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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?

#161

Post by oro44 »

krackers wrote: post #150
ffsm8 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"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."

Its quite likely this is already happening buddy...

The 'random' degradation across all LLM-based services is obvious at this point.

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

#162

Post by oro44 »

pton_xd wrote: post #153
ffsm8 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I thought it was well known at this point that the best usage happens outside of peak hours?

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

#163

Post by oro44 »

HoyaSaxa wrote: post #60

I think most public companies will take the short term profits and startups will be given a huge opportunity to take market share as a result. At my company, we are maintaining our hiring plan (I'm the decision maker). We have never been more excited at our permission to win against the incumbents in our market. At the same time, I've never been more concerned about other startups giving us a real run. I think we wil…

"But those startups that are able to harness the productivity gains to deliver more complete and polished solutions that solve real problems for their users will be unstoppable."

They'd be unstoppable irrespective of LLMs. Why do you think Zuckerberg acquired Instagram? He literally tried copying it and failed. Instagram at the time was absolutely tiny in terms of pure labour, relative to Facebook.

Most people on hacker news are missing the point. Productivity gains for the sake of perceived productivity gains is not what creates economic value. Its not the equivalent of a factory all of a sudden becoming more productive in producing more of the same stuff. Not comparable at all.

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

#164

Post by oro44 »

pydry wrote: post #21
tyleo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's working for a lot of people. There are people getting value from these products right now. I'm getting value myself and I know several other folks at work who are getting value. I'm not sure what your circumstances are but even if it's not true for you, it's true for many other people.

It's interesting that the people IRL I encounter who "get the most value" tend to be the devs who couldnt distinguish well written code from slop in the first place. People online with identical views to them all assure me that theyre all highly skilled though. Meanwhile I've been experimenting using AI for shopping and all of them so far are horrendous. Cant handle basic queries without tripping over themselves.

Agreed.

Im very confident the experts in every field are not all that impressed by LLMs, relative of course, to those who were 'meh' in the first place. Experts meaning those who actually understand the content, not simply regurgitate or repeat it on demand.

I'd even go as far as to say there are many out there who have a feeling of disdain of the experts and want to see LLMs flourish because of this.

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

#165

Post by wrs »

maccard wrote: post #158
wrs wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 litera…

I understand (and don’t know what to say beyond “that’s weird”). I was just reacting to your equating “the first try sometimes doesn’t compile” with “it often fails”. That’s only a failure if you stop at that point.

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

#166

Post by oro44 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #108
dominotw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. This is f"cking hilarious.

"oooh Im afraid of doxxing myself", wtf? lmao!

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

#169

Post by vibe42 »

krackers wrote: post #150
ffsm8 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is part of why running open models on hardware you control is valuable. They may trail SOTA by 6-12 months (really less for many use cases) but there's more reliability, control etc.
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