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

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141–150 of 244 posts

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

#141
If your dev team can be replaced by AI bots, go ahead and do it. Be confident about it.

Seriously, all managers I know (2, somehow) that have done this are now in sprint hell because they didn't realize an LLM cannot do the work their devs did. Bit of schadenfreude.

Not saying this can't be done, some projects are easy enough that you can throw an LLM at it

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Tom…

I am using Claude code. I didn’t explicitly tell it what the build command was (it’s dotnet build), and it didn’t ask. Thats not my fault. > I’ve observed Claude code is extremely good at making sure the code compiles My observation is that it’s fine until it’s absolutely not, and the agentic loop fails.

>Thats not my fault.

I don't know that it's useful to assign blame here.

It probably is to your benefit, if you are a coding professional, to understand why your results are so drastically different from what others are seeing. You started this thread saying "I keep getting told I'll be amazed at what it can do, but the tools keep failing at the first hurdle."

I'm telling you that something is wrong, that is why you are getting poor results. I don't know what is wrong, but I've given you an example prompt and an example output showing that Claude Code is able to produce the exact output you were looking for. This is why a lot of people are saying "you'll be amazed at what it can do", and it points to you having some issue.

I don't know if you are running an ancient version of Claude Code, if you are not using Opus 4.6, you are not using "high" effort (those are what I'm using to get the results I posted elsewhere in reply to your comment), but something is definitely wrong. Some of what may be wrong is that you don't have enough experience with the tooling, which I'd understand if you are getting poor results; you have little (immediate) incentive to get more proficient.

As I said, I was able to tell Claude Code to do something like the example you gave, and it did it and it built, without me asking, and produced a working program on the first try.

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

#143
It's better than it was, but I'm still not amazed.

I was working with it just yesterday and found it mixed up class attributes and dict keys when looking if something existed. As a result, it always thought the key was missing. Glancing through the code, it would have been easy to overlook, as it was checking for something... just doing it the wrong way. The code also appeared to still work in the larger context, just not as well or as efficiently as it was supposed to work. It was only my obsessive testing and attention to detail that caught it.

I find it much faster and easier to write things myself, using AI to help me along the way, rather than trying to delegate everything to the AI and hoping for the best. Writing code is much more interesting than reviewing code, and it puts me close enough to it that those kind of issues don't happen in the first place.

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

#144

I use it near daily and there is definitely a positive there, BUT its nothing like what the OP statement would make it up to be. If it is writing both the code and the tests then you're going to find that its tests are remarkable, they just work. At least until you deploy to a live state and start testing for yourself, then you'll notice that its mostly only testing the exact code that it wrote, its not confrontation…

The pain already starts when a new feature needs to be introduced, your colleague is assigned to the task and the architecture is completely unfit for modular development.

Any sensible experienced programmer will take into account possible future features spoken about around the office, when deciding how implement a feature. To me that’s the key reason I can’t delegate AI complex features that will grow. The same reason I inspect and clean the toilet when I’m done - out of respect to my colleagues

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a 2600 chess player, a bot that plays 1800 chess is a horrendous chess player. But you can understand why all the 1700 and below chess players say it is good and it is making them better using it for eval? Don't worry, AI will replace you one day, you are just smarter than most of us so you don't see it yet.

The analogy of thinking of coding AI like it's chess AI is terrible. If chess AI was at the level of coding AI, it wouldn't win a single game. This kind of thinking is actually a big reason why execs are being misinformed into overestimating LLM abilities. LLM coding agents alone are not good enough to replace any single developer. They only make a developer x% faster. That dev who is now x% faster may then allow you…

I like the chess analogy as it answer the question: why can't i see those gain?

To adress your point, let's try another one analogy. Imagine secreterial assistants, discussing their risk of been replaced by computers in the 80s. They would think: someone still need to type those letters, sit next to that phone and make those appointments, I am safe. Computers won't replace me.

It is not that AI will do all of your tasks and replace you. It is that your role as a specialist in software development won't be necessary most of the time (someone will do that, and that person won't call themselves a programmer).

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

#146
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy of thinking of coding AI like it's chess AI is terrible. If chess AI was at the level of coding AI, it wouldn't win a single game. This kind of thinking is actually a big reason why execs are being misinformed into overestimating LLM abilities. LLM coding agents alone are not good enough to replace any single developer. They only make a developer x% faster. That dev who is now x% faster may then allow you…

I like the chess analogy as it answer the question: why can't i see those gain? To adress your point, let's try another one analogy. Imagine secreterial assistants, discussing their risk of been replaced by computers in the 80s. They would think: someone still need to type those letters, sit next to that phone and make those appointments, I am safe. Computers won't replace me. It is not that AI will do all of your ta…

Secretarial assistant as a profession is still very alive, and the title has been inflated to stratospheric heights (and compensation): "Chief of Staff"

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

#147
post #112

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 probl…

I hope you are right. I’ve been in this industry 20 years… the passionate developer or small team with the awesome software wins a few times, but 99% of the time it’s the shitty software with a great marketing and sales team that wins.

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

#148

I use it near daily and there is definitely a positive there, BUT its nothing like what the OP statement would make it up to be. If it is writing both the code and the tests then you're going to find that its tests are remarkable, they just work. At least until you deploy to a live state and start testing for yourself, then you'll notice that its mostly only testing the exact code that it wrote, its not confrontation…

This is more or less my belief too. But I think there are probably domains/companies where the "promo video" is actually good enough to ship (or at least, where that's the quality that devs were shipping before)

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

#150
post #110
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 mi…

Here's an evil business idea: Use the LLMs to identify the users most likely to be "vocal influencers" and then prioritize resources for them, ensuring they get the best experience. You can engineer a bubble this way.

And then the next step is to dynamically vary resources based on prediction of user stickiness. User is frustrated and thinking of trying competitor -> allocate full resources. User is profiled as prone to gambling and will tolerate intermittent rewards -> can safely forward requests to gimped models. User is an resolute AI skeptic and unlikely to ever preach the gospels of vibecoding -> no need to waste resources on him.

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