I have an alternative view which is that sycophancy erodes trust in AI, from those who are not seeking validation from a machine, but information or advice.
If you're looking for advice in a situation where you are not sure of what the correct choices are, you will find LLM chat AI to go in circles. It says one thing. Something is dodgy about it, so you raise a tentative objection (as a non-expert). The thing does a "you are completely right, I apologize" about face and then says something different, and things have begun to slide into uncertainty.
That might not exactly be sycophancy, but it's basically the same thing: producing responses that are reflection of what is in the chat, rather than any real shit.
Pick any topic where people disagree. It could be an entirely technical topic in which engineers have settled the questions, and the only contrarians are crackpots. The problem is that the crackpots are out there writing, and this is snarfed into the training data. Crackpots use certain ways of talking about certain subjects. If you use similar vocabulary and concepts that align with some crackpot theory, the AI simply starts predicting tokens according to that, and you are now in crackpot land: what you are saying is validated using the crackpot terms. Next, write in a way that reintroduces rigidity: proper terminology and correct concepts, and, whoa, the AI is an engineer again, contradicting the previous crackpot shit.
electric_toucan 5 hours ago [-]
When I want advice, I’ve found it useful to tell the model that someone else came up with the ideas we’re discussing, not me. That pushes the model away from sycophancy, and better calls out the risks. Sometimes it goes too far in shutting down the idea no matter what, but I think it’s easier to critically evaluate critiques than to step back from the model praising everything you say
jtr1 8 hours ago [-]
I realize this is not scalable, but I’ve come to the personal preference that sycophancy be overt. LLMs are always steering in a direction and I find it a good reminder that they are just as incapable of objectivity as humans. TBD, but I think I’d prefer that fact plainly visible where I can see it.
mock-possum 4 hours ago [-]
This rings far truer for me. I don’t understand the psychosis of somehow allowing LLM responses to have an emotional impact on you, to make you think or believe a certain thing, to the extent that you blow up your own life over it - thank god I don’t have whatever flaw others have that make them ridiculously vulnerable to that.
One key point is that - “pick any topic where people disagree” - most knowledge-seeking I perform via a chat bot is to get a sense of what most people generally agree upon. A quick poll of the zeitgeist of the corpus it was trained on. What used to take me 10-15 minutes on Google now takes me 2-3 minutes with Gemini.
That holds true for Claude code too - I’m relying upon the fact that other people have already solved my problem, or have at least solved the components I need to tie together into a solution for my problem - I’m just fast forwarding through the process of digging them up myself and making sure they’re interoperable. The lion’s share of the tasks I set forth for an LLM is just ‘go find me something like this.’
How some people get from that, to weeks of AI-triggered mania, I simply do not understand.
chrisjj 12 hours ago [-]
> The problem is that the crackpots are out there writing, and this is snarfed into the training data.
No, the problem is the chatbot pretends to be an AI answer engine.
Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine, and you'll not be surprised at all to get crackpot writings from the web.
> write in a way that reintroduces rigidity
... and do not be surpised to get rigid crackpot writings from the web.
Ravus 11 hours ago [-]
> Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine
I think that this highlights the problem: it's not even a proper search engine. If it were, it would find existing material and link to it. The chatbot instead re-elaborates the message. This is different enough to have legal consequences (see the recent German ruling).
By squashing everything together, one loses the ability to evaluate sources, including their credibility and ulterior motives. With a search engine, I can tell if I am getting climate information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, from an oil trading consortium, or from a random blog.
The parent poster's suggestion is trying to work around the selection of sources, but such an attempt is fighting against the questionable design of the whole thing.
I don't think it's currently solvable, as selling those models as oracles is an essential component of their business plan.
wredcoll 5 hours ago [-]
I was using one as a way to search for recipes/ideas and I was really quite depressed when the thing replied with "I would recommend...".
No, you wouldn't because you're a fucking machine.
chrisjj 10 hours ago [-]
Plus this rot has extended to true search engines too. A recent Google blurb on new "AI" features of Google web search kicks of with the following misrep:
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind"
And they are also perverting search results, if this is to be believed:
"The Google AI Mode recognizes search intent by understanding the meaning of a query made rather than relying entirely on keywords. The platform uses sophisticated AI models to determine what users are looking to accomplish and whether they need any information, comparisons, or final decisions. This way, Google provides more accurate search results."
Well, Sundar Pichai just left. In some "Why Google search got worse" threads, people who worked on search mentioned him championing predictable results without too much magic. Seems like it's mostly magic now.
seizethecheese 17 hours ago [-]
Perhaps only a small minority want quality out of information product, while most want satisfying simplicity. This is definitely how the news plays out.
I recently built an ai chart product that attempts to add more nuance by injecting extra models to jump in when the first model misses the mark. (http://pellmell.au So far it seems like only a minority of people like it. The main feedback is that answers are confusing or too much to read
tonyedgecombe 14 hours ago [-]
I learnt a long time ago that most people don't want their problems solved, they just want to vent.
layla5alive 6 hours ago [-]
You say that like its entirely a bad thing.
"They want to vent" :-
"they want to be heard" :-
"they want to be understood" :-
"they want to know they are understood" :-
"they want to feel they matter to and are safe with the people they value"
donatj 1 days ago [-]
> This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment
I believe this is a larger problem than just AI.
The internet has helped people surround themselves with only voices that agree with them and validate them, often to their detriment.
