The AI coding tools I see today help to make coders somewhat more efficient. That isn't something that's very visible in the software landscape as a whole.
If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
101–110 of 173 posts
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#102There's a time delay between when an innovation is first adopted and when it has a real impact. You might spend anywhere from 2 months to 8 years [1] developing an application. I've seen numerous VC or bootstrapped companies that took 1.5 years to 2 years to launch, so I wouldn't expect AI to have had much an effect yet.
I'm also not sure about "better"; I find Copilot is a good wingman for writing things like shell scripts, CMD.EXE scripts, powershell scripts and python scripts that do simple things. Even there I find it confuses forward slashes and backslashes sometimes so I often have to do a little debugging. Copilot can help me figure out how to use obscure (to me) features of PostgreSQL in JooQ. It will also argue with me and take factually wrong positions such as telling me that there is no zero-argument version of Optional.orElseThrows() which there is.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#103Because technology generally makes things faster, not better.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#104I don't find them useful for coding much, but I do find them useful for searching through documentation and making suggestions. With Cursor, you can have it reference the docs for the library/framework you are using and then ask it questions about the docs. While this does not always work well, it can save a lot of time.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#105Why 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…
the efficiency gains are resulting in more products being created rather than existing products being improved This has been perhaps the only constant in the history of this industry. As software tooling and hardware get better, we never really feel or see the gains because companies and individual developers are pressed to do more. If a tool makes my job 2x easier, then I'm simply expected to have 2x more output. No…
100%. You can also see this with Moore's law. Hardware gains were converted to developer productivity gains.
Software is easier than ever to write, but now the average AAA video game is 100+ GB and most popular software is browser-based.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#106Because the problem is not in the code itself? :D
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#107Simple, really. It's not actually helping people to code better: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...
Last junior dev I spoke to, taught themselves React, spent months building a very polished portfolio, got hired to work with a new "language" they hadn't heard of called "Angular". This dev was taking up the job because it paid well, they otherwise had a disdain for tech.
If these are the people who are coming into the industry, LLMs will not help them. There is no desire to learn or understand or dig even remotely beneath the surface.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#108Duh. Products are not about making life better. They are about stimulating basal instincts for information and novelty. If a company can do that with a horrible user experience, they will. Although I personally have never used substances or drugs, I think it must be similar to drug addiction. Provide just enough of new technology as fast as possible to keep the users high and addicted.
Nah, drugs are all about the experience. It's only novel the first few times you try a new drug, and sustained use requires the drug to be pleasant!
In other words, drugs are better than the internet, and we could all learn a thing or two from drugs, to make our products better!
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#109Product development decisions are essentially completely independent of software development decisions. Product development is challenging in it's highly contextual, highly political, and essentially unique to every product.
It doesn't how effective software development is if you're not doing anything to improve the discovery and planning process.
Re: If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better?
#110Crucially, products are more than "code". They are UX, they are support, they are maintainability, etc.
Also, in my experience, AI is helping people who don't know how to code to write code they don't understand and can't support. In my experience, the people who are already making products aren't getting much benefits from AI (not yet anyway).