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

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

#141

Post by CM30 »

Because the quality of the code is at best very, very loosely related to the quality of the end product. I mean, what are many of the issues you see in poorly designed sites, apps, programs, etc?

Usually a mix of poor design choices and hostile design.

Neither of these directly correlate to the quality of the code, how quickly it was created, how many bugs it has, etc.

If everyone working in tech (or any sort of programming related project in general) was an expert level programmer with decades of experience, neither of these things would be noticeably better. They'd still create software that's miserable to use because of bad design, and we'd still have companies trying to scam the users by making basic functionality hard to use (see cookie notices, unsubscribe processes, etc).

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

#142

Post by yatz »

In my experience, AI is helping people code faster, not precisely better! It does not take long before we find the limitations of AI code-gen running you in circles.

As far as I know, most of us do research with AI to get ideas and find pros and cons but we are still the ones mostly driving the logic with AI filling in the function level blocks.

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

#143

Post by marcosdumay »

inetknght wrote: post #58
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…

> Why would there be a correlation between how fast something is developed and its quality? I've found that for all but the smallest and tightest of teams, there definitely is a correlation... an inverse correlation.

The highest quality product is finished first, yeah.

Often the difference is between finishing within an order of magnitude of the predicted time versus not finishing at all. But the highest quality product is almost always finished first.

There are exceptions, and AFAIK, those are all for very small projects. In my experience, high-quality takes about a week to be paid back. So if you have something smaller that you'll throw away after a use, you may want to cut corners.

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

#144

Post by PaulHoule »

marcosdumay wrote: post #136
PaulHoule wrote: post #102

There'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…

GTP-derived bash scripts seem like a new kind of nightmare I never wanted to imagine.

If you are afraid of that you should see the CMD.EXE scripts that Copilot writes. For that matter, copilot has a habit of making long bulleted lists so instead of just telling you to make a configuration change in settings it will also tell you how to do it with REGEDIT and the policy editor.

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

#145

Post by sevensor »

marcosdumay wrote: post #140
sevensor wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean COBOL? FORTRAN wasn't really about lowest common competence. Anyway, about this: > It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource. It's in their interest to make programmers fungible. It's self-delusional to think they succeeded.

No, I do mean FORTRAN. Massively lowered the bar. Not that COBOL didn’t, but it was in a different domain and slightly later as I understand it. Have you ever worked with properly old FORTRAN? Some of it is quite good, but some of it, well, it’s regrettable it was ever transferred off of paper tape.

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

#146

Post by Yawrehto »

The key is that if. What if it isn't, yet? What if right now the AI is in a phase where it's still learning and doesn't produce good stuff yet?

Besides, products have been getting worse for a while. Enshittification is a potent force, and even if AI was axiomatically helping people code faster and better, enshittification might still lead them to add in annoyances, privacy risks, et cetera.

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

#147

Post by outlore »

High quality products result from the accumulation of fixes and polish. They also add new desirable features in response to user feedback.

Whether AI is used to write code is irrelevant to a product getting “better”. AI copilots can be used to bootstrap early stage concepts which might be unpolished, or can be used to add polish by writing bug fixes.

I neither subscribe to the mania around AI, nor do I think it will enshittify products. I believe it is just another tool that we can use.

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

#148

Post by DanHulton »

kredd wrote: post #113
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 pro…

I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.)

If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.

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

#150

Post by johnea »

How many times are these naive questions going to resurface?

Of course this all depends on what you mean by "better", or for whom the product is better.

AI, like every technical advance in history, will be deemed "better" if fewer people make more money from it.

This has nothing to do with you, mister insignificant user...

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