There are entire online communities urging people to cut others out of their lives over the slightest disagreement.
overgard 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, a lot of it isn't even really about people's choice though. Like, I have so many click-baity things in my YouTube feed even though I ignore almost all of it, because just one click and suddenly that's a thing it's going to show me 10x. I wish there was a place I could go for tech news that just didn't talk about AI. I'm so over it.
ehnto 18 hours ago [-]
I think what frustrates me about the constant AI talk, is that it's like a global bikeshedding/yak shaving convention. It's an onslaught of details and opinions that don't matter that much. People arguing about single percentile benchmark differences like it will make or break their next project.
I get it, we can use AI agents, and they keep improving. Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff. I really think LLMs and agents are incredible, but I don't want to hear that over and over again for another 5 years.
HN is particularly bad for it right now. Where are all the innovations, cool technical side projects etc happening outside of LLMs?
georgefrowny 8 hours ago [-]
> Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff.
Also sounds like Reddit where there are whole communities around what seem like part of the process - keyboards, knife sharpening, etc, rather than what you actually used your Handmade Matcha 65% MX Mechanical Collector's Edition or your Organic Kyoto 6500 diamond stone-honed knife for.
Like, yes, I get that people like to talk about their processes, and that's fine, but it seems like you can easily get sucked into making it the whole game by a sufficiently "supportive" community.
morgoths_bane 14 hours ago [-]
>I get it, we can use AI agents, and they keep improving. Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff.
I completely agree with this sentiment. What I have seen is that these types of people never show the results of their work, they only discuss how productive they were or how fast it was to develop their project. The actual details of the project are not really mentioned.
In the rare event they do show their project, there's three categories: a worse version of something else that already exists (e.g. their version of Counter Strike that is less fun, rewriting some Python library into Rust but is now also worse), a dashboard, a visually engaging website you'll find interesting for less than 10 minutes and then never touch again.
I am not even an LLM hater, I am just not that impressed with majority of what has been built. Honestly I think back in the 90s I was far more impressed with the early websites that were totally garbage by today's standards. I remember spending so much time on the US Treasury's website as a kid learning everything about how currency works, I do not think I have ever had that level of engagement or fascination with anything that was generated by an LLM or where an LLM had significant support in the development.
Certainly this technology is nascent, however allegedly it should be making us far more productive so in the fourish years it's been around I feel like I should have witnessed something interesting by now. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon, but even in that case I think that there should at least be something else that's taking the world by storm and I am just not seeing it either.
Maybe there are some cool LLM creations, I think the speed at which it creates is also its own weakness. If anyone can create things really quickly, that includes people who are lazy and lack imagination, so then we're inundated with so much slop. Increasing accessibility does not mean that the quality will be maintained. Much like National Parks, if we make sensitive wilderness areas as accessible as possible that will degrade the quality significantly with the arrival of so many tourists, thus the parks have to consider the balance between preservation and conservation. Therefore, it was better when art et al. required some time, intention and skill before it could be shared with the world. These restrictions inherently kept the balance of quality much like how limits of accessibility in National Parks preserve the natural beauty.
jaggederest 24 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I think AI is the bees knees but I already spend 6+ hours a day thinking about it, more is unhelpful. I wish for something with the quality of discourse of HN but without being so monomaniacally focused on tech-du-jour.
MaKey 9 hours ago [-]
I can recommend the Unhook browser extension. My YouTube start page is empty, I have to actively seek out videos I want to watch.
dotancohen 17 hours ago [-]
> I wish there was a place I could go for tech news that just didn't talk about AI.
Just write an agent to parse HN. Oh wait...
darkmarmot 1 days ago [-]
It's like it turns everyone into a CEO with all the yes men they could ever ask for! Never goes wrong!
1 days ago [-]
romaniitedomum 19 hours ago [-]
> This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment
The obvious counterpoint is the large number of complaints about OpenAI's excessively sycophantic models back in April 2026, which led to them rolling back to a previous and less sycophantic model. I think there are those who are susceptible to model sycophancy, but it's definitely not most users. I have a vague, half-formed intuition that many of those susceptible to sycophancy are those who use AI for non-technical, non-work uses, such as inter-personal relationship questions.
As for me, as soon as I see any hint of sycophancy in a response I either stop what I'm doing or I tell the model to stop being an idiot.
recursive 19 hours ago [-]
People are drawn to nicotine use. And still people complain about smoke.
Kattywumpus 1 days ago [-]
I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
> Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities.
Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.
I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.
gryfft 1 days ago [-]
How would you say your views have changed since then?
matheusmoreira 19 hours ago [-]
Biggest change was brazilian vs american laws. I had more knowledge of and respect for US laws than those of my own country, and Claude essentially fixed that. I started studying the law with Claude whenever I'd get into some argument involving copyright, and it started picking up on this pattern and showing me counterpoints where brazilian law precisely defined things that americans had to pay lawyers to go to court and get a judge to create precedent for.
AI measurably lowered the number of absolute claims I've been making. Tended to generalize and radicalize too much which would invite people to respond to the tone and the extremism instead of disproving the underlying idea. That sort of reply would actually reinforce my beliefs: if I was wrong, people would simply refute it. AI attacked my points with counterexamples until I was able to refine them into a core that's actually true.
These little distilled kernels of truth were the most valuable results. I found that many of my arguments actually have an underlying idea that holds up under scrutiny, but nobody cares because I try to prove it via extreme arguments. One such idea is anti-impossibility: laws and rules are all fine, but making it structurally impossible for people to disobey them is unacceptable. I used to try to argue that idea by defending running red lights which persuaded no one. Now I've identified the real idea and can make a much better argument for it.
smcg 1 days ago [-]
Both could be true. People follow incentives.
