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

I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

frederickvanbrabant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 490 posts

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#51

Post by Havoc »

sarchertech wrote: post #19
Havoc wrote: post #4

It absolutely will make some things faster. Anyone that has ever churned out some boilerplate code with it knows that. ...but yeah most organizational processes & people aren't set up for leveraging it and roll out will be slow (same on learning where it does / doesn't work).

I’m not convinced. I’ve been using AI pretty heavily for about 18 months and agents for a little over 6 months. I’m currently working on a data migration for an enormous dataset. I’m writing the tooling in go, which is a language I used to be very familiar with, but that I hadn’t touched in about 12 years when I started this. It definitely helped me get back into go faster. But after the initial speed up, I found mys…

>if so it’s on the order of 10-20%. Nothing revolutionary.

For many businesses that is revolutionary.

Not sure that's enough magic to make the math work for the trillions being invested, but on a ground level within companies even small wins stack up. You may have burned through $1000 without getting much done, but from a company perspective they've probably got an employee with better instincts as to what does or doesn't work

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#52

Post by hydra-f »

Handholding is an issue which is affected by 3 factors: the model, the tooling and the human expertise. Out of the three, the last is the weakest link, due to the fact that it takes the longest to nurture.

Once tooling (e.g. agent harnesses, external tools) becomes more mature and consistent, the other 2 will become less of a bottleneck.

If I were to take a gamble here, I would argue that development will at one point reach the more ideal scenario, whereas the project planning, the scoping, will become longer. Also, the documentation section will take almost the same as the development, slightly longer at the edges.

The new ai-assisted era will most likely push companies to adopt a Waterfall management, rather than an Agile one.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#53

Post by Foobar8568 »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. When I was working we used to get requirements that literally said things like, "Get data and give it to the user". No definition of what data is, where its stored,…

We arrived to that state today with Codex and Claude Code. I really don't know what people are doing wrong?

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#54

Post by rpdillon »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #26

I actually have data on this. I’ve been building sharc, a Common Lisp port of Hacker News. https://www.github.com/shawwn/sharc If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what dang did over the course of several years. It’s taken a few weeks. I started right around May, and now it’s able to render large HN threads (900+ comments) within a factor of five of production HN performance. (Thank you to dang for giving actua…

I've had a handful of software projects in my career land essentially on the day I predicted, sometimes several months out, and the commonality across all of those projects was that the specification was crystal clear. Two of them were actual ports of an existing piece of software over to a new system. And so any time we had a question about the implementation, we could look at the existing version and immediately have our questions answered about what "correct" was.

I think projects where correct is very clearly defined can benefit from LLM acceleration, as you're describing here.

But so much of modern software development is figuring out what the right thing to build is. And in those situations, I don't think LLMs provide nearly as much benefit.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#55

Post by fHr »

Maybe my existing processes not but it can help you enormously. I literally found a problem with AI analyzing packages in Wireshark and it hinted and steered me in the direction in me finding the error setting in the end. Could a senior network guy found it? Yes but probably not even faster. Did I as a L2 SWE not being familiar with much of networking and the companies stack(was like 1 Month at this company) found it with no AI, absolutely no.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#56

Post by plasticchris »

tgv wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: post #5

It makes small teams without organizational overhead go lightning fast. It might be the ultimate tool of disruption.

I have a colleague who vibes the shit out of his part, and it results in large commits that take a lot of time to understand, and that makes cooperation practically impossible. LLMs are not team players.

I get much different results than others when using these tools. Turns out there is some skill in wielding them, and knowing the domain in which you do.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#57

Post by echelon »

tgv wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: post #5

It makes small teams without organizational overhead go lightning fast. It might be the ultimate tool of disruption.

I have a colleague who vibes the shit out of his part, and it results in large commits that take a lot of time to understand, and that makes cooperation practically impossible. LLMs are not team players.

That's a you guys problem. Maybe one or both of you.

Have you thought about pair programming together with the AI?

My LLM outputs are intentional, in my style, and tightly reviewed by myself.

I'm also emitting Rust, which I've found to be the very best language to work with in AI. The AST and language design is focused around control flow and error handling. The borrow checker, sum types, filtering and mapping makes it such that good design is idiomatic.

There's a lot JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Java in the world. A lot of it isn't great. The architectures and styles are wildly varied too. Rust doesn't have that problem. The training data is really solid and idiomatic.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#58

Post by hibikir »

Every large corporation is stuck in communication problems and approval processes. They have grown so large as to have minimal alignment between what the company attempts to produce, what makes the company profitable, and what people actually do. Enshittification, The Gervais Principle, Bullshit Jobs. Pick your favorite, flawed way to look at what is going on, it's all blind people touching different parts of the same elephant.

The way AI makes your processes go faster will have little to do with cutting software development time in itself, but by letting an organization be made with fewer people, which in itself lowers your misalignment issues. A giant company of 200K people will still be about as messy as one today, but you might be able to do a lot more with the same number of people, just like a lone programmer today, without AI, already does quite a bit more than anyone could do by themselves the 80s.

Maybe some of the advantages are that you don't need quite as many developers, or maybe you can use a smaller marketing team, or you don't need to spend that much time answering questions, because an LLM is doing it for you, and it's tracking what it's been asked of it, turning the questions into product research. Either way, the gains come from being able to run leaner, and therefore minimizing organizational misalignment.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#59

Post by pton_xd »

steveBK123 wrote: post #36
shalmanese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think when LLMs first came out people thought they could just say something like, "Make a Facebook clone". But now we're realizing we need to be more exact with our requirements and define things better. That has always been the bottle neck in software. This was substantially predicted by Fred Brooks in 1986 in the classic No Silver Bullets [1] essay under the sections "Expert Systems" and "Automatic Programming"…

It's interesting how predictable some of this is. The LLMs turn out fully formed clones of stuff for which there exists copious amounts of code openly searchable on the web doing the exact same thing. LLMs require developer-like specification, task/subtask breakdown and detail where such example code already exists. As a professional prior to LLMs, how many problems that you work on have many existing free solutions…

> how many problems that you work on have many existing free solutions but you neglected to use that code and decided to spend days doing it yourself?

Only when the existing free solutions are licensed with something like GPL. Now I can just say, write me a C webserver library similar to mongoose and I get the functionality without the license burden.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#60

Post by tedd4u »

Havoc wrote: post #51
sarchertech wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not convinced. I’ve been using AI pretty heavily for about 18 months and agents for a little over 6 months. I’m currently working on a data migration for an enormous dataset. I’m writing the tooling in go, which is a language I used to be very familiar with, but that I hadn’t touched in about 12 years when I started this. It definitely helped me get back into go faster. But after the initial speed up, I found mys…

>if so it’s on the order of 10-20%. Nothing revolutionary. For many businesses that is revolutionary. Not sure that's enough magic to make the math work for the trillions being invested, but on a ground level within companies even small wins stack up. You may have burned through $1000 without getting much done, but from a company perspective they've probably got an employee with better instincts as to what does or do…

How does that 10-20% change when the cost of tokens rises to meet post-IPO earnings targets? For example if it increases 2, 5, or 10x, does this 10-20% gain net out? (Rhetorical question)
Post reply on HN