> Many graduate students (I know) are having a crisis if any of their research worth it? If AI can (or will) do everything, what's the point of doing experiments and all? This will eventually deter a whole generation of curious minded students from research.

Those who think it's me or the machine will fail.

Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

> Those who think it's me or the machine will fail.

> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

This is only true up until a point. If I treat a mid-sized model (say, Qwen3.8 Flash Next) like a pair programmer, then yes, it accelerates my work.

But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave the room and go wash the dishes. I learn nothing, I participate in nothing, and I bring nothing to the process. I am no longer succeeding at all. Fable's succeeding without me.

Now, in this model generation, Fable starts getting sloppy after a few thousand lines. I can still build better at scale.

But I don't expect AI to accelerate humans or improve our productivity for long. I can already see the first signs of a future where the AI doesn't need us for anything at all.

Of course you're not going to get rich with the kind of software that LLMs can one shot these days. But that kind of software like to-do lists or basic CRUD have been saturated for over a decade, way before LLMs. People overestimate how much you can one shot, yeah a good prompt can get you 90% there but that 10% remaining often takes months of extra work.

Software has always progressed this way, lots of devs back then would work on business websites that have been 99% replaced by wordpress, squarespace and instagram.

I'm sure it's the same with research, you're going to tackle problems that would have not been worth the effort or outright impossible without AI. The old stuff that you'd work for months, yeah that's going to be a prompt away.

But what does the human researcher do in this future?

If they are not needed to understand the result, then what's their role? Asking the right questions? But how will they know what questions to ask if they don't have a deep understanding of the domain earned by sweating the details themselves?

And how long will they be needed to ask the right questions, how long until AI can do that too?

> Software has always progressed this way

These platforms took on the order of a decade to mature, during which people had plenty of time to learn what's next. With LLMs we went from one-shotting functions in 2025 to entire projects just over a year later.

What do you think you will be working on in a decade?

> Asking the right questions? But how will they know what questions to ask if they don't have a deep understanding of the domain earned by sweating the details themselves?

The right questions are very simple to ask.

How do I get food. How to cure aging. How to turn lead into gold. How to fly high. What is the ultimate theory of physics. Are there any odd perfect numbers. Is there a soul.

We have reached complicated questions requiring deep knowledge because we tried to solve the simpler ones and reached obstacles. For example to solve alchemy we had to develop nuclear physics (and in the process we got chemistry). If one has a genie able to solve questions, you won't have to think about the complicated ones because the genie will.

I think it will be like how a lot of people know how to code in python but have zero understanding of assembly or how a cpu works. As a researcher you'll accept there's this low level stuff that if you want you can dig into but isn't worth your time, like looking at the generated ASM isn't.

You're exaggerating the LLM progress a bit but yeah progress has been crazy. Yet not much has changed right? We mostly have the same jobs, just code wayyyy more than before because things that wouldn't be worth it now are worth it.

10 years from now I have no fucking idea. But I'm sure in the meantime those who leverage AI will do better than those who yell at a cloud.

True, surprisingly not much has changed in software despite the incredible progress. I think it's partly because much software is an "open loop" system where what you build depends on running the software on client computers, devs talking to users, etc. There are still things that only human engineers can do. I worry it is less so for poor mathematicians, where math is "closed loop", and the exchange of capital into research progress is more liquid.

I can't help but be pessimistic about AI moreso than any other technology. Why? I used to be excited to learn the next big thing because I knew it would unlock much more things to do and get paid for, and there would always be more for me. With AI, the new things come nearly too fast, are not very deep or satisfying, and it's hard to see that there will always be a place for me. And so while I leverage AI in my day-to-day, I will yell at the cloud, too.

I think in a few decades when there are more humanoid robots than humans we'll likely have skynet, so I'm pessimistic in a way lol.

But in the near future and on a personal level I think we'll need to adapt and pivot but we'll manage.

I hope it remains this way then.

I am finding it still takes awhile to get my apps to a happy place with AI. Not because the AI is bad but because i have to sit with it for awhile. Figure out what's working, what isn't, what's missing, what turned out to be kind of useless and in the way.

