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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
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Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#32This 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…
Granted, _discovery_ of such things is something I'm still trying to solve at my own job and potentially llms can at least be leveraged to analyse and search code(bases) rather than just write it.
It's difficult because you need team members to be able to work quite independently but knowledge of internal libraries can get so siloed.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#33I find LLMs useful to decide what is the best option to solve a problem and see some example code.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#34I haven't found ChatGPT helpful in speeding up my coding because I don't want to give up understanding the code. If I let ChatGPT do it, then there are inevitable mistakes, and it sometimes hallucinates libraries, etc. I have found it very useful in guiding me through the dev-ops of working with and configuring AWS instances for a blog server, for a git server, etc. As a small business owner, that has been a big time saver.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#35I think different things are happening...
For experienced engineers, I'm seeing (internally in our company at least) a huge amount of caution and hesitancy to go all-in with AI. No one wants to end up maintaining huge codebases of slop code. I think that will shift over time. There are use cases where having quick low-quality code is fine. We need a new intuition about when to insist on handcrafted code, and when to just vibecode.
For non-experienced engineers, they currently hit a lot of complexity limits with getting a finished product to actually work, unless they're building something extremely simple. That will also shift - the range of what you can vibecode is increasing every year. Last year there was basically nothing that you could vibecode successfully, this year you can vibecode TODO apps and stuff like that. I definitely think that the App Store will be flooded in the coming future. It's just early.
Personally I have a side project where I'm using Claude & Codex and I definitely feel a measurable difference, it's about a 3x to 5x productivity boost IMO.
The summary.. Just because we don't see it yet, doesn't mean it's not coming.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#36This 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.
> Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.
I used to be one of those people. It just made sense to me when I was (I still am to some extent) more naïve than I am today. But then I also used to think "it makes sense for everyone to eat together at a community kitchen of some sort instead of cooking at home because it saves everyone time and money" but that's another tangent for another day. The reason I bring it up is I used to think if it is shared functionality and it is a small enough domain, there is no need for everyone to spend time to implement the same idea a hundred times. It will save time and effort if we pool it together into one repository of a small library.
Except reality is never that simple. Just like that community kitchen, if everyone decided to eat the same nutritious meal together, we would definitely save time and money but people don't like living in what is basically an open air prison.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#37My hunch is that the amount of shovelware (or really, any software) is mostly proportional to the number of engineers wishing to work on that.
Even if AI made them more productive, it's on a person to decide what to build and how to ship, so the number (and desire) of humans is a bottleneck. Maybe at some point AI will start buying up domains and spinning up hundreds of random indiehacker micro-SaaS, but we're not there. Yet.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#38Great angle to look at the releases of new software. I, too, thought we'd see a huge increase by now. An alternative theory is that writing code was never the bottleneck of releasing software. The exploration of what it is you're building and getting it on a platform takes time and effort. On the other hand, yeah, it's really easy to 'hold it wrong' with AI tools. Sometimes I have a great day and think I've figured i…
Also when vou create a product you can’t speed up the iterative process of seeing how users want it, fixing edge cases that you only realized later etc. these are the things that make a product good and why there’s that article about software taking 10 years to mature: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe people are working less and enjoying life more, while shipping the same amount of code as before.
If someone builds a faster car tomorrow, I am not going to go to the office more often.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#40I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, but the OP should also be looking at product launch websites like ProductHunt, where there are tens to hundreds of vibe coded SaaS apps listed daily.
From my experience, it's much easier to get an LLM to generate code for a React/Tailwind CSS web app than a mobile app, and that's why we're seeing so many of these apps showing up in the SaaS space.