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If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#21

Post by animal_spirits »

All of the products you are using today were likely created before ChatGPT was released. For those products, you are not going to see any visible improvements because many of them will suffer from poor implementation due to lack of adequate knowledge of code/frameworks. Most software best practices are learned after the software is created and release. The code is probably very spaghetti and hard to maintain. Refactoring is still hard for AI, but writing from scratch is much easier with AI. For the software that is currently out, bugs will be fixed faster, and features might be added sooner.

The real explosion of great software will happen in 3-5 years. AI is huge for the beginning of projects. You know _what_ you want the app to do but you don't know _how_. That's where AI adds huge value. People are now starting new projects with AI help, and they are building foundations of codebases that will be much more maintainable and sustainable as development continues compared to the current suite of software products we interact with today.

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#24

Post by rmellow »

Digital distribution and cloud apps lowered the cost to correct mistakes and therefore lowered the barrier to release.

No longer are developers bound by physical media, or have to force clients to troubleshoot, manually download updates on their website and install them.

... and as others said, LLMs impact is greater on junior developers, and at that, more on speed than quality. For experienced developers, the impact is greater on speed.

I have no data, only sense to make.

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#25

Post by sexy_seedbox »

csallen wrote: post #12

I signed into Zapier yesterday for the first time in a while. You can seemingly run their entire UI right now via AI. I typed a simple idea into their AI box, and it created a multi-step "zap" for me that was more-or-less what I wanted. So at least some software is getting better.

How is Zapier's AI for more difficult tasks? Is it a "Yes" man like almost all other AI services/LLMs?

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#26

Post by bamboozled »

ado__dev wrote: post #9

We're still very much in the early days. Code AI tools today absolutely crush at creating proof of concept apps. You can test your idea and get market validation in days vs months. They are getting better at medium/large codebases, but still have a ways to go before being super useful and it translating to a huge increase in productivity. Currently it's really good for helping with the menial tasks (creating docs, un…

This is such a wildly unsubstantiated claim. Where is the evidence of this happening ?

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#27

Post by jsheard »

animal_spirits wrote: post #21

All of the products you are using today were likely created before ChatGPT was released. For those products, you are not going to see any visible improvements because many of them will suffer from poor implementation due to lack of adequate knowledge of code/frameworks. Most software best practices are learned after the software is created and release. The code is probably very spaghetti and hard to maintain. Refacto…

> You know _what_ you want the app to do but you don't know _how_. That's where AI adds huge value. People are now starting new projects with AI help, and they are building foundations of codebases that will be much more maintainable and sustainable

I'm not following. How are these codebases going to be more maintainable and sustainable if the developers are committing code they don't even understand?

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#28

Post by j45 »

Maybe things that weren't being built (available capacity to develop) is increasing, thereby lifting up the floor of things that never get built.

Further, non-coders being able to become equivalent to a junior developer is a huge leap.

What active developers do with AI remains to be seen. It really could 20x the average developer, but it doesn't seem like a huge chunk of developers are really using AI in a way that it's the rage on the developer level broadly.

Maybe that's why Cursor going "viral" on youtube seems different when it was known to some, and not others.

Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?

#29

Post by talldayo »

ado__dev wrote: post #9

We're still very much in the early days. Code AI tools today absolutely crush at creating proof of concept apps. You can test your idea and get market validation in days vs months. They are getting better at medium/large codebases, but still have a ways to go before being super useful and it translating to a huge increase in productivity. Currently it's really good for helping with the menial tasks (creating docs, un…

> They are getting better at medium/large codebases

If we are strictly speaking about the cutting-edge models like OpenAI's o1, their context is getting smaller, not larger.

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