If AI is helping people code better, why aren't products getting better? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by tonyoconnell » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 2:34 AM UTC

player1234 wrote: post #79

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.

For example, I built a full stack events management plaftorm with Sveletkit, Supabase and Shadcn entirely with AI - AI generated both the frontend and backend code and database schema. It can be quantified like this - 0 (I had no platform) 1 = Now I have a platform. I honestly wouldn't have been able to build it without the help of AI, it would have taken too long and I wouldn't have started development. Also I really like some of the design decisions it took and there were many times I thought a generation was really beautiful and that I wouldn't have though of that. The designs were better than what I would have come up with in Figma so I didn't bother using Figma to design the UI. Think step by step, the user is going to land on this page with a goal of X, how can you improve the ux and remove friction while making the ui extremely beautiful worked really well.

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

#172

Post by feketegy » Mon, Sep 30, 2024, 7:03 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #91

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…

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…

I think that at every stage of software development, a new tool comes along to help manage complexity. This is true from punchcards all the way to LLMs.

This chart illustrates it better: https://x.com/feketegy/status/1809173358279311672/photo/1

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

#173

Post by rerdavies » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 11:37 PM UTC

rerdavies wrote: post #156

ericmcer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT came out in late 2022 so it has been almost 2 years since the "AI is going to change everything" wave started. Looking at myself and my coworkers I don't feel there has been an uptick in developer output in that time. We all have copilot licenses as well, I don't use mine but pair with people who do and it seems cool but not for much more beyond advanced autofill. My big concern with all this stuff is it is p…

I haven't tried copilot yet. I have tried Claude 3.5, which is unexpectedly brilliant. I use it very regularly. But almost entirely useful for writing new code, not fixing old code. I take your point with respect to understanding large existing codebases. AIs don't yet seem to deal well with strategic large-context thinking. But things are changing at such a furious pace, so that may change sometime much sooner than…

Update: I did my first "find the bug" today. I fed it a thousand lines of code, described my bug, and asked Claude to fix it. It did. (putting a dropdown menu inside a button means that clicks in the menu are propagated to the button too. click on the menu item, the menu closes, but then the button gets the event as it propagates (because the menu is structurally inside the button, and re-opens the menu again. Hence why my menu wouldn't close).

Wow.