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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#171

Post by johnfn »

n8cpdx wrote: post #167
Esophagus4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why, but it seems like your comment really brought out the ire in a few commenters here to discredit your experience. Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation? I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that. At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comment…

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims. That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk. If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not…

But I really did do around 4 to 5 weeks of work in a single week on my personal site. At this point you just seem to be denying my own reality.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#172

Post by Daishiman »

artur44 wrote: post #19

A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotc…

> Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human.

I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them based on specs and plans elaborated by the LLMs.

This last week I extended my company's development tooling by adding a new service in a k8s cluster with a bunch of extra services, shared variables and configmaps, and new helm charts that did exactly what I needed after asking nicely a couple of times. I have zero knowledge of k8s, helm or configmaps.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#173

Post by IceDane »

johnfn wrote: post #49
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments…

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

Your site has waterfalls and flashes of unstyled content. It loads slowly and the whole design is basically exactly what every AI-designed site looks like.

All of the work you described is essentially manual labor. It's not difficult work - just boring, sometimes error prone work that mostly requires you to do obvious things and then tackle errors as they pop up in very obvious ways. Great use case for AI, for sure. This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well, except maybe in the sense that yeah, AI is great for dull work in the same way an excavator is great for digging ditches.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#174

Post by halfcat »

chemotaxis wrote: post #53
_trampeltier wrote: post #44

Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?

Probably because AI appears to work, more or less, and now it's just a race to make it better and to monetize it. Before ChatGPT, I'd guess that the amounts of money poured in both of these things were about the same.

> Probably because AI appears to work, more or less

All nondeterministic AI is a demo. They only vary in the duration until you realize it’s a demo.

AI makes a hell of a demo. And management eats up slick demos. And some demos are so good it takes months before you find out how that particular demo gets stuck and can’t really do the enterprise thing it claimed to do reliably.

But also some demos are useful.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#175

Post by zahlman »

jimlawruk wrote: post #76

If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to today.... > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.

It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for that market concentration to revert to the historical mean without catastrophe, than for P/E ratios to revert to the historical mean without catastrophe.

(I think a reasonable argument can be made that P/E ratios today should be higher than the historical mean, or rather that they should have trended up over time, based on fundamental changes in how companies compensate their shareholders.)

Re: Is it a bubble?

#176

Post by IceDane »

9rx wrote: post #170
IceDane wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering: do you genuinely not understand how compilers work at all or is there some deeper point to your AI/compiler comparison that I'm just not getting?

My understanding is that compilers work just like originally described. I type out what I want. I feed that into a compiler. It takes that input of what I want and generates code. Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?

A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#177

Post by Esophagus4 »

n8cpdx wrote: post #167
Esophagus4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why, but it seems like your comment really brought out the ire in a few commenters here to discredit your experience. Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation? I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that. At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comment…

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims. That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk. If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not…

> That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year.

What makes you think one year is the right timeframe? Yet you seem to be so wildly confident in the strength of what you think your question will reveal… in spite of the fact that the guy gave you an example.

It wasn’t that he didn’t provide it, it was that you didn’t want to hear it.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#178

Post by rhetocj23 »

n8cpdx wrote: post #167
Esophagus4 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why, but it seems like your comment really brought out the ire in a few commenters here to discredit your experience. Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation? I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that. At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comment…

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims. That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk. If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not…

[dead]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#179

Post by mekoka »

dingnuts wrote: post #60
johnfn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

> Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case. If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim…

As they said, it depends on the task, so I wouldn't generalize, but based on the examples they gave, it tracks. Even when you already know what needs done, some undertakings involve a lot of yak shaving. I think transitioning to new tools that do the same as the old but with a different DSL (or newer versions of existing tools) qualifies.

Imagine that you've built an app with libraries A, B, and C and conceptually understand all that's involved. But now you're required to move everything to X, Y, and Z. There won't be anything fundamentally new or revolutionary to learn, but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all). Getting the AI to execute the changes gets you to skip much of the tedium. And even though you still don't really know much about the new libs, you'll get the gist of most of the produced code. You can piecemeal the docs to review the code at sensitive boundaries. And for the rest, you'll paint inside the frames as you normally would if you were joining a new project.

Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#180

Post by samdoesnothing »

johnfn wrote: post #49
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments…

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

Is your redesign live for chipscompo? Because if so, and absolutely no offence meant here, the UI looks like it was built by an intern. And fair enough, you sound like a backend guy so you can't expect perfection for frontend work. My experience with AI is that it's great at producing intern-level artifacts very quickly and that has its uses, but that certainly doesn't replace 95% of software development.

And if it's producing an intern-level artifact for your frontend, what's to say it's not producing similar quality code for everything else? Especially considering frontend is often derided as being easier than other fields of software.

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