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Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

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Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#101

Post by ritzaco »

How much software do you need and how many computers are there to run it on?

After combine harvester, we produced the same food with less people.

At the moment, it seems like hardware is the constraint. Companies don't have access to enough machines or tokens to keep all their devs occupied, so they let some go. Maybe that changes, maybe we already have too much software?

Personally I think we already had too much software before LLMs and even without them many devs would have found themselves jobless as startups selling to startups selling to startups failed and we realized (again) that food, shelter, security, education etc are 'real' industries, but software isn't one if it's not actively helping one of those.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#102

Post by jmull »

> or the boilerplate, libraries, build-tools, and refactoring

If your dev group is spending 90% of their time on these... well, you'd probably be right to fire someone. Not most of the developers but whoever put in place a system where so much time is spent on overhead/retrograde activities.

Something that's getting lost in the new, low cost of generating code is that code is a burden, not an asset. There's an ongoing maintenance and complexity cost. LLMs lower maintenance cost, but if you're generating 10x code you aren't getting ahead. Meanwhile, the cost of unmanaged complexity goes up exponentially. LLMs or no, you hit a wall if you don't manage it well.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#103

Post by jmalicki »

jayd16 wrote: post #84
krastanov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating to me. I completely believe you and I will not bother you with all the common "but did you try to tell it this or that" responses, but this is such a different experience from mine. I did the exact same task with claude in the Julia language last week, and everything worked perfectly. I am now in the habit of adding "keep it simple, use only public interfaces, do not use internals, be elegant and…

You say it doesn't fail but you also mention all these work around you know and try...sounds like it fails a lot but your tolerance is different.

Most people I've seen complain say things like "I asked it for code and it didn't compile."

The real magic of LLMs comes when they iterate until completion until the code compiles and the test passes, and you don't even bother looking at it until then.

Each step is pretty stupid, but the ability to very quickly doggedly keep at it until success quite often produces great work.

If you don't have linters that are checking for valid syntax and approved coding style, if you don't have tests to ensure the LLM doesn't screw up the code, you don't have good CI, you're going to have a bad time.

LLMs are just like extremely bright but sloppy junior devs - if you think about putting the same guardrails in place for your project you would for that case, things tend to work very well - you're giving the LLM a chance to check its work and self correct.

It's the agentic loop that makes it work, not the single-shot output of an LLM.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#104

Post by scuderiaseb »

I have found it very useful in pointing me in the right direction, exploring codebases and writing up boiler plate or other scaffolding. However I do need to review and test, and at the end of the day it’s me who’s responsible for the code. So I only make it write parts of code at a time, not oneshotting a new Github company.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#105

Post by ekkeke »

ritzaco wrote: post #101

How much software do you need and how many computers are there to run it on? After combine harvester, we produced the same food with less people. At the moment, it seems like hardware is the constraint. Companies don't have access to enough machines or tokens to keep all their devs occupied, so they let some go. Maybe that changes, maybe we already have too much software? Personally I think we already had too much so…

There definitely isn't enough _specialised_ software. If you look at engineering tools the open source/free stuff is just not good, and the professional software packages run in the tens of thousands per user. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we get competitive open source alternatives to simulink, HFSS, autocad, solidworks, LT Spice, etc.

Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#106

Post by pdntspa »

fxtentacle wrote: post #91
maccard wrote: post #61

> try it, you might actually be amazed. I keep being told this and the tools keep falling at the first hurdle. This morning I asked Claude to use a library to load a toml file in .net and print a value. It immediately explained how it was an easy file format to parse and didn’t need a library. I undid, went back to plan mode and it picked a library, added it and claimed it was done. Except the code didn’t compile. Th…

Same here. While LLMs sometimes work surprisingly well, I also encounter edge cases where they fail surprisingly badly multiple times per day. My guess is that other people maybe just don't bother to check what the AI says which would cause them to not notify omission errors. Like when I was trying to find a physical store again with ChatGPT Pro 5.4 and asked it to prepare a list of candidates, but the shop just wasn…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#107

Post by jmalicki »

fxtentacle wrote: post #91
maccard wrote: post #61

> try it, you might actually be amazed. I keep being told this and the tools keep falling at the first hurdle. This morning I asked Claude to use a library to load a toml file in .net and print a value. It immediately explained how it was an easy file format to parse and didn’t need a library. I undid, went back to plan mode and it picked a library, added it and claimed it was done. Except the code didn’t compile. Th…

Same here. While LLMs sometimes work surprisingly well, I also encounter edge cases where they fail surprisingly badly multiple times per day. My guess is that other people maybe just don't bother to check what the AI says which would cause them to not notify omission errors. Like when I was trying to find a physical store again with ChatGPT Pro 5.4 and asked it to prepare a list of candidates, but the shop just wasn…

"I also encounter edge cases where they fail surprisingly badly multiple times per day. "

If 80% of the time they 10x my output, and the other 20% I can say "well they failed, I guess this one I have to do manually" - that's still an absolutely massive productivity boost.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#108

Post by gamblor956 »

dominotw wrote: post #14
thefounder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can launch a new product in one month instead of 12 months. I think this works best for startups where the risk tolerance is high but works less than ideal for companies such Amazon where system failure has high costs

so where are these one man products lauched in a month? not talking about toys or vibecoded crap no one uses.

Real ones don't exist. Conveniently, nobody that has claimed to have created a functional AI product is willing to "doxx themselves" by linking to their app.

Weirdly, people who have actually created functional one-man products don't seem to have the same problem, as they welcome the business.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#109

Post by bryant »

Public companies are incentivized to fire for short term gains while figuring out long term strategy on the basis that they'll have a cheaper pool to hire from once they figure out how they're going to more effectively monetize their ability to scale with AI.

Companies without the same constraints are well equipped to keep who they've got, pivot them into managing/overseeing agents to scale, and build better products from the outset.

So this'll be a good opportunity for smaller companies (or not-for-profits like co-ops and credit unions) to eat the lunches of bigger companies that'll be slow to adapt.

Re: Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

#110

Post by ffsm8 »

maccard wrote: post #61

> try it, you might actually be amazed. I keep being told this and the tools keep falling at the first hurdle. This morning I asked Claude to use a library to load a toml file in .net and print a value. It immediately explained how it was an easy file format to parse and didn’t need a library. I undid, went back to plan mode and it picked a library, added it and claimed it was done. Except the code didn’t compile. Th…

> This morning I asked Claude to use a library to load a toml file in .net and print a value.

Legit this morning Claude was essentially unusable for me

I could explicitly state things it should adjust and it wouldn't do it.

Not even after specifying again, reverting everything eventually and reprompt from the beginning etc. Even super trivial frontend things like "extract [code] into a separate component"

After 30 minutes of that I relented and went on to read a book. After lunch I tried again and it's intelligence was back to normal

It's so uncanny to experience how much ita performance changes - I strongly suspect anthropic is doing something whenever it's intelligence drops so much, esp. Because it's always temporary - but repeatable across sessions if occuring... Until it's normal again

But ultimately just speculation, I'm just a user after all

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