AI has made me a 10x hobby engineer. IE if I need skills I dont have to do work thats just for me. Its great.
Its sometimes helpful when writing an email but otherwise has not touched any of my productive work.
Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
101–110 of 498 posts
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their main point is "AI coding claims don't add up", as shown by the amount of code shipped. I personally do think some of the more incredible claims about AI coding add up, and am happy to talk about it based on my "evidence", ie the software I am building. 99.99% of my code is ai generated at this point, with the occasional one line I fill in because it'd be stupid to wait for an LLM to do it. For example, I've bui…
Oh yeah, I love building one off tools with it. I am working on a game mod with a friend, we are hand writing the code that runs when you play it, but we vibe code all sorts of dev tools to help us test and iterate on it faster. Do internal, narrow purpose dev tools count as shipped code?
This seems to be a common thread. For personal projects where most details aren't important, they are good at meeting the couple things that are important to you and filling in the rest with reasonable, mostly-good-enough guesses. But the more detailed the requirements are, the less filler code there is, and the more each line of code matters. In those situations it's probably faster to type the line of code than to type the English equivalent and hand-hold the assistant through the editing process.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in my experience, it excels in blank canvas projects. Where you've got nothing and want something pretty basic. The tools can probably set up a fresh React project faster than me. But at least every time I've tried them on an actual work repo they get reduced to almost useless. Which is why they generate so much hype. They are perfect for tech demos, then management wonders why they aren't seeing results in…
I've had great success with GPT5 in existing projects because its agent mode is very good (the best I've seen so far) at analyzing the existing codebase and then writing code that feels like it fits in already (without prompt engineering on my part). I still agree that AI is particularly good on fresh projects though.
Could be that there is a huge difference in the products. Last few companies have given me Github Copilot which I find entirely useless, I found the automatic suggestions more distracting than useful, and the fix and explain functions never work. But maybe if you burn $1000/day on Claude Code it works a lot better. And then companies see the results from that and wonder why they aren't getting it spending a couple of dollars on Copilot.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#104This makes some sense. We have CEOs saying they're not hiring developers because AI makes their existing ones 10X more productive. If that productivity enhancement was real, wouldn't they be trying to hire all the developers? If you're getting 10X the productivity for the same investment, wouldn't you pour cash into that engine like crazy? Perhaps these graphs show that management is indeed so finely tuned that they'…
Today you will learn what diminishing returns are :) You can only utilize so many people or so much action within a business or idea. Essentially it's throwing more stupid at a problem. The reason there are so many layoffs is because of AI creating efficiency. The thing that people don't realize is it's not that one AI robot or GPU is going to replace one human at a one to one ratio. It's going to replace the amount…
Bootstrapping is a lot easier when you have your family's or someone else's money to start a business and then fall back on if it doesn't pan out.
The reason people take jobs comes down to economics, not "creativity".
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…
Did you read TFA, which shows that developers are slower with AI and think they're faster?
The two types of responses to AI I see are your very defensive type, and people saying "I don't get it".
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…
Find a way to make sure workers get the value of ai labor instead of bosses and the workers will like it better. If the result is "you do the same work but managers want everything in 20% of the time" why would anyone be happy?
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#107> demand they show receipts or shut the fuck up
This is what I always look for. Haven’t found one salient success story with a claim for success.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#108The answer is that we're making it right now. AI didn't speed me up at all until agents got good enough, which was April/May of this year. Just today I built a shovelware CLI that exports iMessage archives into a standalone website export. Would have taken me weeks. I'll probably have it out as a homebrew formula in a day or two. I'm working on an iOS app as well that's MUCH further along than it would be if I hand-r…
FWIW this closely matches my experience. I’m pretty late to the AI hype train but my opinion changed specifically because of using combinations of models & tools that released right before the cut off date for the data here. My impression from friends is that it’s taken even longer for many companies to decide they’re OK with these tools being used at all, so I would expect a lot of hysteresis on outputs from that kind of adoption.
That said I’ve had similar misgivings about the METR study and I’m eager for there to be more aggregate study of the productivity outcomes.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#109> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? On my computer. Once I've built something I often realize the problems with the idea and abandon the project, so I'm never shipping it.
So is a flood of unshippable code now an indicator of increased productivity?
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#110Got lots of data in my own work. The mission: Demonstrate the gains of AI to C-level.
Well... no significant effects show except for a few projects. It was really hard torturing the data to come to my manager's desired conclusion.