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Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

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Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#21

Post by globular-toast »

proc0 wrote: post #6

Writing code is the easiest part of the process (relatively speaking). Figuring out the requirements, working with stakeholders to drive consensus, and understanding user needs is the bulk of the work. LLMs will certainly lower the entry barriers for new programmers, and might also create a new solopreneur economy because of it. Now non-technical people with ideas can start prototyping and raise money, but would soon…

That doesn't completely explain it. There are tons of open source projects with countless feature requests just begging for someone to implement them. There's not really any research to do. Often the feature being requested is ridiculously simple but difficult to implement.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#23

Post by shortrounddev2 »

returnInfinity wrote: post #17

Youtube, Instagram are flooded with AI generated content. I believe AI will be useful in Game Dev. AI voice acting, AI face generation. This way all the NPCs will be unique. Possibly AI layout generation. I don't think using AI to generate script is great use case. It can be used to generate ideas. But still we need human creativity to make great games.

We don't need LLMs to generate background NPCs, we have procgen for that already. I think AI generated voices are still a ways from being ad good as a real human; whenever I watch a YouTube video with an AI voice over, I can tell immediately

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#24

Post by nradov »

orph wrote: post #12

Everyone is a decent programmer now who can solve nearly any problem with help from LLM.

Everyone? Most people are incapable of expressing a problem in reasonably clear terms. They often don't even know the right questions to ask.

LLMs are pretty good at giving you what you ask for. Not so good at telling you that you're asking for the wrong thing.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#25

Post by twojacobtwo »

Profits? I mean, I'm guessing the trend can't be wholly disconnected from the massive layoffs in the tech sector over the last year or so. Probably not the primary driver, but companies are always looking to maximize profits and, in the short-term, what faster way is there than by making cuts?

If a business sees a 15% productivity boost coming, especially with no easy plan in place to to utilize it fully for equivalent profit, someone near the top is already thinking that quick cuts could be an immediate 15% increase in reported profits for next quarter (in a 1:1 scenario).

I'm being a bit simplistic, but I think the general idea of business maximizing profits over output stands (or easy short-term thinking over more difficult long-term planning).

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#27

Post by adpirz »

- Some early studies have shown modest gains (can try and link later)

- It’s still very early. LLMs have only been publicly available for 2 years, copilots a little less than that.

- It’s mostly anchored on cold starts ie I’m creating something from scratch. Leveraging LLMs in existing and mature codebases is definitely going to pick up.

- The majority of devs aren’t really using these tools or using them to their full ability. It takes a lot of fiddling to understand the limits and strengths, but when you do, you basically stop writing code and write more prose.

I will be surprised if in ten years even a quarter of your keyboard inputs will be towards code directly vs directing your friendly coding robot.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#28

Post by moffkalast »

j0hnyl wrote: post #18

I actually think all of the things you listed are absolutely happening.

> for instance, in the open source community

They're definitely wrong on that point, there's countless projects that exist that otherwise wouldn't have been started at all. Anecdotally I would never have put in the initial effort to set up a project that has 100+ stars now without the initial kick from early GPT-4 last year.

Lots of these new repos are also disproportionately in the LLM related space specifically since that's where people use them the most for code, so it's probably not as noticeable at large yet.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#29

Post by eesmith »

sixhobbits wrote: post #14

Technology spreads slowly. google docs is an instant 50x productivity increase for any legal process and yet a few years ago I saw an advocate's mind blown by a simple demonstration of simultaneous editing from two people in the same affidavit. For him, the norm is still to redline a document on paper, and have his secretary add those changes to the original digital document and have that sent over to the opposing te…

My lawyer says his office runs on Microsoft 365. Is Google Docs really 50x over that? I don't even see how it's 50x over LibreOffice and a shared drive.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#30

Post by lm28469 »

returnInfinity wrote: post #17

Youtube, Instagram are flooded with AI generated content. I believe AI will be useful in Game Dev. AI voice acting, AI face generation. This way all the NPCs will be unique. Possibly AI layout generation. I don't think using AI to generate script is great use case. It can be used to generate ideas. But still we need human creativity to make great games.

> Youtube, Instagram are flooded with AI generated content

Are we supposed to be happy about that?

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