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AI usage patterns in software teams

linear.app

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Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#131

Post by lukebitts »

hypfer wrote: post #68
anon7000 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A normal agentic loop will have the agent using a type system and basic tests to do some basic validation of changes. A good agentic loop would give the agent a very easy way to verify if it’s on the right track. I think agents are better than many humans at writing error free code (runtime errors, not bugs. The code could still be buggy or incorrect.)

Fundamentally though, an agent cannot produce great code, because great code requires intent, which is the opposite of the statistical mean. You will get a solution that works with a proper workflow, but you won't get one that scales or would be truly maintainable. Which is also what you get with random midwit drive-by contributors, but faster. I'll give it that.

This is a weird framing, but the user is the "intent". If you can produce "great code" by yourself (whatever that is), then you can get your agent to produce it for you. If you are talking about vibe-coding then yeah, it is going to be trash

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#132

Post by jappgar »

danggggg wrote: post #129
duskdozer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this mean-spirited comment really what you want to share as the face of your company?

[dead]

His comment sucks but it is indeed a skill issue. Not the skill of "agentic coding" or whatever but the skill of having and communicating good ideas. A lot of engineers/people are bad at that, and are struggling to produce anything of value with AI coding.

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#133

Post by chasd00 »

drodgers wrote: post #95
danggggg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Skill issue. If you make an effort to use the new tools effectively, the gains are wild. Don't fall into a grumpy luddite trap, the train is leaving the station and you'll struggle to catch up if you don't learn and grow. Not using AI for software development in 2027 will be like only knowing how to program via punchcard in 2010. It's new. It's different. It's hard. It's your job. Learn how to use it effectively, emb…

> It's new. It's different. It's hard. It's your job. Learn how to use it effectively, embrace the new abundance mindset.

This. Except it’s not that hard to get proficient. Either learn it or get left behind same as it ever was in software tech.

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#134

Post by jdw64 »

lukebitts wrote: post #119
nozzlegear wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But these days, AI just generates code following the existing patterns of the codebase Is this sarcasm?

I read these kinds of comments and wonder what makes reality so different for us. I personally have found AI has the easiest time in the world following existing patterns. At my workplace, our frontend code is so well organized most of the time all the AI has to do is copy and paste an implementation from somewhere else and change the names, and it gets right pretty much 100% of the time

Every workflow is highly personal, so there's no real reason to argue about it. Depending on the work, some tasks become patternized and others don't. Most people overestimate themselves as being near average, and some of them are actually unskilled. There's no point in fighting with them.

Even on HN, people don't comment purely out of 'rationality.'

I think AI generates well patterned code. Essentially, it handles a lot of situations with standardized code. But recognizing those patterns and knowing how to implement them are different things.

In programming, there are people who know how to implement something but can't explain the contract or the model behind it. For those people, AI might not be very useful, or they might be one of the rare few who write code far better than AI. Either way, the fact that an AI beat a top competitive programmer is enough to say it performs better than most people on HN. There's no point in arguing with them.

It's not that they're necessarily wrong. It's that they tend to generalize their own personal workflows.

AI can't do software engineering, but it can code well. Software engineering is the problem of transforming a complex open system into a closed one, taking a PM's requirements and building a single system out of them. AI can't do that. Why? Because AI can't adjust emphasis the way humans do. The design for frequently accessed parts and rarely accessed parts should be different, but AI treats everything uniformly, which makes it harder to modify later.

On the other hand, once a problem is closed and well defined, AI does much better than most people. It's logical and doesn't make the kind of leaps humans do, at least with frontier models. So there's no point in arguing with them at all.

Their experiences are based on their own workflows, so their perceptions naturally differ. And it's hard to tell whether they're saying it's bad because they truly understand it well, or because they don't understand it at all.

I'm not saying they should live in an echo chamber, but there's no reason to argue with them. It's better to trust statistical facts.

