Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Some things just take time

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 295 posts

Re: Some things just take time

#51

Post by Philpax »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #22
QuadrupleA wrote: post #13

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out? It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward. I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?

Re: Some things just take time

#52

Post by thn-gap »

I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to make up for this difference. This works very well with internal competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some extra fear due to the bad job market.

I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas.

I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.

Re: Some things just take time

#53

Post by hedayet »

big-chungus4 wrote: post #12
Swizec wrote: post #5

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks. But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void. Make sure you fit the roc…

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

> You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, [some water overflows], you remove half of water...

That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an observable event.

Re: Some things just take time

#54

Post by sritchie »

auggierose wrote: post #24
big-chungus4 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before. You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.

What?

Hahah, I just have to reply and say I loved the original comment and was happy for the laugh. Obviously this is the answer to the riddle of

> Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any additional containers

I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors recently, love leaning hard into this one.

Re: Some things just take time

#55

Post by simonw »

alexpotato wrote: post #46

I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters). I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions: - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective - Playte…

I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun.

Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.

Re: Some things just take time

#56

Post by hedayet »

sledgehammers wrote: post #42

Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big productivity increases.

you know what most of us end up doing on those other days? we start side tech projects that require even more effort for even little return.

You can't trust us with self-care. There's just too many shiny toys out there!

Re: Some things just take time

#57

Post by potro »

alexpotato wrote: post #46

I've been working on a clone of Sid Meier's Pirates but with a princess theme (for my daughters). I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions: - AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly - It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc - Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective - Playte…

I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language practice app for myself. It works decent from functional perspective and I don’t see too many bugs. But the biggest productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using it in order to understand what is working and where the issues are.

Re: Some things just take time

#58

Post by an0malous »

thn-gap wrote: post #52

I work at FAANG, and leadership is successfully pushing the urge for speed by stablishing the new productivity expectations, and everyone is rushing as much as they can, as the productivity gain doesn't really match the expectations, and people overwork to make up for this difference. This works very well with internal competition and a quota system for performance ratings, with some extra fear due to the bad job mar…

I’ve noticed this dynamic acutely working at YC startups the last 5ish years. Coding has become like a sweatshop.

I don’t think it’s exclusive to startups or tech either, it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant growth, and when there are real technological improvements you can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.

Re: Some things just take time

#60

Post by Chris_Newton »

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be.

I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding tools. Using AI for research or to spin up a quick demo or prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails before doing the main implementation so the AI can’t get too far off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.

Post reply on HN