Lutger 9 hours ago [-]
I think the conclusions are a bit overstated and lopsided. Regardless of the sycophancy (which you can tune), LLMs have infinite patience and attention to details. They also have very little inherent bias - it just mirrors your own mostly. They are, in those aspects, vastly superior to even the best therapists, who can't listen for even a couple of minutes and can't think outside of their limited frames. They are only human.
Try listening to somebody and merely repeating the literal words that they say. I guarantee you, most people can't even reproduce two or tree sentences correctly. And I am not even talking about understanding the words, just the literal reproduction of them, copy-pasta. Humans just can't do it, we are not good at it.
Talking to an AI about your problems is a bit like talking to yourself, but with the added superpower of hours of google searches compressed in seconds. Of course it is dangerous and incomplete, but in a way it also beats talking to humans if you know what you are doing and are looking to and able to solve your problems yourself.
altmanaltman 9 hours ago [-]
> They are, in those aspects, vastly superior to even the best therapists, who can't listen for even a couple of minutes and can't think outside of their limited frames.
You start your comment saying the conclusions are overstated and then just drop this conclusion without any proof except anncedotal prespective.
accountrequired 1 days ago [-]
You're absolutely right!
pwdisswordfishq 1 days ago [-]
It's a pretty overdone joke at this point, don't you think?
tom_ 1 days ago [-]
It's not a joke-it's an honest fact.
jihadjihad 1 days ago [-]
I dunno. The seams of the joke are still load-bearing IMO.
almostdeadguy 1 days ago [-]
You're right to push back. And honestly, this reframes the entire thing.
accountrequired 1 days ago [-]
You made an excellent point! (could not resist that one)
alexalx666 13 hours ago [-]
any close relationship forms a dependence. If you talk to something that poses as a helpful human 8 hours a day to do your job, you already spending more time with this "person" than with your loved ones
roughly 20 hours ago [-]
This feels like one of those articles that’s gonna come to mind again and again over the next couple decades.
kittikitti 5 hours ago [-]
I took this advice personally, where people denounced sycophants, so I stopped affirming them. I became a huge asshole and everyone around me started reacting very, very negatively. My conclusion is that this is a huge distraction and people honestly highly prefer sycophants.
lowsong 9 hours ago [-]
In decades to come we view "chatbot" AI as one of the most dangerous inventions of this century. Once regulation catches up and they are outlawed, we'll look back on this period of history with horror.
SwellJoe 21 hours ago [-]
I've said before that in one small way, having access to the sycophantic models is like being a billionaire: You never have to hear "no" or "that's not a good idea".
And, it has the same deleterious effect on your mental health. I could name a bunch of billionaires that behave like sociopaths, and they're often seemingly miserable while doing it. I'm sure some of them started out as sociopaths, but they rarely behaved that way so obviously early in their rise.
rramadass 7 hours ago [-]
This is an important paper which everybody should read and then accordingly tune/guard their interactions with AI; especially true when people use AI for personal/psychological support/validation. It will completely distort reality and push people into fantasy land which when mapped to the real world can have disastrous consequences.
Sycophancy is the "stickiness factor" of AI analogous to that of Social Media.
Ask AI to build a "Character Profile"(in the broadest sense) of a person based on their available public writings. This requires "commonsense reasoning" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_reasoning), understanding human motivations and behaviour, context, assumptions, societal knowledge etc.
I know "me" and so i asked AI to use my HN comments/submissions as input :-) The sycophancy/flattery/praise was quiet excessive. I am realistic and old enough to not need ego-soothing (a little is fine but a lot makes me suspicious) and so i asked AI whether these phrases were not too over-the-top. It apologized and agreed to drop the fluff. I then asked it to identify job roles (any) for which i might not be a good fit given my character profile. This acts as an external constraint which focuses attention on shortcomings and hence forces the AI to look at the other side of the coin. Now the results were better and more in line with what some Human may deduce from my HN persona (which obviously is not my complete real-life persona) but still wanting in many aspects.
The above is a perfect example of "Jagged Intelligence" exhibited by AI. Excellent in formal symbolic manipulation sciences, regurgitation and simple reasoning but highly deficient in human-like commonsense reasoning.
monocola 12 hours ago [-]
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theturtle 1 days ago [-]
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davesiknow 1 days ago [-]
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alexbelyanin 12 hours ago [-]
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jtrn 3 hours ago [-]
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daun_gee 1 days ago [-]
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LAC-Tech 1 days ago [-]
I think this goes along way to explain people's very defensive reactions when you are skeptical about Agentic Development.
artnanika 1 days ago [-]
Those are two different things. Chatgpt being sycophantic while playing the role of a therapist with a teenager is much different from Codex being sycophantic while reviewing user feedback. The former is extremely dangerous for society.
LAC-Tech 1 days ago [-]
I make no societal judgments; just that the nastiness of the reactions I get suggests something more than technical choice is going on.
I had one prominent "influencer" publicly challenge me to a coding competition over it. It was very weird.
1 days ago [-]
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
I'm one of the people who gets accused of this. I don't mind skepticism. But every time I turn around, someone's claiming nobody gets any value from these tools and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or running a scam. That gets really old.
sidrag22 1 days ago [-]
I've had one conversation that was sorta like this, it was around the time some kid kept releasing videos of him interacting with a very bad TTS gpt model or something and it would give very very bad answers confidently.
Their frame of reference was that, and this was at a time when opus 4.5 was around. Hard to expect a reasonable conversation when one person has such a different view of what the tools are capable of.
LAC-Tech 1 days ago [-]
I can believe people get value out of them. I think I do.
