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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?

#71

Post by KronisLV »

ado__dev wrote: post #60
bamboozled wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding value in a product does make development go from months to days , which is the unsubstantiated claim. Even your customers can talk shit to sometimes in order to curry favour for a discount.

Since gpt came out I have built tons of throwaway apps, plenty of specialized apps for side projects, and experimented with tons of ideas that I likely wouldn’t have if I didn’t have access to a tool to build it for me from just asking it to do it and explain what it did. Claude artifacts has been awesome for this. Cody when I actually want to build it out. I recommend trying it before you knock it.

> Since gpt came out I have built tons of throwaway apps, plenty of specialized apps for side projects, and experimented with tons of ideas that I likely wouldn’t have if I didn’t have access to a tool to build it for me from just asking it to do it and explain what it did.

GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and Phind are all a bit like this for me - they both lower the barrier of entry and save me a lot of time for trivial algorithms and boilerplate code, in addition to helping me find things better than search engines sometimes do, especially when given a look at the code that I'm working with.

It might not be an order of magnitude difference in my case, but things that wouldn't have happened with the higher barrier of entry are now happening and that's quite the difference in of itself! I'm cautiously optimistic about LLMs and other forms of "AI". If nothing else, so far we basically have a more versatile form of IntelliSense, even if it's not always going to output correct code.

I wonder if some day it'll be feasible to feed in the entirety of a larger codebase and reason about it better than people who only know a part of it could.

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

#73

Post by obirunda »

I think the primary reason is that datasets contain a lot more average/bad code than exceptional, and to add to that problem judging between those is possibly a subjective issue.

Developers using AI will get mostly average solutions faster but exceptional ones will be obviously rare. And, crucially if the idea itself is average or bad there isn't much an elegant coding solution will do for the idea.

I think this ultimately is the divide between the hype and reality of how AI will impact products. If you just give a product manager the keys to do all the coding as no code "prompt engineer", more than likely will lead to further enshitification of features in products with unmaintainable code bases. At the current state, understanding algorithms and thinking computationally is a requirement to improve a code base.

The hopes of having a "build me a $1 billion app" prompt capability, or "improve my shitty app" are too long horizon and subjective requests to bypass the hardships of product ideation and iteration to have the LLM deliver on the requests. It's not magic, it's probability. Averages are the end goal here, not excellence.

If we arrive at a point where LLMs translate general prompts into idealistic versions that are more like version 100 of the idea while still capturing the user's intent, then we will see these improvements. Otherwise it's copy pasta on steroids, and done mindlessly, will mostly lead to enshitification rather than improvements.

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

#74

Post by kurthr »

foobarqux wrote: post #31
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 an…

If "everyone is arguing that they are already 10x" since GPT4 18mo ago, why aren't they 100x with _o1 and 3.5 Sonnet? Maybe it's bs and they've been spending actual hours getting maybe 2x more productive for the last year. None of it has kicked in yet? It might continue to improve? Who knows.

Actual productivity takes time, and actual products take work. Talk is cheap, show me the code.

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

#75

Post by csomar »

ado__dev wrote: post #60
bamboozled wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding value in a product does make development go from months to days , which is the unsubstantiated claim. Even your customers can talk shit to sometimes in order to curry favour for a discount.

Since gpt came out I have built tons of throwaway apps, plenty of specialized apps for side projects, and experimented with tons of ideas that I likely wouldn’t have if I didn’t have access to a tool to build it for me from just asking it to do it and explain what it did. Claude artifacts has been awesome for this. Cody when I actually want to build it out. I recommend trying it before you knock it.

So you can give us a couple examples of apps you built with AI that are actually useful?

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

#77

Post by chthonicdaemon »

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 can think of several ways in which faster development could lead to better quality. Let's say you have a fixed time to come up with a solution to a problem. If you are able to come up with one candidate and evaluate it in that time, you have to live with what you get. If you do two candidates, you can select the one that is better.

Another aspect of quality is "polish". A team that can get a UI in front of QA twice in a development cycle instead of only once will benefit from more fault-finding.

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

#79

Post by player1234 »

tonyoconnell wrote: post #72

My products are so much better because of AI. I can now build things I didn't even dream of building before. I am amazed that so many humans find it really hard to accept this new reality - computers can write better code than we do.

What products? Better how? How have you quantified this? Give us the numbers for these extraordinary claims.
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