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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?

#111

Post by hjkl0 »

ActionHank wrote: post #107
DanHulton wrote: post #94

Simple, 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 b…

They’ll have to learn Angular for their new job, so “no desire to learn” seems harsh and unfair

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

#112

Post by alentred »

Because Code ≠ Product. Code ∈ Product, among many other things.

I would go even further and say that that relationship between the two is weak, but also very peculiar: bad code can ruin a good product; but good code alone says very little, if anything at all, about the quality of a product.

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

#113

Post by kredd »

DanHulton wrote: post #94

Simple, really. It's not actually helping people to code better: https://greaterdanorequalto.com/ai-code-generation-as-an-age...

It, undeniably, makes prototyping incredibly fast. I’ve been forcing myself to use Cursor for the past month, and could create a fairly functional web app, given my skills aren’t front end dev. Very sweet for one off deterministic python scripts, figuring out the UI bugs, filling up boilerplate code and especially handy with languages/frameworks you’re not that familiar with.

Sure, we’re not at the “hook it up to prod codebase and ask it to make features from scratch” phase, but we didn’t have this 2 years ago either. But writing it off as completely useless? Nah.

I’m more of a process oriented person, who more or less cares about code quality. And as of now, it kinda sucks for it. However if your main goal is just the result, it’s delivering good stuff.

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

#114

Post by spit2wind »

Programming with AI, so far, tries to specify something precise, algorithms, in a less precise language than what we have.

It's the difference between Euclid and modern notation, with AI programming being like Euclidean notation and current programming languages being the modern notation:

"if a first magnitude and a third are equal multiples of a second and a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth are equal multiples of the second and fourth, then the first magnitude and fifth, being added together, and the third and sixth, being added together, will also be equal multiples of the second and the fourth, respectively."

versus

a(x + y) = ax + by

If AI programming can find a better way to express the problems we're trying to solve, then yes, it could work. It would become a matter of "how well the compiler works". The current proposals which use natural language as the notation is not better than what we have.

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

#115

Post by cooljacob204 »

alentred wrote: post #112

Because Code ≠ Product. Code ∈ Product, among many other things. I would go even further and say that that relationship between the two is weak, but also very peculiar: bad code can ruin a good product; but good code alone says very little, if anything at all, about the quality of a product.

I would argue good code helps a product through allowing faster iteration.

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

#116

Post by at_a_remove »

I believe it increases the speed of the coding, but not the quality. It doesn't do your QA for you. It doesn't do your UX for you. And if you're a code monkey assigned to implement a feature you know will drag the product down, well, you'll get that out the door faster. AI won't force the marketing people to make good decisions, or create sane deadlines, and so on.

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

#118

Post by SkyBelow »

Better programming, task to task, does not result in better applications.

For a simple example, consider a would be program that takes 100 tasks of 16 hours each to build a program with a quality of 75%. With AI, those tasks can take an average of 12 hours each, meaning the software can be delivered faster. Unless someone purposefully invests the saved time into improving the program, you'll end up with the same 75% quality program faster.

Now what if AI makes the code slightly worse, leading the quality to drop to 70%, but some of the savings are used to improve quality, bringing it back up to 75%? Same outcome of the product not being any better to the end user.

Even if the code is higher quality, how much of that 25% of missing quality is the result of bad code verses bad designs or a mismatch between what customer wants and what those designing the project think the customer wants? Even a perfect AI that solves all bugs won't improve that.

In short, programming better can mean many different things, some of which might translate to a better or worse product, but with no consistency.

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

#119

Post by sevensor »

ActionHank wrote: post #107
DanHulton wrote: post #94

Simple, 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 b…

Ever since FORTRAN came on the scene, there have been tools that make disdainful, unskilled programmers more productive. I doubt this will ever change. It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. There’s a much smaller risk to your business when you hire ten and get one or two good ones in the lot, than if you hire one good one and pay them triple. Things average out, and you’re not beholden to a few people who know their worth. As long as the pay is good enough to keep a couple of competent people around, you can rely on them to cover for the rest. Best of all, you never have to figure out which is which.
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