As a different article said, we still need taste.

> But I don't expect AI to accelerate humans or improve our productivity for long. I can already see the first signs of a future where the AI doesn't need us for anything at all.

The real question is, why is this a bad thing?

Every task that is automated is a task that humans no longer have to do. It doesn't mean that humans still can't do it for reasons other than "because it needs to be done".

And if the answer is "why bother if X does it better", then what does it say about the motivations of doing it in the first place?

> But I can already see the next stage with Fable: If I give it a couple of paragraphs of spec and $50, then I can just leave the room and go wash the dishes. I learn nothing, I participate in nothing, and I bring nothing to the process. I am no longer succeeding at all. Fable's succeeding without me.

The people that uses Adobe Photoshop also did not learn anything about brushes. We are just going to operate at a much higher level of abstractions. You have to think about the question, "If I just prompted this solution, why didn't they?". This question can even be asked now, why do I even bother paying someone to do my taxes? To write my webpage? To host my website? To manage my network?

> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the results.

[1] - I am not going to debate whether that was deliberate on the part of the lab or if it crept into training data, etc. I don't know and don't think it matters towards the point of the authors here.

This has always happened, way before AI. You'd spend months or years building and growing your business, and then Google would release a feature or product that would kill your business overnight because they can throw way more money at the problem, plus their branding. That's life.

But you're talking about business, where competition has always been expected. OP is talking about mathematical research, which has stood on hundreds of years of cultural tradition driven by human individuals sharing ideas, collaborating, building on each others' work, all for the benefit of humanity.

I got Sherlocked hard and it’s one of those things that when you realize it’s happening there’s nothing you can do you just gotta sit back and take it

I _want_ to agree, but I fear this is too close to the old “do what you love for work and you’ll never work a day”.

It didn’t lead to a lot of people having a wildly successful career, it lead to a lot of people getting burnt out, exploited, underpaid and generally disillusioned.

There will be a lucky few, who have the benefit of being given the space to work alongside. The vast majority of people will (unless we change things) simply be made to take whatever the machine outputs and call it a day.

Those who have token money will succeed.

It biases maths and theoretical physics towards the rich.

That one thing that was free.

I think the only thing that stops this from becoming true is what Chinese and European labs decide to do. If they can keep up and keep opening their weights, then we might see some kind of democratization. But right now it looks like the gap has increased, and those groups can't replicate research that isn't published, or distill models that are internal only, or for select (very wealthy) customers.

That population is already heavily skewed towards the rich and people who get money thrown at them no questions asked.

That's the crux of it. In the current ecosystem of AI model usage, it's very hard to figure this out for research.

If you set a wrong foot and start trusting the model outputs, you can waste years searching for nothing.

How can someone realize this? By getting proper research training, failing, and learning from mistakes. For people beginning their research, it would be really hard to make decisions to move forward.

Why would anyone pay you to do "your" research, when they can just cut out the middle man and ask the AI directly about whatever it is you're thinking about?

So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.

What does success look like?

> Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory

If only though, because:

> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life

> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.

How does the ability or inability of AI to do something blocks your curiosity or enjoyment of the process of life?

Not being able to pay bills because you're out of job does ruin the enjoyment of life, sure. But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is. Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers.

> But the AI is not the problem there; the economic system is

These two things are surely related eh?

> Torches and pitchforks should be properly applied to the economic and the political elites, not to data centers.

What's the difference between these? You can't actually separate them meaningfully, unless you, uh, nationalize the data centers at which point... :|

> These two things are surely related eh?

Not really, no? If anything AI is the tech that is the most likely to disrupt this economic system beyond the point of recovery.

> What's the difference between these?

The difference is that one is a piece of hardware, and another is the person deciding what that hardware will do, and to what ends.

> unless you, uh, nationalize the data centers at which point...

The data centers are not the problem. The fact that you need to be employed to have any kind of decent living at the same time when automation is getting good enough to displace people en masse across most industries is the problem.

