What if useful AI is a fantasy?
The author, a programmer, recounts using Claude AI for code generation since 2023 and later experimenting with its agentic features. While initial results boosted productivity, the lack of a clear mental model for generated code led to frustration and a shift toward more guided, AI‑assisted ideation. The piece questions whether large language models will ever prove indispensable, likening their hype to past technology fads that failed to deliver lasting impact.
- ▪The author began using Claude in 2023 and later subscribed to Claude Pro to test agentic, tool‑using AI for full project generation.
- ▪After initial enthusiasm, the author found it difficult to understand and modify AI‑generated code without building a mental model first.
- ▪This difficulty prompted a transition from "set and forget" coding to a more active, guided approach and eventually to AI‑assisted ideation where the author writes code themselves.
- ▪The author remains uncertain about the long‑term utility of LLMs, comparing their current hype to the unmet expectations of past technologies like the Metaverse.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,644 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lzon |
| Canonical URL | https://lzon.ca/posts/other/llm-fantasy/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:17:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T19:25:35.586Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T19:25:35.586Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
What if useful AI is a fantasy? BlogMarginalia What if useful AI is a fantasy? Posted July 28, 2026 5 min read I tried to use AI in my work, but was it actually useful?I’m a programmer, and I have been using AI for development work since around summer of 2023. At that point I tried Claude, and it was good enough at generating code that I did manage to make use of it for some of my projects. Jumping ahead to the beginning of this year, I subscribed to Claude Pro and had the opportunity to try “agentic”, tool-using AI for the first time (via Claude Code).At first I was enthralled, and used the AI to generate wholesale entire hobby projects, just like many others did.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lzon.
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