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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?

#211

Post by lordkrandel »

MrScruff wrote: post #116
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.

Oh, finally someone who speaks the truth :D yeah, security su*ks everywhere. True. But when you grow a product with time, you fill the holes one by one when you start losing water. With AI, you will have so many holes in your 15 days made battleship, that... good luck putting it at sea, you can tank in the first minute. As Moltbook has shown. I don't have to find proofs (which I dont actually find). I just need a counter example and... first big vibe product I've seen, first gigantic security failure. Plain to see.

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

#212

Post by alexjplant »

lordkrandel wrote: post #207
alexjplant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do people keep ralking about AI as it actually worked? Because it does. > 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. I wouldn't know since it's been years since I've tried but I'd imagine that Claude Code would indeed generate a half-baked Next.js monstrosity if one-shot and left to its own devices. Being t…

> can give it a list of fields with validation rules and query patterns and it'll build me CRUD pages in a fraction of the time it'd take me to do so. Ah, is this what you do for a job? I actually have to accord accounting rules between countries, evaluate different conflicting laws, understand what the government wants in a report, check that everything sums up... But if my job was CRUD apps and thats it, yes I woul…

> Ah, is this what you do for a job? I actually have to [...]

> if my job was CRUD apps and thats it,

I'm not sure whether you intended this but your post reads as presumptuous and disdainful. The whole point of these tools is to free people from having to do these parts of their job so that they can focus on the ones of greater substance. At no point did I say that was my entire job or that I was afraid of it disappearing - if that was your takeaway then I don't know what to say.

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

#213

Post by foobarchu »

alecbz wrote: post #126
foobarchu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why I don't like to claim massive productivity boosts, personally. It's helped me out with the tedious bits that are still necessary. It's also great as an idea board, where I ask for some sample approaches to a problem. That cuts way down on research time, even if a few of the options given are dead ends because e.g. they use an API that doesn't exist.

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

#214

Post by lordkrandel »

fbrncci wrote: post #31
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

It works. You’re just not doing it right if it doesn’t work for you. It’s hard to convince me otherwise at this point.

Have fun then. I don't need to convince you, I asked reasons to be convinced. And this thread is offering me none at all! :D

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

#215

Post by lordkrandel »

K0balt wrote: post #45
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’ve been using it to develop firmware in c++. Typically around 10-20 KLOC. Current projects use Sensors, wire protocols, RF systems , swarm networks, that kind of stuff integrated into the firmware. If you use it correctly, you can get better quality, more maintainable code than 75% of devs will turn in on a PR. The “one weird trick” seems to be to specify, specify, specify. First you use the LLM to help you write a…

Yeah, I guess that for small projects, you can prototype and generate well and good. 20k loc is not much. A seasoned engineer can put code generation to good use. Yet, the cost of maintaining 4x the code grows exponentially, especially when you have to communicate your specs to humans, or have stakeholders discuss how they want the product to be. Firmware is also a nice ground. Sensors also behave mechanically, which is good for AIs who can pattern match more effectively than with actual humans. I won't say AI is useless. I see the incremental gains. I don't see the exponential gains for everyone that is going to kill the world - yet. And the fact that it takes 50+ comments to actually get someone who can explain real gains tells me much about how overhyped the whole domain is.

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

#216

Post by Neosmith_amit »

I think this binary "fire vs. build better" is probably NOT the right perspective. Maybe a different perspective could be, since the cost of attempting things is falling rapidly, what features are now worth trying, that were NOT worth building because the implementation cost was too high.

I think companies that maintain the same product roadmap, will stagnate irrespective of whether they keep the engineers or fire 90% of them. The ones that will win, in my humble opinion, will be the ones that ask, "What can we build now, that we could not build before due to any reason (cost, expertise etc.)?" That is an entirely different question.

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

#217

Post by roncesvalles »

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.

The cost-effectiveness of something that doesn't work is 0.

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

#218

Post by fxtentacle »

jmalicki wrote: post #140
maccard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t 10x my output - they write some code for a problem I/you have already thought about. The hard part isn’t writing the code, it never has been. It’s always been solving and breaking down the problem.

It's not the hard part, just the tedious part that takes the most time.

I can typically type faster than I can think.

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

#219

Post by fxtentacle »

senordevnyc wrote: post #130
fxtentacle wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or maybe the other shops were offering a higher CPC? I heard OpenAI is trying to introduce invisible advertising.
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