this article is just 2 sentences turned into multi page slop using ai lol
Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#12This article itself is AI slop, of course this is not surprising coming from a website called "ai-updates.net" which I get the impression that might be entirely vibe coded too. I feel that maybe in the future HN will have to implement a "low quality AI" flag or something(if it has aleady I'm not aware).
I bloody hate the linkedin speak that is used in this article. I am sort of glad that a lot of AI articles use such language, since I was repulsed by it before AI was a proper thing, I don't have to update my filters :))
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#13He may well be right, but 'more work' is rarely the answer. The key is doing 'the right work'.
In my experience of AI so far, it's really easy to just 'do more', but there's also very little value in the things people are doing. They don't make you more revenue or improve the product in a meaningful way, or even make the product better to work on. Price's Law[1] or the Pareto Principle[2], or whatever similar axiom you like, suggest that most people aren't actually contributing all that much.
If you apply AI to 'more work' you just end up with the same distribution of good to bad things - and it's highly likely that will lead to more outages, maintenance, and people burning out from the downsides. You have to make sure that the work is actually useful. That's hard, and something AI is terrible at.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#14> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output. > That metric is controversial. An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
Once had a coworker adding lots of safeguards to his code - that i knew would never trip - as he was measured by LOC in his prior workplace.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#15> The company has used the amount of code shipped as a major indicator of engineering output. > That metric is controversial. An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
If you use a wrong metric you get wrong results.
Charles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#16Oh, another situation where a CEO makes an assertion that quantity is a more important metric than quality? I suppose the high level humor in this is considering the nature of the app itself. Not part of the target market but still rather side eye concerned this could end poorly for the users if the CEO isn’t very concerned with, em, protection.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#17I’ve never worked anywhere where there isn’t at least 3 times more work to do than there is time and developers to do it.
But when you do that extra 200% of work, would that give you a better output from a business point of view?
Of course not - and, in fact, ruthless prioritisation almost always makes for a better product.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#18No way Grindr needs 200 engineers.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use a wrong metric you get wrong results.
Charles Simonyi Has that story about how a PM began publicly calling out engineering productivity by having them report weekly lines of code, and Simony one week put a negative number in for his line count. The PM stopped doing that afterward.
Related story about Bill Atkinson at Apple, reporting -2000 lines of code, at https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html . Perhaps that's the one you are thinking of?
It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.
Re: Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers
#20When AI start to do the activity of 200 Grindr users I'll get more concerned.