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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?

#121

Post by alecbz »

jmalicki wrote: post #103
jayd16 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 check…

Stuff like this works for things that can be verified programmatically (though I find LLMs still do occasionally ignore instructions like this), but ensuring correct functionality and sensible code organization are bigger challenges.

There are techniques that can help deal with this but none of them work perfectly, and most of the time some direct oversight from me is required. And this really clips the potential productivity gains, because in order to effectively provide oversight you need to page in all the context of what's going on and how it ought to work, which is most of what the LLMs are in-theory helping you with.

LLMs are still very useful for certain tasks (bootstrapping in new unfamiliar domains, tedious plumbing or test fixture code), but the massive productivity gains people are claiming or alluding to still feel out of reach.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by linsomniac »

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…

> Even if it’s under specified, surely it should at least leave it _compiling_?

Are you using Claude Code? Do yo have it configured so that you are not allowing it to run the build? Because I've observed that Claude Code is extremely good at making sure the code compiles, because it'll run a compile and address any compile errors as part of the work.

I just asked it to build a TOML example program in DotNet using Tomlyn, and when it was done I was able to run "./bin/Debug/net8.0/dotnettoml example.toml", it had already built it for me (I watched it run the build step as part of its work, as I mentioned it would do above).

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

moffkalast wrote: post #111
roncesvalles wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by jmalicki »

alecbz wrote: post #121
jmalicki wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 check…

Stuff like this works for things that can be verified programmatically (though I find LLMs still do occasionally ignore instructions like this), but ensuring correct functionality and sensible code organization are bigger challenges. There are techniques that can help deal with this but none of them work perfectly, and most of the time some direct oversight from me is required. And this really clips the potential pro…

It depends - there are some very very difficult things that can still be easily verifiable!

For instance, if you are working on a compiler and have a huge test database of code to compile that all has tests itself, "all sample code must compile and pass tests, ensuring your new optimizer code gets adequate branch coverage in the process" - the underlying task can be very difficult, but you have large amounts of test coverage that have a very good chance at catching errors there.

At the very least "LLM code compiles, and is formatted and documented according to lint rules" is pretty basic. If people are saying LLM code doesn't compile, then yes, you are using it very incorrectly, as you're not even beginning to engage the agentic loop at all, as compiling is the simplest step.

Sure, a lot of more complex cases require oversight or don't work.

But "the code didn't compile" is definitely in "you're holding it wrong" territority, and it's not even subtle.

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

#126

Post by alecbz »

foobarchu wrote: post #96
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…

The best experiences I have are those where I can describe what I want done with details. Rather than asking it add toml parsing, I would tell it to exactly which library to use ahead of time and reduce the number of decisions available to the model to make. Some of the most effective use-cases are when you have a reference to give it, e.g. "add x feature the same way as in this other project that is also in the work…

> The best experiences I have are those where I can describe what I want done with details.

But that's the hard part! You can only eke out moderate productivity gains by automating the tedium of actually writing out the code, because it's a small fraction of software engineering.

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

#127

Post by linsomniac »

jmull wrote: post #102

> 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 ongoin…

>There's an ongoing maintenance and complexity cost.

My company has 20 years of accumulated tech debt, and the LLMs have been pretty amazing at helping us dig out from under a lot of that.

You make valid points, but I'm just going to chime in with adding code is not the only thing that these tools are good at.

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

#128

Post by senordevnyc »

moffkalast wrote: post #111
roncesvalles wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compared to what? I spent about $700 last month on Cursor, mostly on Opus 4.6. The time it saved me is at least 10-20x more valuable than that. I keep trying to use GPT-5.3 Codex, because it's like 40% cheaper, but then the quality doesn't always seem quite as good, and it's honestly not worth it to me to save a couple hundred bucks a month for something that's 10% worse. The multiplicative value of what I'm building means it's worth it to pay extra for the SOTA model in almost all cases.

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

#129

Post by senordevnyc »

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 is so perplexing to me. I've definitely hit these kinds of issues (which usually result in me cursing at the agent in all caps while telling it to get its shit together!), but it's almost always a long ways into a session where I know context rot is an issue, and the assumption it's making is a dumb one but it's also in the middle of a complex task...I just haven't had anything remotely like the situation you're describing, where Opus 4.6 can't make a simple change and verify that it compiles, can't look up docs, can't follow your instructions, etc. Bizarre.

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

#130

Post by senordevnyc »

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…

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

I wonder if it was getting blocked on searches or something, and just didn't tell you.

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