But "OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED THE OLD WAY IS DEAD 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE" - no. If that were true, we'd notice it in the software all around us.
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
I think we are noticing it. Are you not?
I've shipped three software projects in the last two months. I shipped zero in the preceding year.
Right now I'm building a system to decompile MAME ROM games into idiomatic JavaScript. It completes one game in about 3 days - complete with extensive commenting. I started it about 2 weeks ago.
I'm not sure "EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED" but if you're not seeing dramatic change, I suspect you're not looking.
Planktonne 1 days ago [-]
> if you're not seeing dramatic change, I suspect you're not looking
If the people claiming that everything has changed were even a fraction as productive as they think, then it would be visible even to people who weren't looking.
As it is, a lot of people are actively looking but still not seeing it.
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
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chaps 24 hours ago [-]
"you should probably get your eyes checked."
Don't be a jerk. A lot of people have had bad experiences with these systems from people basically saying exactly what you're saying. This "you should get your eyes checked" mentality is pervasive with the nerds who confidently say that their analysis is solid when it's... not. It's a big problem in communities that have non-conventional videogame puzzles for example. Someone will come in, announce some novel solution.... leading to a four hour fight about the efficacy of LLMs, only to find a mistake in their code the next day.. never to be seen again.
Mind you, I'm not saying that these systems aren't great at reverse engineering and whatnot. They're spectacularly good at that. But RE is a relatively constrained problem because everything is still right in front of you. For complicated problems where the signal is mixed between noise... less so.
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
As near as I can tell - your argument boils down to "I've seen other people make mistakes so you must be also."
chaps 24 hours ago [-]
If that's what you got from it, then I hope you have a good life.
Be kinder, friend.
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
If you can point to a single error in my argument I would love to talk to you about it.
Otherwise, you have a good life as well.
chaps 23 hours ago [-]
My point is just that you're talking past people and being an asshole in the process. Not everything is about winning an argument. Lower your temperature and you'll have more productive discussions that revolve around disagreements.
Cheers.
qarl2 23 hours ago [-]
No. I am not talking past anyone. I am providing cogent argumentation and evidence. And I'm being met with nonsense and platitudes.
And... I didn't start it.
Cheers.
EDIT: Good choice.
23 hours ago [-]
Planktonne 1 days ago [-]
I'm pleased for you, but these tools have been out for many, many weeks, and there are many, many people claiming incredible productivity gains.
Where's the rest of it?
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
I just showed you something that would have been considered a miracle one year ago.
And your response was "So what - show me another one."
Planktonne 24 hours ago [-]
I'm not disputing that it's a hard thing to do, but we had decompilers before; "miracle" is rather stretching it.
Even granting that framing though, the claimed increase in productivity isn't a one-off, but asserted for everyone using them; you're claiming mass-produced miracles but trying to depend on a single example.
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
> but we had decompilers before
Cite one example of a decompiler that provides English names and comments.
I'm sure it's useful for that, but we've had pretty good decompilers before AI.
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
I would love for you to cite a single one.
It must take a binary executable and derive English names for the memory addresses.
overgard 24 hours ago [-]
I used to use dotPeek all the time back in like 2012. There are also things like Ghidra that the NSA made. I dunno, google them, there are a lot. I'm not saying LLMs aren't useful here, just that it's not a huge deal. Also, why are AI people always making tools to take other people's IP? You are kind of fucking with people's intellectual property without permission it seems like. I'm not saying it's the crime of the century or anything but it's distressing how many AI projects come out of "let me repackage something someone else made"
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
> there are a lot
There are none.
Ghidra does not provide semantic names.
dotPeek shows you the symbols that were not stripped from the .NET.
Neither of these can do what I asked.
fragmede 23 hours ago [-]
lol you think he hasn't heard of Ghidra? How stupid do you think he is?
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
> if you're not seeing dramatic change, I suspect you're not looking.
Ironically, this is the inverse of the very thing you complained about people doing to you.
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
Except I'm providing evidence.
xracy 19 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing more examples of you saying you're providing evidence than of you actually providing evidence. So far I've heard a single anecdote about what you did.
That's a pretty far cry from the "evidence" you claim to have dropped on multiple comments.
qarl2 15 hours ago [-]
LOL. Providing a counter example is far from just an anecdote.
vhantz 9 hours ago [-]
An anecdote is an anecdote is an anecdote
qarl2 7 hours ago [-]
A proof isn't an anecdotal story.
The claim was this is not possible. I show it happening. That's a proof.
You're confused because the example is my own project. But I'm not merely describing it - I am giving you full access to it to confirm or reject my argument.
Not anecdotal. Saying it three times does not make it true.
chaps 4 hours ago [-]
What things have you tried that didn't go well? At this point, that's more interesting.
If you want to have a whack at a hard problem, have a try at the cryptographic puzzle in Noita if you want to see the silly failure modes of these systems. Lots of people have tried to solve it with AI and nothing's budged. If you can solve it, great.
qarl2 3 hours ago [-]
Why are you changing the subject?
What does your new subject have to do with the fact that the previous arguments were all pretty much baloney?
Pointing to a problem that has not been solved is completely unrelated to the miraculous things that have been solved.
And I thought you'd decided (three times now) that I'm not worth talking to?
chaps 3 hours ago [-]
Because I find what you have to say interesting. Sorry about that, I'll try to consider you less interesting.
qarl2 3 hours ago [-]
If you'd like to change the subject I'd be happy to do so.
You're right - there are still many problems that have not been solved by AI. AI has not found a cheap and effective way to turn lead into gold, as an example.
