I could give a rats ass what his industry thinks about me or my skills.
I can build whole systems. They cant.
Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
21–30 of 498 posts
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#22In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work. The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not…
Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour.
Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and syntax highlighting too?
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#23This tracks with my own experience as well. I’ve found it useful in some trivial ways (eg: small refactors, type definition from a schema, etc.) but so far tasks more than that it misses things and requires rework, etc. The future may make me eat my words though. On the other hand, I’ve lately seen it misused by less experienced engineers trying to implement bigger features who eagerly accept all it churns out as “go…
> implements some logic from scratch where there certainly is more than one suitable library, making this code we now own - is some behemoth of a PR trying to do all the things
Depending on the amount of code, I see this only as positive? Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#24I need to agree with the author, with a caveat. He is a well developed developer. For somebody like him, churning out good quality code is probably easy.
Where i expect to see a lot of those metrics of feeling fast come from, is from people who may have less coding experience, and with AI are coding way above their level.
My brother in law asks for a nice product website, i just feed his business plan into a LLM, do some fine tuning on the results, and have a good looking website in a hour time. If i did it myself manually, just take me behind a barn as those jobs are so boring and take for ages. But i know that website design is a weakness of mine.
That is the power of LLMs. Turn out quick code, maybe offer some suggestion you did not think about, but ... it also eats time! Making your prompts so that the LLM understands, waiting for the result, ... waiting ... ok, now check the result, can you use it? O no, it did X, Y, Z wrong. Prompt again ... and again. And this is where your productivity goes to die.
So when you compare a pool of developer feedback, your going to get a broad "it helps a lot", "some", "is worse then my code", ... mix in with the prompting, result delays etc...
It gets even worse with Agent / Vibe coding, as you just tend to be waiting, 5, 10min for changed to be done. You need to review them, test them, ... o no, the LLM screwed something up again. O no, it removed 50% of my code. Hey, where did my comments go. And we are back to a loss of time.
LLMs are a tool... But after a lot of working with them, my opinion is to use them when needed but do not depend on them for everything. I sometimes look with cow eyes when people say they are coding so much with LLMs and spending 200, or more bucks per month.
They can be powerful tools, but i feel that some folks become so over dependent on them. And worst is my feeling that our juniors are going to be in a world of hurt, if their skills are more LLM monkey coding (or vibe coding), then actually understanding how to code (and the knowledge behind the actual programming languages and systems).
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#25> We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore.
I see pseudo-scientific claims from both sides of this debate but this is a bit too far for me personally. "We all know" sounds like Eternal September [1] kind of reasoning. I've been in the industry about as long as the article author and I think he might be looking with rose-tinted glasses on the past. Every aging generation looks down at the new cohort as if they didn't go through the same growing pains.
But in defense of this polemic, and laying out my cards as an AI maximalist and massive proponent of AI coding, I've been wondering the same. I see articles all the time about people writing this and that software using these new tools and it so often is the case they never actually share what they built. I mean, I can understand if someone is heads-down cranking out amazing software using 10 Claude Code instances and raking in that cash. But not even to see one open source project that embraces this and demonstrates it is a bit suspicious.
I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"?
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#26There's a relatively monotonous task in software engineering that pretty much everyone working no a legacy c/c++ code base has had to face: static analysis and compiler warnings. That seems about as boring and routine of an operation that exists. As simple as can be. I've seen this task farmed out to interns paid barely anything just to get it done.
My question to HN is... can LLMs do this? Can they convert all the unsafe c-string invocations to safe. Can they replace system calls with posix calls. Can they wrap everything in a smart pointer and make sure that mutex locks are added where needed.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#27These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation. This is my…
> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company".
Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#28This tracks with my own experience as well. I’ve found it useful in some trivial ways (eg: small refactors, type definition from a schema, etc.) but so far tasks more than that it misses things and requires rework, etc. The future may make me eat my words though. On the other hand, I’ve lately seen it misused by less experienced engineers trying to implement bigger features who eagerly accept all it churns out as “go…
> implements some logic from scratch where there certainly is more than one suitable library, making this code we now own - is some behemoth of a PR trying to do all the things Depending on the amount of code, I see this only as positive? Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.
I'm not talking about generating a few lines instead of importing left-pad. In recent PRs I've had:
- Implementing a scheduler from scratch (hundreds of lines), when there are many many libraries for this in Go.
- Implementing some complex configuration store that is safe for concurrent access , using generics, reflection, and a whole other host of stuff (additionally hundreds of lines plus more for tests).
While I can't say any of the code is bad, it is effectively like importing a library which your team now owns, but worse in that no one really understands it or supports it.
Lastly, I could find libraries that are well supported, documented, and active for each of these use-cases fairly quickly.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#29Most of it doesn't exist beyond videos of code spraying onto a screen alongside a claim that "juniors are dead." I think the "why" for this is that the stakes are high. The economy is trembling. Tech jobs are evaporating. There's a high anxiety around AI being a savior, and so, a demi-religion is forming among the crowd that needs AI to be able to replace developers/competency. That said: I personally have gotten imp…
I mean the truth should be fairly obvious to people given a lot of the talk around AI stuff rings very much like the ifls/mainstream media style "science" articles which always make some outrageous "right around the corner" claim based off some small tidbit out of a paper they only skimmed the abstract of.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#30In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work. The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not…
Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour. Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and…
The author’s main point is that there hasn’t been an uptick in total code shipped, as you would expect if people are 10x-ing their productivity. Whether folks admit to using AI in their workflow is irrelevant.