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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#311

Post by jon_north »

jplusequalt wrote: post #309
jon_north wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!, $500 is 5% of revenue. All else held equal, if that helps you go 20% faster, it's an absolute no brainer. The question is.. does it actually help you do that, or do you go 0% faster? Or 5% slower? Inquiring minds want to know.

>If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!, This is the sort of statement that immediately tells me this forum is disconnected from the real world. ~80% of full time workers in the US make less than $10k a month before tax. Source: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

And yet, the average salary of an IT worker in the US is somewhere between 104 and 110k. Since we're discussing coders here, and IT workers tend to be at the lower end of that, maybe there is some context you didn't consider?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#312

Post by jplusequalt »

jon_north wrote: post #304
jplusequalt wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>$15.98 * 1.5 * 20 = $497,40 a month Are people seriously dropping hundreds of dollars a month on these products to get their work done?

If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!, $500 is 5% of revenue. All else held equal, if that helps you go 20% faster, it's an absolute no brainer. The question is.. does it actually help you do that, or do you go 0% faster? Or 5% slower? Inquiring minds want to know.

>if that helps you go 20% faster, it's an absolute no brainer.

Another thing--is your job paying you $500 more per month for going 20% faster?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#313

Post by jplusequalt »

jon_north wrote: post #311
jplusequalt wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!, This is the sort of statement that immediately tells me this forum is disconnected from the real world. ~80% of full time workers in the US make less than $10k a month before tax. Source: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

And yet, the average salary of an IT worker in the US is somewhere between 104 and 110k. Since we're discussing coders here, and IT workers tend to be at the lower end of that, maybe there is some context you didn't consider?

>And yet, the average salary of an IT worker in the US is somewhere between 104 and 110k.

After tax that's like 8% of your take home pay. I don't know why it's unreasonable to scoff at having to pay that much to get the most out of these tools.

>maybe there is some context you didn't consider?

The context is that the average poster on HN has no idea how hard the real world is as they work really high paying jobs. To make a statement that "$10k a month is not a lot" makes you sound out of touch.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#314

Post by kyoji »

This was a great post, one of the best I've seen on this topic at HN.

But why is the cost never discussed or disclosed in these conversations? I feel like I'm going crazy, there is so much written extolling the virtues of these tools but with no mention of what it costs to run them now. It will surely only get more expensive from here!

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#315

Post by usefulcat »

throw10920 wrote: post #280
LiamPowell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. In my experience this isn't true. People just assume their code is wrong and mess with it until they inadvertently do something that works around the bug. I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years and there are currently 1241 open wrong-code bugs. Here's an example of a simple to understand bug (not…

> I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years You are an extreme outlier. I know about two dozen people who work with C(++) and not a single one of them has ever told me that they've found a compiler bug when we've talked about coding and debugging - it's been exclusively them describing PEBCAK.

I've been using c++ for over 30 years. 20-30 years ago I was mostly using MSVC (including version 6), and it absolutely had bugs, sometimes in handling the language spec correctly and sometimes regarding code generation.

Today, I use gcc and clang. I would say that compiler bugs are not common in released versions of those (i.e. not alpha or beta), but they do still occur. Although I will say I don't recall the last time I came across a code generation bug.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#316

Post by cgh »

bonesss wrote: post #187
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really shouldn't use the absolute hellscape of churn that is web dev as an example of broader industry trends. No other sub-field of tech is foolish enough to chase hype and new tools the way web dev is.

I think the web/system dichotomy is also a major conflating factor for LLM discussions. A “few hundred lines of code” in Rust or Haskell can be bumping into multiple issues LLM assisted coding struggles with. Moving a few buttons on a website with animations and stuff through multiple front end frameworks may reasonably generate 5-10x that much “code”, but of an entirely different calibre. 3,000 lines a day of well-f…

Exactly this. At work, I’ve seen front-end people generating probably 80% of their code because when you set aside framework churn, a lot of it is boilerplatey and borderline trivial (sorry). Meanwhile, the programmers working on the EV battery controller that uses proprietary everything and where a bug could cause an actual explosion are using LLMs as advanced linters and that’s it.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#317

Post by jjice »

i_love_retros wrote: post #299
gh0stcat wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was a joke ie you need to be a billionaire to be able to use agents like this, but you are correct. I think we need to stop listening to billionaires. The article is well thought out and well written, but his perspective is entirely biased by never having to think about money at all... all of this stuff is incredibly expensive.

Billionaires also tend to have a vested interest in the tech being hyped and adopted, after all one doesn't become a billionaire without investments.

Define investment in this case. He's the cofounder of HashiCorp. I guess you could refer to his equity as an investment here, but I don't really think it tracks the same in this context.

He may have a vested interest, but he did cofound HashiCorp as an engineer that actually developed the products, so I find his insight at least somewhat valuable.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#318

Post by jon_north »

jplusequalt wrote: post #313
jon_north wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the average salary of an IT worker in the US is somewhere between 104 and 110k. Since we're discussing coders here, and IT workers tend to be at the lower end of that, maybe there is some context you didn't consider?

>And yet, the average salary of an IT worker in the US is somewhere between 104 and 110k. After tax that's like 8% of your take home pay. I don't know why it's unreasonable to scoff at having to pay that much to get the most out of these tools. >maybe there is some context you didn't consider? The context is that the average poster on HN has no idea how hard the real world is as they work really high paying jobs. To…

We're talking about people who work really high paying jobs deciding if a tool is worth their time.

Why would anyone discuss whether or not people who don't work those jobs should be using those tools, when that isn't part of their job?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#319

Post by Ygg2 »

pcl wrote: post #193
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…

”I've never personally found a compiler bug.” I remember the time I spent hours debugging a feature that worked on Solaris and Windows but failed to produce the right results on SGI. Turns out the SGI C++ compiler silently ignored the `throw` keyword! Just didn’t emit an opcode at all! Or maybe it wrote a NOP. All I’m saying is, compilers aren’t perfect. I agree about determinism though. And I mitigate that concern b…

Compilers don't change output assemby based on what markdown you provide them via .claude.

Or what tone of voice in prompt you gave them. Or if Saturn is in Aries or Sagittarius.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#320

Post by jjice »

wackget wrote: post #305

How much electricity (and associated materials like water) must this use? It makes me profoundly sad to think of the huge number of AI agents running endlessly to produce vibe-coded slop. The environmental impact must be massive.

If you'd like an estimate, I like this from Simon Willison: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/

Keep in mind that these are estimates, but you could attempt to extrapolate from here. Programming prompts probably take more because I assume the average context is a good bit higher than the average ChatGPT question, plus additional agents.

All in, I'm not sure if the energy usage long term is going to be overblown by media or if it'll be accurate. I'm personally not sure yet.

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