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#135

Post by chasd00 »

duskdozer wrote: post #111
drodgers wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skill issue. If you make an effort to use the new tools effectively, the gains are wild. Don't fall into a grumpy luddite trap, the train is leaving the station and you'll struggle to catch up if you don't learn and grow. Not using AI for software development in 2027 will be like only knowing how to program via punchcard in 2010. It's new. It's different. It's hard. It's your job. Learn how to use it effectively, emb…

Is this mean-spirited comment really what you want to share as the face of your company?

I don’t know this person but no one else is holding back on mean spirited replies, I see no reason they shouldn’t reply in same.

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#136

Post by qsera »

drodgers wrote: post #95
danggggg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Skill issue. If you make an effort to use the new tools effectively, the gains are wild. Don't fall into a grumpy luddite trap, the train is leaving the station and you'll struggle to catch up if you don't learn and grow. Not using AI for software development in 2027 will be like only knowing how to program via punchcard in 2010. It's new. It's different. It's hard. It's your job. Learn how to use it effectively, emb…

The AI whisperer! The hottest job title of 2026!

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#137

Post by wongarsu »

hypfer wrote: post #110
wongarsu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree that LLMs solve for the statistical mean But more importantly: isn't what you call "intent" just a series of optimization goals? You want your code to satisfy the constraint of being correct™, while also maximizing various other goals like being maintainable, easy to understand, having few lines of code, as little tight coupling as possible, etc. Goals that often conflict, but when given two impl…

> I'm not sure I agree that LLMs solve for the statistical mean The good thing is that you don't have to agree with that, as the fundamental technical reality does it for you. LLMs do work like that. They are just statistics and probabilities.

Doesn't the universal approximation theorem apply to typical LLM architectures? LLMs solve for the shape of the input data, as well as they can approximate it in the constraints of their architecture, the optimizer and the amount of compute spent in the training process

And where those constraints prevent us from matching the shape there is no guarantee that we match anything like the mean. Though maybe we can agree that that's where the optimizer would tend to steer towards when it can't do any better

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#138

Post by danggggg »

jdw64 wrote: post #134
lukebitts wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read these kinds of comments and wonder what makes reality so different for us. I personally have found AI has the easiest time in the world following existing patterns. At my workplace, our frontend code is so well organized most of the time all the AI has to do is copy and paste an implementation from somewhere else and change the names, and it gets right pretty much 100% of the time

Every workflow is highly personal, so there's no real reason to argue about it. Depending on the work, some tasks become patternized and others don't. Most people overestimate themselves as being near average, and some of them are actually unskilled. There's no point in fighting with them. Even on HN, people don't comment purely out of 'rationality.' I think AI generates well patterned code. Essentially, it handles a…

[dead]

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#139

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #126
blfr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usage does not correlate with valued output or ROI This sounds possible but how can we know? It could just as well correlate. Effort of all kinds correlates with success even when it's not obvious or not... linear.

If that was true then there wouldn’t be a giant ROI crisis fueling calls of an AI bubble burst imminent. If the answer was “the ROI is clear” then folks would just say that.

The debate about ROI isn't about whether everyone is going to throw their hands up and stop using AI tooling - the debate is about where that value is going to be captured. It's pretty clear that using some degree AI assistance for programming is on the whole faster and better than writing code by hand for the majority of applications, and it's clear that the degree to which it's better than writing code by hand is increasing quickly.

I'm sure someone is going to reply to and say "actually it's not clear and the tech debt is about to explode everything real soon now" or something to that effect, but it's hard for me to explain this theoretically when it is so obvious in practice in my day to day.

Re: AI usage patterns in software teams

#140

Post by kyllo »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #139
cmiles8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was true then there wouldn’t be a giant ROI crisis fueling calls of an AI bubble burst imminent. If the answer was “the ROI is clear” then folks would just say that.

The debate about ROI isn't about whether everyone is going to throw their hands up and stop using AI tooling - the debate is about where that value is going to be captured. It's pretty clear that using some degree AI assistance for programming is on the whole faster and better than writing code by hand for the majority of applications, and it's clear that the degree to which it's better than writing code by hand is i…

On the value capture question, it's really not clear that the ability to write code at superhuman speed actually translates to an increase in the speed with which we can create new, better technology products that customers will pay more money for, vs. just enabling layoffs.
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