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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?

#111

Post by moffkalast »

roncesvalles wrote: post #80
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…

Did you use the best model available to you (Opus 4.6)? There is a world of difference between using the highest model vs the fast one. The fast ones are basically useless and it's a shame that all these tools default to it.

Opus is not cost effective.

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

#112

Post by ppqqrr »

false dichotomy. neither company will make it. the winner will be some solo dev with a singular vision and ruthless dedication to quality. “teams” do not have visions, individuals do. the more people are involved in a product, the blurrier the vision becomes, the more insidious the vested interest of the organization to profit from the user, rather than align themselves with the user. solo devs do not have such problems, because they’re no different from users, aside from the fact that they were users before the software existed. they make the software because they want to use it, and there is no amount of payroll employees that can replicate the quality and innovation that results from this simple, genuine self-interest.

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

#113

Post by ngburke »

Solo here, no devs to fire. What's changed is the bar for "worth building" dropped massively. Stuff I'd have shelved as too small to justify the time, I just do now. The risk is that you end up with a lot of half-finished things if you're not disciplined about finishing.

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

#114

Post by krastanov »

shafyy wrote: post #74
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…

It's almost like.... LLMs are non-deterministic and hallucinating... Oh wait?!

non-deterministic does not mean it is not biased towards a particular type of results (helpful results)

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

#115

Post by wrs »

thwarted wrote: post #94
wrs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m honestly baffled by this. I don’t want to tell you “you’re holding it wrong” but if this is your normal experience there’s something weird happening. Friday afternoon I made a new directory and told Claude Code I wanted to make a Go proxy so I could have a request/callback HTTP API for a 3rd party service whose official API is only persistent websocket connections. I had it read the service’s API docs, engage in…

> it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy. It works better when you tell it what to do, rather than letting it decide. That can be at a pretty high level, though. Basically reduce the problem to a set of well-established subproblems that it’s familiar with. Same as you’d do with a junior developer, really. Equating "junior developers" and "coding LLMs" is pretty lame. You handhold a junior developers so, e…

I didn’t say they are equivalent, nor do I in any way consider them equivalent. One is a tool, the other is a person.

I simply said the description of the problem should be broken down similar to the way you’d do it for a junior developer. As opposed to the way you’d express the problem to a more senior developer who can be trusted to figure out the right way to do it at a higher level.

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

#116

Post by MrScruff »

lordkrandel wrote: post #4

Why do people keep ralking about AI as it actually worked? I still don't see ANY proof that it doesn't generate a total unmaintainable unsecure mess, that since you didn't develop, you don't know how to fix. Like running a F1 Ferrari on a countryside road: useless and dangerous

I see a lot of people talk about 'insecure code' and while I don't doubt that's true, there's a lot of software development where security isn't actually a concern because there's no need for the software to be 'secure'. Maintainability is important I'll grant you.

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

#117

Post by rglover »

I'm a soloist. My plants are getting watered again and I get to finish work earlier and enjoy my home life now instead of sprouting ulcers or staying up til 4am. In the event I did/do have employees, I wouldn't hire anyone who could be replaced by an LLM (nor would I want to because I enjoy keeping my clients happy and having a team that actually feels like they have some sense of security in life—turns out those people are incredibly loyal and hard working).

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

#118

Post by ball_of_lint »

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…

Did you give claude access to run the compile step?

I remember having to write code on paper for my CS exams, and they expected it to compile! It was hard but I mostly got there. definitely made a few small mistakes though

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

#119

Post by wrs »

maccard wrote: post #97
wrs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m honestly baffled by this. I don’t want to tell you “you’re holding it wrong” but if this is your normal experience there’s something weird happening. Friday afternoon I made a new directory and told Claude Code I wanted to make a Go proxy so I could have a request/callback HTTP API for a 3rd party service whose official API is only persistent websocket connections. I had it read the service’s API docs, engage in…

> I have noticed some people I work with have more trouble, and my vague intuition is it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy What’s giving too much autonomy about “Please load settings.toml using a library and print out the name key from the application table”? Even if it’s under specified, surely it should at least leave it _compiling_? I’ve been posting comments like this monthly here, my experience has…

There’s nothing wrong with it that I can see. Like I said, I’m a bit baffled at your experience. I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, but usually one short iteration later that’s fixed. Claude Code will usually even do that iteration by itself.

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

#120

Post by linsomniac »

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…

My friend, with all due respect, I don't think this is a problem with the AI.

I don't know anything about DotNet, but I just fired up Claude Code in an empty directory and asked it to create an example dotnet program using the Tomlyn library, it chugged away and ~5 minutes later I did a "grep Deserialize *" in the project and it came up with exactly the line you wanted (in your comment here) it to produce: var model = TomlSerializer.Deserialize(tomlContent)!;

The full results of what it produced are at https://github.com/linsomniac/tomlynexample

That includes the prompt I used, which is:

Please create a dotnet sample program that uses the library at https://github.com/xoofx/Tomlyn to parse the TOML file given on the command line. Please only use the Tomlyn library for parsing the TOML file. I don't have any dotnet tooling installed on my system, please let me know what is needed to compile this example when we get there. Please use an agent team consisting of a dotnet expert, a qa expert, a TOML expert a devils advocate and a dotnet on Linux expert.

I can't really comment on the code it produced (as I said, I don't use dotnet, I had to install dotnet on my system to try this), so I can't comment on the approach. 346 lines in Program.cs seems like a lot for an example TOML program, but I know Claude Code tends to do full error checking, etc, and it seems to have a lot of "pretty printing" code.

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