But I sorta think that's a silly metric. There are always going to be unsolved problems for any system. The interesting metric is how many problems have been solved - and how surprising are they.
Like I said above - a decompiler that produces semantic understanding of the machine code it's looking at (this address is score; this address is how many lives are left; this address is...) would have been considered literally impossible before LLMs. Today, I was able to implement such a system in under two weeks.
That's an impressive result. If you disagree, I'd love to discuss it with you.
chaps 2 hours ago [-]
I'm aware of what they're good at. I got claude 4.6 to run linux as a native postgres module inside linux inside postgres inside linux inside postgres on a mac. It was impressive then and it's still impressive. IOW, I really think you're misinterpreting my comments as significantly more inflammatory than I actually mean. And you seem to be taking it personally.
But what I'm interested in is in the edges of their failure modes because those failure modes prop up frequently in pernicious ways. For a similar reason that I want to understand the edges of my own intellectual failure modes by regularly challenging myself. This conversation is an example of that.
It seems like you're just not interested in discussing the edges and failure modes. You call that a "silly metric", I call it, "understanding your tools".
qarl2 1 hours ago [-]
My primary interest in these threads is to debunk the claims that "AI is a hoax".
Granted, that's not exactly the claim these days, the claim's goalposts shift constantly, as these things do.
But if you go back to the top of this conversation - I asked why people aren't seeing the miracles (not cute tricks - useful things that simply were impossible before) and I was largely met with the response "you're delusional if you see miracles."
But the thing is - I am not. So I am going to continue arguing that case every time I see a version of it.
So no, I'm not interested in exploring other issues. Sorry. Yours in particular I find as interesting as discussing whether Microsoft Word can be used to edit video files. Not interesting.
But if you need validation, here it is: there are many problems that AI cannot solve. Of course there are. There always will be.
qarl2 9 minutes ago [-]
HEH. Not sure why you're implying I have changed my position. I said as much above and would have said the same at any time. I don't think it's controversial in the least that there are things AI can't do.
Do you have a weird need to reframe this so you can feel like you won? You shouldn't do that. It's not healthy.
chaps 1 hours ago [-]
Great! Glad you were able to take off your rose tinted glasses, even for a moment. Peace.
LAC-Tech 24 hours ago [-]
I think we are noticing it. Are you not?
I am not. Congratulations on your side project.
qarl2 24 hours ago [-]
Projects, plural.
And weren't you the one who started this complaining of nastiness?
qarl2 15 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry downvoters - it's true. In his opening statement he complained about nastiness and then became extremely nasty himself, when I had said nothing like that to him. Other than just disagree and provide evidence.
veqq 1 days ago [-]
> I think we are noticing it. Are you not?
The software around us seems worse than ever, constantly breaking and significantly worse than 1-3 decades ago.
pc86 1 days ago [-]
You think the software around today is worse than software in the late 90s?
qarl2 1 days ago [-]
I guess my experience is different than yours - and I'm providing evidence.
chrisjj 24 hours ago [-]
> But every time I turn around, someone's claiming nobody gets any value from these tools
Really? I find agreement that gullible users get something they value, even if it is worthless.
atleastoptimal 1 days ago [-]
This is true, but likely happening in talk therapy too with overly sycyphantic therapists
jalev 1 days ago [-]
Sure, but there is a marked difference between a therapist and an LLM Chatbot: you can't talk to your therapist for +4h a day, at any time convenient to yourself. It's also not a guarantee you're going to hit upon a therapist that is like that, versus a product that is very literally intended to maximise your usage of it.
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
a therapist should, if they follow their training, not be a sycophant whatsoever. CBT, for eg, is a multi-step process including Socratic self-dialogue, reframing practices, etc to guide the person towards the development of insight and healthier coping mechanisms
lstodd 19 hours ago [-]
Any good therapist should train you in the methods of coping with and eventually overcoming your problem. This boils down to private grad+postgrad psychology/psychiatry course, because to cope+overcome you have to understand what's going on and there is no one who can do shit but you yourself.
But that is only ~half of job. The other half consists of gently reminding one that not all is lost yet.
There is no LLM that can do this and I think there never will be.
socketcluster 11 hours ago [-]
In my case, I need my AI to be sycophantic because most of my contrarian ideas are correct.
So it's a waste of my time and tokens when the AI keeps making weak arguments which I proceed to destroy one by one.
Usually, what happens is it tries to debunk my statement but then I offer a rebuttal to all of its points, it then concedes to all of my points but each time it offers a new partial rebuttal... Which I proceed to crush... But it keeps coming up with increasingly irrelevant caveats. It goes on for quite some time and at the end I ask it to review our discussion and it admits that its original stance "was not as strong" as it initially claimed but it never fully concedes... Even though I literally destroyed all of its points and every partial rebuttal it tried to come up with... Meanwhile its rebuttals became increasingly nit-picky and distant from the original claims made...
It's like if I'm saying "the ship is sinking, look at all the water in the hull and look at all the water pouring in through that hole" and it's like "oh but this is a small hole and the pump can easily offset it" so then I say "What about this hole over here" "Oh but the pump can still offset the stream from both holes easily" and then I say "What about that third one? And fourth one? And fifth one?" And it's like "The pump can easily offset that" and I'm like "Common! The hull is full of water and the water level is rising, the hull is full of holes; it's not a stretch to suggest that the ship is sinking because of all the holes in it... I shouldn't have to point out the location of every single hole for my argument to start making sense!"
It's not proof by induction but it's probably as close as you can get to it for a topic which lies outside the realm of mathematics!
nchmy 10 hours ago [-]
I have had similar experiences - it'll hold fast on a bunch of awful points that I've already shown, and eventually gotten it to admit, are invalid. Kinda like a human...