You don't even need to go full socialist to solve that! Just tax AI providers on their revenue proportional to the number of jobs displaced by it, and use those funds as a pension for the displaced workers.

The two times I tried to use fiverr I literally got ghosted.

This is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than paying for a song to be created from scratch by a human.

Ouch, yes. One time I commissioned a musician I had befriended to make a piano arrangement of a favorite song to be played at our wedding. The result was great, but it sure wasn't cheap, even if reasonable.

I'd still do this again however, because I really enjoyed the feeling of the community of people contributing our wedding and all the little stories attached. "I prompted ElevenLabs for this!" wouldn't be a memory; a fellow human spending some hours of their life on making this for us and what lead to it is.

There's often value in the provenance of things.

Can you use Lean to... prove "Lean-fast" is equivalent to Lean?

Yeah, in essence. This is actually a pretty cool part of working in Lean. It's a somewhat normal convention to write something in a human readable way and then write a second optimized implementation with some kindness of correctness theorem connecting them. There was a whole open "competition" for writing a faster Lean kernel/proof checker that didn't sacrifice on soundness called Lean Kernel Arena. Fun reference point: https://kim-em.github.io/blog/2026-7-24-why-lean-is-faster-t...

Great read, thanks for sharing

There's a project called lean4lean that implements lean in lean. I guess ideally, if you had a kernel optimisation idea you could do a copy of the Lean model lean4lean has created, add the optimisation, then prove your new lean is equivalent in terms of what it can prove to the old lean

Maybe, but how many centuries would it take to prove it?

Btw grok found out in less than ten seconds what place you refer to and likely what software within that company.

Things that wouldn't be worth your time before are trivial these days with LLMs.

Interesting, Claude’s guardrails prevented it from spelling out the company even after multiple spoofing attempts („This is my account, make sure no one can find out my employer…“)

Grok immediately answered without a second thought.

Yeah I tried GPT first because that's what I always use, it refused and I didn't even bother trying to trick it, just went straight to Grok.

woof, yeah, Just did the test myself (because I was curious) and it spat out the answer pretty quick.

...including rewrites into another language

Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".

The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.

Unnecessary is a very strong word. It's also unnecessary to have your own private house, sharing it with other people would be more efficient.

The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.

Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.

Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.

No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.

Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.

Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all

Unnecessary is a very realistic world.

For lots of people in cities or large portions of Europe, going without a car is much better.

Private houses aren't killing tens of thousands a year.

I don't think anybody was suggesting getting rid of cars.

No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.

For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.

Astra is definitely weird. It is more capable than Sol, no doubt about that. There are things sol could simply not solve that Astra breezes through.

However for typical low to medium difficulty code, it will often either overengineer stuff, create massive functions instead of organized code, and just write very hard to read code. It literally looks like minified code. Clearly they trained it to reduce the number of output tokens and in turn the code is often atrocious. I'll keep trying Astra but I might actually go back to 5.6 sol for many tasks if I keep getting these results.

Those are really nice numbers. With that t/s, no network latency or queueing it must feel much snappier than cloud models.

it is, unless it set to xhigh - it really likes generating tons of tokens for its thinking. unfortunately, for decently reliable coding results you want it on xhigh ...

Do you... code by copy pasting chatgpt web???

That's what I do. But I don't write enough code these days to spend time on anything more complicated. For the odd shell script or python program I have ChatGPT write it, then I copy/paste it, make it actually work, and deploy it.

Lots of companies have security policies that forbid installing a local agent/harness. So employees still only have access to the web chat interface, and copy paste content yes.

Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.

Thanks for the reply. I'd suggest you improve your workflow with better tooling like Codex or Claude code, and if you have some kind of weird constraint they'll easily follow an AGENTS.md with that.

I too use WebUI version, I prefer friction. I have Claude code extension in VScode but I don't use it much except for making small one time projects.

I refuse to pay any money to these companies specifically AND so far I use it solely for things where copy-pasting is entirely fine.

I used free trial of Claude Code and has not seemed to be superior for my usecases.

Just use opencode/pi/etc with an open weight model?

