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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?

#91

Post by fxtentacle »

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't in the list, despite GPT claiming it to be exhaustive. When I then found it manually and asked GPT for advice on how I could improve my prompting in the future, it went full "aggressively agreeable" on me with "Excellent question! Now I can see exactly why my searches missed XY - this is a perfect learning opportunity. Here's what went wrong and what was missing: ..." and then 4 sections with 4 subsections each.

It's great to see the AI reflect on how it failed. But it's also kind of painful if you know that it'll forget all of this the moment the text is sent to me and that it will never ever learn from this mistake and do better in the future.

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

#92

Post by varispeed »

AI just removes the boring stuff. It's like having developers spending their valuable time on typing and then comes a product that removes typing cost and dumb managers are like ha! we now need fewer developers! And the smart ones go, great we can shorten the feedback loop and use existing resources to make more improvements!

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

#93

Post by maccard »

JakeStone wrote: post #88
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…

If Claude ends up grabbing my C# TOML library, in my defense, I wrote it when the TOML format first came out over a dozen years ago, and never did anything more with it Sorry.

Nope! https://github.com/xoofx/Tomlyn

The code it needed to write was:

    var model = TomlSerializer.Deserialize(toml)!;
Which is in the readme of the repo. It could also have generated a class and deserialised into that. Instead it did something else (afraid I don’t have it handy sorry)

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

#94

Post by thwarted »

wrs wrote: post #75
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…

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…

> it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy. It works better when you tell it what to do, rather than letting it decide. That can be at a pretty high level, though. Basically reduce the problem to a set of well-established subproblems that it’s familiar with. Same as you’d do with a junior developer, really.

Equating "junior developers" and "coding LLMs" is pretty lame. You handhold a junior developers so, eventually, you don't have to handhold anymore. The junior developer is expected to learn enough, and be trusted enough, to operate more autonomously. "Junior developers" don't exist solely to do your bidding. It may be valuable to recognize similarities between a first junior developer interaction and a first LLM interaction, but when every LLM interaction requires it to be handheld, the value of the iterative nature of having a junior developer work along side you is not at all equivalent.

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

#95

Post by plagiarist »

jayd16 wrote: post #84
krastanov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating to me. I completely believe you and I will not bother you with all the common "but did you try to tell it this or that" responses, but this is such a different experience from mine. I did the exact same task with claude in the Julia language last week, and everything worked perfectly. I am now in the habit of adding "keep it simple, use only public interfaces, do not use internals, be elegant and…

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.

IME it does fail pretty hard at first. One has to build up a little library of markdown and internal library of prompt techniques. Then it starts working okay. I agree there is a hurdle still, trying it on one task doesn't really get one over the hurdle.

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

#96

Post by foobarchu »

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 workspace", or "make the changes I made to the contents of directory X in git commit , but applied to directory Y instead". In both cases it's a lot of copy/paste then tweaking an obvious value (like replacing "dev" with "QA" everywhere).

I try to give the model as little freedom as possible. That usually means it's not being used for novel work.

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

#97

Post by maccard »

wrs wrote: post #75
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…

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 been consistently this with Claude, opencode, antigravity, cursor, and using gpt/opus/sonnet/gemini models (latest at time of testing). This morning was opus 4.6

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

#98

Post by hexer303 »

I find that the arguments of whether or not AI boosts productivity is not very productive.

The more grounded reality is that AI coding can be a productivity multiplier in the right hands, and a significant hindrance in the wrong hands.

Somewhere there exists a happy medium between vibe coding without ever looking at the code, and hand-writing every single line.

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

#99

Post by fweimer »

roncesvalles wrote: post #80
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…

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.

To make this more confusing, there is a fast mode of Opus 4.6, which (as far as I understand it) is supposed to deliver the same results as the standard mode. It's much more expensive, but advertised as more interactive.

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

#100

Post by maccard »

rileymichael wrote: post #77
maccard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Habe they? I’ve used tools that mostly do it, but they require manually writing templates for the frameworks. In internal apps my experience has been these get left behind as the service implementations change, and it ends up with “copy your favourite service that you know works”.

> they require manually writing templates for the frameworks the ones i've used come with defaults that you can then customize. here are some of the better ones: - https://guides.rubyonrails.org/command_line.html#generating-... - https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Mix.Tasks.Phx.Gen.html - https://laravel.com/docs/13.x/artisan#stub-customization - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/t... > my experience…

Sorry - I’m aware that rails/dotnet have these built into visual studio and co, but my point was about our custom internal things that are definitely not IDE integrated.

> it comes down to ensuring time is invested in devex

That’s actually my point - the orgs haven’t invested in devex buyt that didn’t matter because copilot could figure out what to do!

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