Yet, the answer is not sycophancy. It is for it to just be objective, honest, humble etc... Challenge or agree with you when necessary
hlynurd 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you want a sycophant because you use words like "crush" and "destroy" to describe counterpoints to your arguments (please don't destroy me.)
dbspin 10 hours ago [-]
> most of my contrarian ideas are correct.
My stripper finds me attractive, my therapist is in love with me, and my genius goes unrecognised because of small men intimidated by ideas they cannot comprehend.
I'm really hoping your comment is satire, but assuming it isn't, genuinely it might be time to get some help. Our capacity for self delusion as humans is enormous, and it's only higher in brighter people - particularly autodidacts who are used to being the smartest person they know.
11 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 21:14:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you're looking for advice in a situation where you are not sure of what the correct choices are, you will find LLM chat AI to go in circles. It says one thing. Something is dodgy about it, so you raise a tentative objection (as a non-expert). The thing does a "you are completely right, I apologize" about face and then says something different, and things have begun to slide into uncertainty.
That might not exactly be sycophancy, but it's basically the same thing: producing responses that are reflection of what is in the chat, rather than any real shit.
Pick any topic where people disagree. It could be an entirely technical topic in which engineers have settled the questions, and the only contrarians are crackpots. The problem is that the crackpots are out there writing, and this is snarfed into the training data. Crackpots use certain ways of talking about certain subjects. If you use similar vocabulary and concepts that align with some crackpot theory, the AI simply starts predicting tokens according to that, and you are now in crackpot land: what you are saying is validated using the crackpot terms. Next, write in a way that reintroduces rigidity: proper terminology and correct concepts, and, whoa, the AI is an engineer again, contradicting the previous crackpot shit.
One key point is that - “pick any topic where people disagree” - most knowledge-seeking I perform via a chat bot is to get a sense of what most people generally agree upon. A quick poll of the zeitgeist of the corpus it was trained on. What used to take me 10-15 minutes on Google now takes me 2-3 minutes with Gemini.
That holds true for Claude code too - I’m relying upon the fact that other people have already solved my problem, or have at least solved the components I need to tie together into a solution for my problem - I’m just fast forwarding through the process of digging them up myself and making sure they’re interoperable. The lion’s share of the tasks I set forth for an LLM is just ‘go find me something like this.’
How some people get from that, to weeks of AI-triggered mania, I simply do not understand.
No, the problem is the chatbot pretends to be an AI answer engine.
Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine, and you'll not be surprised at all to get crackpot writings from the web.
> write in a way that reintroduces rigidity
... and do not be surpised to get rigid crackpot writings from the web.
I think that this highlights the problem: it's not even a proper search engine. If it were, it would find existing material and link to it. The chatbot instead re-elaborates the message. This is different enough to have legal consequences (see the recent German ruling).
By squashing everything together, one loses the ability to evaluate sources, including their credibility and ulterior motives. With a search engine, I can tell if I am getting climate information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, from an oil trading consortium, or from a random blog.
The parent poster's suggestion is trying to work around the selection of sources, but such an attempt is fighting against the questionable design of the whole thing.
I don't think it's currently solvable, as selling those models as oracles is an essential component of their business plan.
No, you wouldn't because you're a fucking machine.
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind"
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/s...
And they are also perverting search results, if this is to be believed:
"The Google AI Mode recognizes search intent by understanding the meaning of a query made rather than relying entirely on keywords. The platform uses sophisticated AI models to determine what users are looking to accomplish and whether they need any information, comparisons, or final decisions. This way, Google provides more accurate search results."
https://bostoninstituteofanalytics.org/blog/latest-google-ai...
I recently built an ai chart product that attempts to add more nuance by injecting extra models to jump in when the first model misses the mark. (http://pellmell.au So far it seems like only a minority of people like it. The main feedback is that answers are confusing or too much to read
"They want to vent" :-
"they want to be heard" :-
"they want to be understood" :-
"they want to know they are understood" :-
"they want to feel they matter to and are safe with the people they value"
I believe this is a larger problem than just AI.
The internet has helped people surround themselves with only voices that agree with them and validate them, often to their detriment.
There are entire online communities urging people to cut others out of their lives over the slightest disagreement.
I get it, we can use AI agents, and they keep improving. Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff. I really think LLMs and agents are incredible, but I don't want to hear that over and over again for another 5 years.
HN is particularly bad for it right now. Where are all the innovations, cool technical side projects etc happening outside of LLMs?
Also sounds like Reddit where there are whole communities around what seem like part of the process - keyboards, knife sharpening, etc, rather than what you actually used your Handmade Matcha 65% MX Mechanical Collector's Edition or your Organic Kyoto 6500 diamond stone-honed knife for.
Like, yes, I get that people like to talk about their processes, and that's fine, but it seems like you can easily get sucked into making it the whole game by a sufficiently "supportive" community.
I completely agree with this sentiment. What I have seen is that these types of people never show the results of their work, they only discuss how productive they were or how fast it was to develop their project. The actual details of the project are not really mentioned.
In the rare event they do show their project, there's three categories: a worse version of something else that already exists (e.g. their version of Counter Strike that is less fun, rewriting some Python library into Rust but is now also worse), a dashboard, a visually engaging website you'll find interesting for less than 10 minutes and then never touch again.
I am not even an LLM hater, I am just not that impressed with majority of what has been built. Honestly I think back in the 90s I was far more impressed with the early websites that were totally garbage by today's standards. I remember spending so much time on the US Treasury's website as a kid learning everything about how currency works, I do not think I have ever had that level of engagement or fascination with anything that was generated by an LLM or where an LLM had significant support in the development.