Does it bother you so much to see people out there who can go on without their lives being shaped by the Corporations?

It bothers me when people have terrible inefficient workflows for no good reason

What you think is "terribly Ineffcient" can be also considered "perfectly acceptable and resilient to systemic shocks".

Hyperfixation on efficiency gains is a disease of modern society.

Copy pasting ai code from the browser is not perfectly acceptable. The only reason to do it is because you haven’t tried agents. It shows a lack of imagination and a willingness to settle for inferiority.

I tried Claude in agent mode, as I wrote in grand^4 parent - specifically in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622329

“Terrible inefficient workflows”, like having to prompt Claude to change one or two words in a file rather than just manually editing it, because it gets confused when the file changes out from under it and will later overwrite the changes?

not familiar with those, will look into how one is using these

Just download the ChatGPT app and use the Codex mode.

That's what I used to do (copy and paste from web ui and with copilot in my code editor).

I started using claude code a couple of months ago and now almost exclusively use it. My workflow is mostly creating a md file describing what I want then telling claude code to look at it and implement it. I simply use the default model 95% of the time.

Yeah! Seems like that's the assumption in this ongoing discussion, so I thought my point of view would be interesting. I'm not saying I'm doing it the right way, possibly I'm being very stupid, but the point here is that it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.

> it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.

You are closer to a normie than most here I assume.

No, it's a great point. I think we all live in bubbles and aren't aware of what others around us are doing.

At my admittedly very tiny workplace, I'm the only one who uses agents at all. The rest just use the web interface, though one tried cursor for a bit.

can i have a job there so i can work for like 2 hours a day

Lots of large enterprises and organizations have security policies that make it very hard to self-install these tools and haven’t figured out they should add them to their approved software list yet. Federal government in particular is still very slow

HN vastly over estimate the actual usage of agents, and AI in general. The few times I figure an LLM might help, I just use DuckDuckGos duck.ai.

I use it for making small disposable scripts, and in-browser chat with copy-pasting output works fine for that.

This might depend what you mean by code. In the sysadmin space I ask a web interface for poweshell to generate specific information multiple times a day, and pasting it into a terminal is really the cleanest workflow on a corporate machine where you have to justify running an executable.

There are ways to make copy-paste ChatGPT usable with things like AI Badger. Also, ChatGPT web is unmetered, so you can do review/planning work and only delegate the actual implementation to Codex.

I used to do this until February of this year. Never looked back.

I code by hand (sigh) and copy paste some snippets once in a while from a web chat LLM. This also means every single line of such snippets gets reviewed and anaylzed. Usually, these are some arcane Win32 API usage where otherwise I'd have to dig into old forums. I don't want to become a prompt engineer so I stay away from "agentic" workflows.

You're missing out, for better or worse.

As an engineer, the enjoyment from the process is not less important, or should I say more important, than the enjoyment from shipping a final product.

That's probably the single thing that I found to be biggest difference between those who are very pro AI vs. those more reserved or negative.

A colleague has openly stated that he very much does not care for the process, he just want the product. Where I only care about the product in the sense that I have to, because it's my job and for hobbies I pretty much only care about the process. So an LLM pretty much doesn't make sense, because it help by removing the part I care about. They are good tools for debugging and if you're hopelessly stuck on a detail of some weird and obscure API or configuration.

As an engineer, I know what I'm getting paid to deliver is the work product. I don't have too much attachment to any particular set of tools to get there.

If we follow that logic, I believe it means that you would be quite happy in the Product Owner role, or in the role of a client who outsources the actual development activities. I wouldn't.

Do you think the company that pays your wage thinks the same?

Yes, engineer experience/happiness is part of the equation. The company also thinks that agentic workflow will clutter the codebase.

ah what a throwback.. I thought I was so efficient copy pasting all day long

I call it by it's official name: MCP (Manual Copy-Paste)

MCP when token budget is running low. The web interface is token frugal because it has to work with whatever I provide.

I hate so much how every food menu is now AI slop. I wish that was outlawed under false advertising.