Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 173 posts

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

#61

Post by giantg2 »

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

Because it's not helping them code better. It might be faster, but the quality in my experience is worse. Then the user is trying to verify or troubleshoot code they didn't write.

The bigger issue is garbage in, garbage out at the requirements level. The business hardly ever documents their business system before turning it into a technical system. How can we create a system to meet requirements that nobody knows and didn't have a chance to really think about while writing the code?

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

#63

Post by vunderba »

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…

Not discounting your claim, but the fact that you work at a company (Sourcegraph) whose business is literally AI coding / coding assistants calls your objectivity somewhat into question.

I will agree that they're very useful for boilerplate tasks particularly around deployment (cloudformation, github actions, etc.)

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

#66

Post by bruce511 »

cdf wrote: post #55

AI code assistants are amazing when you start from zero and just need a 80% working prototype. But once you start trying to refine the product from there, that's where the automation gets counterproductive. If you can exactly specify the problem, eg "Password input crashes when the password has an apostrophe", AI can probably fix it. But if the bug report comes in as "Password input randomly crashes", I will be very…

It's certainly going to be fun seeing this all play out over the next 10 years.

In some ways it's like taking over a project written by someone else that's "80% done". You're locked into their design, get to analyze all that code 1 bug report at a time, get frustrated by obvious mistakes, confused (and mislead) when they relied on some clever side effect.

The quality of life in this maintainence mode depends enormously on the quality of the original coder. "Why did you choose this over that?" Is a common question I have for earlier devs. The AI answer is the least satisfying "it seemed like a good probability at the time".

IME writing the app from scratch to "done" is 10% of the lifecycle of the code. It's the other 90%, spanning over decades, where the quality (or lack thereof) reveals itself.

Personally I'm finding AI useful as a tool. Would I want to be the human fixing AI bugs? (From human bug reports which are pretty vague?) I'm not so sure about that.

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

#67

Post by animal_spirits »

sdenton4 wrote: post #38
jsheard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Yeah precisely. In my case I’ve been building a Django rest app over the last few years. I started off writing way too much of my own code rather than using plugins I had no idea existed. After finally getting ahold of ChatGPT I was able to expand my knowledge of Django tenfold, and was able to rewrite the app from the ground up using proven libraries and design decisions.

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

#70

Post by voiper1 »

jedimastert wrote: post #30

Does anyone know if Github has any sort of public telemetry data (of if anyone from GH is around here somewhere)? There was a ChatGPT outage about a month ago and I'm DEEPLY curious if there was an overall drop in commit volume.

similar to anthropic outage - claude 3.5 is much used by the community for coding.

Sources:

https://openrouter.ai/models/anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet:bet... - claude-dev: 5 billion tokens this week

https://openrouter.ai/models/anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet/app... - aider - 325m tokens this week

Also see aider's leaderboard for models: https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

Post reply on HN