. No one is actually making money off of it except the hardware vendors. None of these AI companies are what my grandpa would’ve called a “going concern.” So I haven’t felt much desire to get into it.
I typically like new technology as it comes out, but I haven’t found LLM’s to be very impressive or inspiring.
I know Gemini isn’t the top. It’s all I’m willing to tolerate.
That doesn’t make any sense.:
„This sub-par product of an evil mega corporation that uses their market power to shove this product down everyone’s throat is all I’m willing to tolerate.“
As bad as Antrophic and openAI are, their product is better and they don’t embed it into phones and search engines. (Not saying they wouldnt‘t if they have the chance, but they haven’t)
It makes sense. I’m not spending a dime… I’m not signing up and giving my credentials out to any other AI … I already have Google . Gemini is good enough for the things I look up monus occasionally being dead wrong which all of them can do. I don’t make stupid memes or videos.
Yeah okay. I understand the monetary angle.
However I also have never spent a dime on AI, and I don’t use Gemini. I run Qwen3.6 on my graphics card, or use opencodes free tier. Deepseek-v4- flash is pretty good.
I’ve read a comment recently that Googles local Gemma models hallucinate less than Gemini, but I don’t know if that’s true, since I hardly use Gemma and Gemini not at all.
I recommend downloading some local models and a harness like pi or opencode if you want to play around an have the hardware for it.
No, I’ve decided not to use a tool that isn’t fit for purpose. Studies have consistently shown that people think they’re much more productive on LLMs than they actually are, and the side effects of cognitive debt and skill loss aren’t worth the often imaginary productivity gains.
Combine that with the awful financials of OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google’s Gemini, and you’ve got the makings of a really nasty situation.
Say I come to depend on Claude Code for all my coding, and build an entire workflow around it. I get used to spending thousands of dollars a month for access, and tell myself it’s worth it for the imaginary productivity gains (although what’s actually happening is that I’m just producing a shit-ton of garbage code no one has any hope of understanding).
Then Anthropic reaches the point where they run out of investor money to spend, and fold because even charging developers like me thousands of dollars doesn’t even begin to cover their costs, and I’m one of their rare customers who are loyal, versus the bulk of developers who use up their free allotments of tokens and then model-hop.
Now what? My workflow is broken, I’ve forgotten how to code, and nothing I’ve produced recently is human-readable.
No thanks. I’m not an old man yelling at clouds, I’m a software developer who can recognize a problem when I see one.
Sir this is lemmy. Most people here just follow whatever the echo chamber tells them to. Thinking or referencing reality is typically not advised.
I know. Kind of sad.
Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.
Are we considered “normal people” though?
Quite a few of the people I know and consider “normal” openly dislike AI.
I’m not sure it’s a majority opinion buts it’s not an obscure one.
I think Ai hate might be the single most unifying position in the west right now.
I don’t think so. No average blue collar worker I know hates AI. They think its a fun, free toy.
Who’s houses are the datacenters being built next to?
If you want to get mad about possible plans that have not yet been made, you need the increasingly rare gift of foresight
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
The pasta manufacturer and the tomato farmer would like to have a word with your metaphor.
Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. “All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait…” While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.
When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. “Don’t say anything, and eventually you’ll be put through.”
Yes, I’m a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank’s human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.
(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn’t a complete bust…)
Don’t these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?
It’s difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.
To me, it’s not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.
I’m the other fence. My daily reporting has 12-15 documents output, that I then previously had to spend 3-5 hours moving this item over to this form, and that item over to that form, and management wants everything to be kept locked PDF so no excel macros can be used… upload everything to claude, let it run. Sure… sure, itll make errors here and there… but no one actually checks what these documents pop out… only that they’re there. And that alone, has cut my workload by half. So, thanks AI for giving me my time back, and thanks boomer bosses, for not knowing how to do basic computer tasks badly enough they will never figure it out!
The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks.
I don’t really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don’t use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?
When someone proudly express their enthusiasm for AI, I immediately think less of that person.
There are loads of reasons normal people aren’t using AI Agents. This article doesn’t give any of the ones I’d think of.
The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don’t understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.
It’s not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they’re not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. “Normal people” accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little “normal people” jobs and “normal people” lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It’s signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.
Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It’s not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it’s still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.
The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don’t like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn’t charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over… well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it’s no secret there’s also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.
Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It’s been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They’re not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with… the charity of the ultra wealthy? That’s nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we’re redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).
I’m not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn’t see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.
And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that “using” something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren’t asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it’s simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they’re not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.
None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren’t reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it’s not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.
I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it
May I ask what the use case was?
It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.
Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.
Even before computers I didn’t need, nor want, anyone’s help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human’s independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly “AI” subscription.
I don’t work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn’t already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist
But surely you need a program to direct your attention to those programs, otherwise how would you know what you’re supposed to be doing? You need to have another power hungry program running that uses a full center worth of processing power to… *checks notes* …do what your google now homepage used to do.
Normal people don’t use VS Code either… what’s a silly article
I don’t use a scalpel… so I guess scalpels are stupid and Surgeons are idiots?
If a scalpel manufacture became 10% (currently AI is at this level) of our total economy but only .006% (percentage of surgeons to population) of people needed them it would be a major problem.
You have to remember that the current investment level assumes that somehow everyone is going to use the AI stuff that much. It won’t do if the only heavy usage is code generation.
Stop normalizing LLMs as productivity machines.
I’ve started to call people AI-assisted
There was an actual term I learned the other day, it was something along the lines of Thinking Dissonance but I can’t remember the exact term.
