Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 244 posts

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

#151

Post by saulpw »

maccard wrote: post #136
wrs wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…

It's not unusual for my initial output (as a programmer) not to compile either. I wouldn't say I "failed" if I can then get it to compile. Which as people are saying, is what happens with Claude Code and Opus, either automatically or at most when I say "get it to compile".

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

animal531 wrote: post #46

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…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by pton_xd »

ffsm8 wrote: post #110
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 mi…

Last year I had a friend chatting with me about how Claude had rather quickly transformed their small coding shop, except that they noticed after 3pm it consistently became incredibly dumb. I kind of laughed at the time but you know what, who knows. There's very likely some load-balancing shenanigans going on behind the scenes.

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

#154

Post by wrs »

maccard wrote: post #136
wrs wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…

Hmm…if you’re giving only one prompt to Claude Code, and allowing it only one output, then I’m no longer baffled at why you’re not getting good results. That’s not how it works. (That’s not how it works when I write code myself, either!)

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

#155

Post by dismalaf »

In my experience the speed gains are real (kind of) but not in a "the AI writes code" kind of way, more of a "the AI is Google on steroids that can reference the docs very quickly". I've found it saves me a ton of time searching through documentation, googling and dealing with bad search results or ads, etc... But it doesn't write good code. So a productivity boost, not 10x, but a bit. And no, I wouldn't fire anyone. It's not that good.

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

#156

Post by Ancalagon »

ffsm8 wrote: post #110
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 mi…

I had a similar experience between this weekend and last weekend!

Maybe Anthropic is trying to cut costs a little and we are all just gaslighting ourselves into thinking its our problem.

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

#157

Post by maccard »

linsomniac wrote: post #142
maccard wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don’t know that it’s useful to assign blame here

Oh - I’m blaming Claude not anyone else. I’ve tried again this evening and the same prompt (in the same directory on the same project) worked.

> i don’t know if you’re using an ancient version of Claude code,

I’m on a version from some time last week, and using opus 4.6

> 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.

If you look at my comments in these threads, I’ve had these issues and been posting about this for months. I’m still being told “ you’re using the wrong model or the wrong tool or you’re holding it wrong” but yet, here I am.

I’m using plan mode, clearly breaking down tasks and this happens to me basically every time I use the damn tool. Speaking to my team at work and friends in other workplaces, I hear the same thing. But yet we’re just using it wrong or doing something wrong,

Honestly, I genuinely think the people who are not having these experiences just… don’t notice that they are.

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

#158

Post by maccard »

wrs wrote: post #154
maccard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…

Hmm…if you’re giving only one prompt to Claude Code, and allowing it only one output, then I’m no longer baffled at why you’re not getting good results. That’s not how it works. (That’s not how it works when I write code myself, either!)

I mean, I don’t know how much less scope I can give it. The next step is writing the 5 lines of code I want it to write.

I also clearly said I didn’t allow it one output, I gave it the compile error message, it changed a different line, I told it it was at the affected line and to check the docs. Claude code then tried to query the DLL for the function, abandoned that and then did something else incorrect.

I’m literally asking it to install a package and copy the example from the readme

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

#159

Post by maccard »

saulpw wrote: post #151
maccard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…

It's not unusual for my initial output (as a programmer) not to compile either. I wouldn't say I "failed" if I can then get it to compile. Which as people are saying, is what happens with Claude Code and Opus, either automatically or at most when I say "get it to compile".

But when it doesn’t compile for me, I don’t claim it’s finished.

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

#160

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> LLMs lower maintenance cost

Even the most enthusiastic AI boosters I've read don't seem to agree with this. From what I can tell, LLMs are still mostly useful at building in greenfield projects, and they are weak at maintaining brownfield projects

Post reply on HN