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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?

#31

Post by foobarqux »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #14

Why would there be a correlation between how fast something is developed and its quality? Assuming that AI is helping developers to write more code, it could mean: * there are fewer developers * developers are working less * the efficiency gains are resulting in more products being created rather than existing products being improved * AI isn't widely enough adopted or used to make enough of a difference * the benefi…

Is there any evidence for any of those hypotheses? More apps in app stores? Mass layoffs? How could the "benefits be too recent to be measured" if everyone is arguing that they are already 10x more productive?

If you accept that premise the only conclusion left is that it has made developer's work much less but their bosses haven't noticed yet.

But you would still expect that some people are working for themselves and continue to work the same amount of hours so should be producing 10 apps a year instead of 1. Are there any examples of that?

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

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#34

Post by mu53 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #14

Why would there be a correlation between how fast something is developed and its quality? Assuming that AI is helping developers to write more code, it could mean: * there are fewer developers * developers are working less * the efficiency gains are resulting in more products being created rather than existing products being improved * AI isn't widely enough adopted or used to make enough of a difference * the benefi…

I am leaning towards fewer developers. There is a crunch in the job market and companies are finding rate of progress as being similar before, so don't feel inclined to hire more

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

#35

Post by sitkack »

W/o a different incentive structure, nothing will get better from what it is now. And if there is a way to produce something cheaper and a functionally equivalent lower quality, that is what will happen.

For most part, it will be same quality or lower at a cheaper cost delivered faster.

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

#36

Post by ado__dev »

bamboozled wrote: post #26
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 ?

Which one?

I run DevRel at Sourcegraph and our AI coding assistant, Cody, is used by tons of individuals, small business, and large enterprises. I get to talk to a ton of customers and see how their adoption of AI is going. And it's certainly increasing and developers are finding a ton of value.

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

#38

Post by sdenton4 »

jsheard wrote: post #27
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?

I think you misinterpret the 'don't know how' part. LLM's are fantastic for boilerplate (which is a big part of getting things started). From there, I might not know the right incantation for (say) handling a button click, but it's not too hard to validate that an LLM-generated handler a) works, b) looks sensible, and c) fits reasonably in the codebase. In fact, most of my use of LLMs for coding is about generating snippets of functionality, which go into a codebase that I'm maintaining the shape of... which helps maintainability.

You can also generate tests more efficiently, meaning you can get better test coverage cheaper. This leads to better maintainability as well, as you know more quickly when you've broken things with a change.

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

#39

Post by ado__dev »

talldayo wrote: post #29
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.

I believe o1's context window will increase over time as well. It's a new model that takes a different approach compared to other ones, so testing it with less context seems logical and expanding the context window as it's quality is validated.

Even in a large code-base, you don't have to have the full context of every single file for every single question, can usually get away with half a dozen files, it's figuring out which ones to provide to the LLM to get the best response.

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