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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

#161

Post by InCom-0 »

On one hand I don't understand what all the fuss is about. LLMs are great at all kinds of things around and about: searching for (good) information, summarizing existing text, conceptual discussions where it points you in the right directions very quickly, etc. ..... they are just not great (some might say harmful) at straight up non-trivial code generation or design of complex systems with the added peculiarity that on the surface the models seem almost capable to do it but never quite ... which is sort their central feature: producing text so that it is seems correct from statistical perspective, but without actual reasoning.

On the other hand, I do understand that the things the LLMs are really great at is not actually all that spectacular to monetize ... and so as a result we have all these snake oil salesmen on every corner boasting about nonsensical vibecoding achievements, because that's where the real money would be ... if it were really true ... but it is not.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#162

Post by UncleMeat »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #130
nemomarx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit, but the only thing that would allow this to happen are systems and incentive structures that allow that to happen. A manager's job is to increase revenue and cut costs, that's how they get their job, how they keep their job, and how they are promoted. People very rarely get free benefits outside the range of what the incentive structures they…

> I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit

And if they don't, then you'd understand the anger surely. You can't say "well obviously everybody should benefit" and then also scold the people who are mad that everybody isn't benefiting.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#163

Post by gedy »

some-guy wrote: post #15

These 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".

Challenge your manager to a race, have him vibe code

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#164

Post by vorpalhex »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #89
some-guy wrote: post #15

These 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". If we can delegate incident response to automated LLMs too, sure, why not. Let the CEO have his way and pay the reputational price. When it doesn't work, we can revert our git repos to the day LLMs didn't write all the code. I'm only being 90% facetious.

I agree with you and I'm being 0% facetious.

I think making stakeholders have to engage with these models is the most critical point for people having deadlines or expectations based on them.

Let Claude run incident response for a few weeks. I'll gladly pause pagerduty for myself.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#165

Post by nicce »

heavyset_go wrote: post #52
nicce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, for leftpad-like libraries it's fine, but does your URL or email validation function really handle all valid and invalid cases correctly now and into the future, for example?

There are good use cases and bad cases. Is a standard regex library better with known good pattern for email validation than some 3rd party library without regex until you benchmark them yourself? Or if you pull parser library, but parse only single type in a single way. There isn’t single truth but usually I see that the external library is included too easily.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#166

Post by balder1991 »

techpineapple wrote: post #125
stillpointlab wrote: post #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 glass…

> I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"? This is one of my big datapoints in the skepticism, there's all these articles about how individual developers are doing amazing things, but almost no data points about the increase of productivity as a result.

I must have written somewhere that I’m believing these claims once Linux UI becomes as polished as MacOS. Surely if LLMs are outputting this much quality code that shouldn’t take long, right?

Meanwhile I see WhatsApp sunsetting their native clients and making everything a single web-based client. I guess they must not be using LLMs to code if they can’t cope with maintaining the existing codebases, right?

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#167

Post by pr3d4t0ralien »

nemomarx wrote: post #106
atleastoptimal wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#168

Post by Onawa »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #88
heavyset_go wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again. I wax and wane on this one. I've had the same feelings, but too often I've peaked behind the curtain, read the docs and got fam…

Yeah LLMs get me _an_ answer far faster than I could find it myself, but it's often not correct. And then I have to verify it myself which was exactly the work I was trying to skip by using the LLM to start with. If I have to manually verify every answer, I may as well read the docs myself.

It doesn't completely solve this problem but definitely helps to have something like context7 MCP server running that `Copilot et al.` can reach dramatically reduces hallucinations for most tools. And additionally I've used Continue.dev VSCode along with manually specified docs and guides that you can selectively inject into your context. Both of those tactics make a huge difference in answer quality.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#169

Post by m463 »

> My argument: video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice.

We might be doing just that now.

The best way to increase your ROI is to fire all your employees. How do we know we're not in the mid-release-cycle of that right now?

I'd guess game levels and assets are becoming ai slop as we speak.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#170

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #127
gdbsjjdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The article is one person recording their own use of AI, finding no statistical significance but claiming since that the evaluated ratio of AI:human speed in performing various coding tasks resembled the METR study, that AI has no value. People have already talked about issues with the METR study, but importantly with that study and this blog post, it querying a small number of people using AI tools for the first tim…

> "These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product."

Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.

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