Certainly this technology is nascent, however allegedly it should be making us far more productive so in the fourish years it's been around I feel like I should have witnessed something interesting by now. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon, but even in that case I think that there should at least be something else that's taking the world by storm and I am just not seeing it either.
Maybe there are some cool LLM creations, I think the speed at which it creates is also its own weakness. If anyone can create things really quickly, that includes people who are lazy and lack imagination, so then we're inundated with so much slop. Increasing accessibility does not mean that the quality will be maintained. Much like National Parks, if we make sensitive wilderness areas as accessible as possible that will degrade the quality significantly with the arrival of so many tourists, thus the parks have to consider the balance between preservation and conservation. Therefore, it was better when art et al. required some time, intention and skill before it could be shared with the world. These restrictions inherently kept the balance of quality much like how limits of accessibility in National Parks preserve the natural beauty.
The obvious counterpoint is the large number of complaints about OpenAI's excessively sycophantic models back in April 2026, which led to them rolling back to a previous and less sycophantic model. I think there are those who are susceptible to model sycophancy, but it's definitely not most users. I have a vague, half-formed intuition that many of those susceptible to sycophancy are those who use AI for non-technical, non-work uses, such as inter-personal relationship questions.
As for me, as soon as I see any hint of sycophancy in a response I either stop what I'm doing or I tell the model to stop being an idiot.
Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.
I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.
AI measurably lowered the number of absolute claims I've been making. Tended to generalize and radicalize too much which would invite people to respond to the tone and the extremism instead of disproving the underlying idea. That sort of reply would actually reinforce my beliefs: if I was wrong, people would simply refute it. AI attacked my points with counterexamples until I was able to refine them into a core that's actually true.
These little distilled kernels of truth were the most valuable results. I found that many of my arguments actually have an underlying idea that holds up under scrutiny, but nobody cares because I try to prove it via extreme arguments. One such idea is anti-impossibility: laws and rules are all fine, but making it structurally impossible for people to disobey them is unacceptable. I used to try to argue that idea by defending running red lights which persuaded no one. Now I've identified the real idea and can make a much better argument for it.
Try listening to somebody and merely repeating the literal words that they say. I guarantee you, most people can't even reproduce two or tree sentences correctly. And I am not even talking about understanding the words, just the literal reproduction of them, copy-pasta. Humans just can't do it, we are not good at it.
Talking to an AI about your problems is a bit like talking to yourself, but with the added superpower of hours of google searches compressed in seconds. Of course it is dangerous and incomplete, but in a way it also beats talking to humans if you know what you are doing and are looking to and able to solve your problems yourself.
You start your comment saying the conclusions are overstated and then just drop this conclusion without any proof except anncedotal prespective.
And, it has the same deleterious effect on your mental health. I could name a bunch of billionaires that behave like sociopaths, and they're often seemingly miserable while doing it. I'm sure some of them started out as sociopaths, but they rarely behaved that way so obviously early in their rise.
Sycophancy is the "stickiness factor" of AI analogous to that of Social Media.
For some background read Jagged Intelligence: The Dangerous Unknowns at the Heart of LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48577159
Here is an experiment that i did;
Ask AI to build a "Character Profile"(in the broadest sense) of a person based on their available public writings. This requires "commonsense reasoning" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_reasoning), understanding human motivations and behaviour, context, assumptions, societal knowledge etc.
I know "me" and so i asked AI to use my HN comments/submissions as input :-) The sycophancy/flattery/praise was quiet excessive. I am realistic and old enough to not need ego-soothing (a little is fine but a lot makes me suspicious) and so i asked AI whether these phrases were not too over-the-top. It apologized and agreed to drop the fluff. I then asked it to identify job roles (any) for which i might not be a good fit given my character profile. This acts as an external constraint which focuses attention on shortcomings and hence forces the AI to look at the other side of the coin. Now the results were better and more in line with what some Human may deduce from my HN persona (which obviously is not my complete real-life persona) but still wanting in many aspects.
The above is a perfect example of "Jagged Intelligence" exhibited by AI. Excellent in formal symbolic manipulation sciences, regurgitation and simple reasoning but highly deficient in human-like commonsense reasoning.
I had one prominent "influencer" publicly challenge me to a coding competition over it. It was very weird.
Their frame of reference was that, and this was at a time when opus 4.5 was around. Hard to expect a reasonable conversation when one person has such a different view of what the tools are capable of.
But "OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED THE OLD WAY IS DEAD 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE" - no. If that were true, we'd notice it in the software all around us.
I've shipped three software projects in the last two months. I shipped zero in the preceding year.
Right now I'm building a system to decompile MAME ROM games into idiomatic JavaScript. It completes one game in about 3 days - complete with extensive commenting. I started it about 2 weeks ago.
I'm not sure "EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED" but if you're not seeing dramatic change, I suspect you're not looking.
If the people claiming that everything has changed were even a fraction as productive as they think, then it would be visible even to people who weren't looking.
As it is, a lot of people are actively looking but still not seeing it.
Don't be a jerk. A lot of people have had bad experiences with these systems from people basically saying exactly what you're saying. This "you should get your eyes checked" mentality is pervasive with the nerds who confidently say that their analysis is solid when it's... not. It's a big problem in communities that have non-conventional videogame puzzles for example. Someone will come in, announce some novel solution.... leading to a four hour fight about the efficacy of LLMs, only to find a mistake in their code the next day.. never to be seen again.
