Post by @tburkhol@lemmy.world

2026-04-20 10:18 UTC

I feel like the big mistake they continue to propagate is failing to distinguish among the uses of AI. A lot of hype seems to be the generative uses, where AI creates code, images, text, or whatever, or the agentic uses where it supposedly automates some process. Safe uses in that way should involve human review and approval, and if the human spends as much time reviewing as they would creating it in the first place, then there's a productivity loss. All the positive cases I've heard of use AI like a fancy search engine - look for specific issues in a large code base, look for internal consistency in large document or document sets. That form lets the human shift from reading hundreds or thousands of pages to reading whatever snippets the AI returns. Even if that's a lot of false positives, it's still a big savings over full review. And as long as the AI's false-negative rate is better than the human, it's a net improvement in review. And, of course, there's the possibility that AI facilitated review allows companies to do review of documents that they would otherwise have ignored as intractable, which would also show up as reduced productivity.

Replies (2)

@ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 13:23

In that scenario where AI is used to find specific code snippets or other matching text blocks, the false positives aren't really the problem. The false negatives are the issue. I've run into that myself a few times when trying to use AI. You give it a very clear prompt to find something and it sometimes just falls flat on its face. It's easy for the AI evangelists to just blame the human who wrote the prompt, or say "you didn't give it enough context!" But anyone who's tried using AI and is being objective about it will tell you that's a weak excuse that doesn't hold water a good chunk of the time. You can give it plenty of context, and be very clear, and it still doesn't find all the examples that clearly match the prompt. Ultimately, you often have better luck using a well-crafted regular expression to search for text than using AI. And that seems like the crux of the issue (which you also highlight). While there are some very good use cases for AI, it's being waaaay over-used. And too often its faults are dismissed or glossed over.

Open ##1465349
@IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 12:25

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced. While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

Open ##1465353