Mind you, I'm not saying that these systems aren't great at reverse engineering and whatnot. They're spectacularly good at that. But RE is a relatively constrained problem because everything is still right in front of you. For complicated problems where the signal is mixed between noise... less so.
Be kinder, friend.
Otherwise, you have a good life as well.
Cheers.
And... I didn't start it.
Cheers.
EDIT: Good choice.
Where's the rest of it?
And your response was "So what - show me another one."
Even granting that framing though, the claimed increase in productivity isn't a one-off, but asserted for everyone using them; you're claiming mass-produced miracles but trying to depend on a single example.
Cite one example of a decompiler that provides English names and comments.
Silent Hill 1 PC https://youtu.be/0niadQJmYx0
Super Smash Bros/other GameCube and Wii games https://www.reddit.com/r/decomps/comments/1uvttvy/moderngekk...
It must take a binary executable and derive English names for the memory addresses.
There are none.
Ghidra does not provide semantic names.
dotPeek shows you the symbols that were not stripped from the .NET.
Neither of these can do what I asked.
Ironically, this is the inverse of the very thing you complained about people doing to you.
That's a pretty far cry from the "evidence" you claim to have dropped on multiple comments.
The claim was this is not possible. I show it happening. That's a proof.
You're confused because the example is my own project. But I'm not merely describing it - I am giving you full access to it to confirm or reject my argument.
Not anecdotal. Saying it three times does not make it true.
If you want to have a whack at a hard problem, have a try at the cryptographic puzzle in Noita if you want to see the silly failure modes of these systems. Lots of people have tried to solve it with AI and nothing's budged. If you can solve it, great.
What does your new subject have to do with the fact that the previous arguments were all pretty much baloney?
Pointing to a problem that has not been solved is completely unrelated to the miraculous things that have been solved.
And I thought you'd decided (three times now) that I'm not worth talking to?
You're right - there are still many problems that have not been solved by AI. AI has not found a cheap and effective way to turn lead into gold, as an example.
But I sorta think that's a silly metric. There are always going to be unsolved problems for any system. The interesting metric is how many problems have been solved - and how surprising are they.
Like I said above - a decompiler that produces semantic understanding of the machine code it's looking at (this address is score; this address is how many lives are left; this address is...) would have been considered literally impossible before LLMs. Today, I was able to implement such a system in under two weeks.
That's an impressive result. If you disagree, I'd love to discuss it with you.
But what I'm interested in is in the edges of their failure modes because those failure modes prop up frequently in pernicious ways. For a similar reason that I want to understand the edges of my own intellectual failure modes by regularly challenging myself. This conversation is an example of that.
It seems like you're just not interested in discussing the edges and failure modes. You call that a "silly metric", I call it, "understanding your tools".
Granted, that's not exactly the claim these days, the claim's goalposts shift constantly, as these things do.
But if you go back to the top of this conversation - I asked why people aren't seeing the miracles (not cute tricks - useful things that simply were impossible before) and I was largely met with the response "you're delusional if you see miracles."
But the thing is - I am not. So I am going to continue arguing that case every time I see a version of it.
So no, I'm not interested in exploring other issues. Sorry. Yours in particular I find as interesting as discussing whether Microsoft Word can be used to edit video files. Not interesting.
But if you need validation, here it is: there are many problems that AI cannot solve. Of course there are. There always will be.
Do you have a weird need to reframe this so you can feel like you won? You shouldn't do that. It's not healthy.
I am not. Congratulations on your side project.
And weren't you the one who started this complaining of nastiness?
The software around us seems worse than ever, constantly breaking and significantly worse than 1-3 decades ago.
Really? I find agreement that gullible users get something they value, even if it is worthless.
But that is only ~half of job. The other half consists of gently reminding one that not all is lost yet.
There is no LLM that can do this and I think there never will be.
So it's a waste of my time and tokens when the AI keeps making weak arguments which I proceed to destroy one by one.
Usually, what happens is it tries to debunk my statement but then I offer a rebuttal to all of its points, it then concedes to all of my points but each time it offers a new partial rebuttal... Which I proceed to crush... But it keeps coming up with increasingly irrelevant caveats. It goes on for quite some time and at the end I ask it to review our discussion and it admits that its original stance "was not as strong" as it initially claimed but it never fully concedes... Even though I literally destroyed all of its points and every partial rebuttal it tried to come up with... Meanwhile its rebuttals became increasingly nit-picky and distant from the original claims made...
It's like if I'm saying "the ship is sinking, look at all the water in the hull and look at all the water pouring in through that hole" and it's like "oh but this is a small hole and the pump can easily offset it" so then I say "What about this hole over here" "Oh but the pump can still offset the stream from both holes easily" and then I say "What about that third one? And fourth one? And fifth one?" And it's like "The pump can easily offset that" and I'm like "Common! The hull is full of water and the water level is rising, the hull is full of holes; it's not a stretch to suggest that the ship is sinking because of all the holes in it... I shouldn't have to point out the location of every single hole for my argument to start making sense!"
It's not proof by induction but it's probably as close as you can get to it for a topic which lies outside the realm of mathematics!
Yet, the answer is not sycophancy. It is for it to just be objective, honest, humble etc... Challenge or agree with you when necessary
My stripper finds me attractive, my therapist is in love with me, and my genius goes unrecognised because of small men intimidated by ideas they cannot comprehend.
I'm really hoping your comment is satire, but assuming it isn't, genuinely it might be time to get some help. Our capacity for self delusion as humans is enormous, and it's only higher in brighter people - particularly autodidacts who are used to being the smartest person they know.