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The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

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Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#71

Post by hunterpayne »

handoflixue wrote: post #5
slowin wrote: post #3

I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary. > But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from…

Yeah, it's a bit absurd. There's so many empirically measured benchmarks where LLMs clearly exceed human capabilities and efficiencies!

I have yet to see such research. I've seen research that says the exact opposite. The devs I see making such pronouncements usually aren't exactly the top devs on their teams. Seems like the result of the double burden to me.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#72

Post by sshine »

hunterpayne wrote: post #62
sshine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the speed means that you get more defects and issues You forget to account for the rate of error correction. You can just choose how many bugs you want now: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-m...

How many new bugs get introduced in those fixes?

As many as you allow.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#73

Post by woodruffw »

ma2kx wrote: post #66
woodruffw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charitably, we could say that “agentic” software engineering is less than 4 years old. I say charitably because I think even that’s an extraordinary stretch. But even at 4 years, I don’t think anybody can fairly claim to be experienced in it in a way that’s going to be stable and fungible for, say, the next 30 years. (My experience has been the polar opposite: the people I know who are the most “AI pilled” are also t…

True, but thats explains why the gap is so huge at the moment. There are some experienced (in coding) devs with a talent in using agent, inexperienced devs with talent, experienced devs without talent and inexperienced devs without talent. And I don't mean talent in a judgmental sense; it's perfectly normal for people to have different aptitudes, and we simply weren't prepared for using computers in a natural languag…

I agree. It remains to be seen whether the field will even stabilize, beyond some local maxima of everything being a chat interface. I for one hope it does.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#74

Post by leptons »

daishi55 wrote: post #68
leptons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't necessarily caused by AI, in fact quite a lot of the layoffs came well before AI was useful. Most of the layoffs happened because companies over-hired during covid, and a lot of other economic issues causing people to spend less money, which causes top-heavy companies to lay off employees they hired when people had more money to spend.

The robot overlords will put the last free man in a pod in 2080 and you guys will still be calling it Covid hiring correction huh

Your comment is a little overdramatic and lacks and grounding in reality. Lots of companies overhired, including mine, and we also had layoffs that were not a result of AI, it pre-dated anyone using AI at our company.

But whatever, this pointless internet interaction is over.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#76

Post by talon8635 »

dcanelhas wrote: post #38

On the "Stop saying please" part. I personally like to use polite language, as an exercise. According to this one paper on arxiv, toxic behavior gets better accuracy https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950 It was published a while ago. But I wonder if it still holds true today.

Not being polite just further nourished our basest animal instincts, which the internet has already enflamed. I’ve watched people slide into severe impatience and antisocial knee jerks as a result of too much time online, including myself. Driving and synthetic (online/ai) social interaction make many of us a little more assholeish. And of course, there’s a negative feedback loop, as this further polarized online discussion angering people even more. It’s rather depressing, and it seems no online realm is safe (including HN)

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#77

Post by bmitch3020 »

simianwords wrote: post #55

> It is widely accepted that there is an AI bubble in the financial markets at the moment No its not. No one serious truly believes 1. AI is going away 2. its obvious that the total market cap of AI related stocks will go down more than 60-70% Its obviously true that there are some related AI companies that will go bust as with any new technology. And its also true that the rise won't be monotonic. What we instead ge…

For me to believe this is not a bubble, I'd want to see that revenues exceed expenses by a large enough factor to sustain the business (often a 10% or greater profit margin). Right now, every one of these companies is following the Uber business model: give the product away at below market prices to hopefully capture the market and force their competitors to go bankrupt first. They're also speed running the bubble with massive data center builds that will increase their debt and future interest payments on that debt.

The question for me isn't "is this a bubble", it's "how many of these companies will be left after it pops". The few companies that remain are likely worth their current inflated value. But I'd want to see the back of the envelope math showing that all of the companies together will be able to earn the necessary profit to justify their valuations, how much revenue would that require, and how does that compare to the current tech purchasing today.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#78

Post by bryanlarsen »

sshine wrote: post #59
datadrivenangel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that skill at coding is not exactly the same thing as skill at developing and maintaining software, and AI can help there as well, but a swarm of cowboy coder agents will get you to a legacy codebase very very quickly. And even if the AI is better than most humans, the speed means that you get more defects and issues! If a human developer has a change failure rate of say 10%, (1 in 10 changes causes a…

> the speed means that you get more defects and issues You forget to account for the rate of error correction. You can just choose how many bugs you want now: https://nolanlawson.com/2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-m...

That excellent post talks about searching for bugs in extant code, but a similar maxim applies to new code:

With AI, you can choose your position on the speed/quality trade-off curve. You can vibe code crap, you can guide/review more closely and get a higher quality product more slowly.

And that choice can extend past non-AI coding: with AI you can produce software even more slowly but even higher quality than you did in the past before AI.

One straightforward way to achieve this is to code manually and use AI to more thoroughly review & audit your code. But that's not the only way to get there -- you can use AI for coding assistance and still produce higher quality code slower. It's tricky, though.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#79

Post by lowsong »

simianwords wrote: post #50
lowsong wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think it’s widely accepted financial markets are in an AI bubble or there is actually any evidence to support this It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble. >…

There's something to say about the extreme confidence people have that AI is a bubble with perpetually pushed up timelines. It doesn't matter that AI is useful (but so was internet). It doesn't matter that revenues exist (mostly fake and circular). It doesn't matter that real unit costs go down (models are getting commoditised). It doesn't matter that the margins are high (companies are secretly hiding the real costs…

> It doesn't matter that AI is useful (but so was internet).

And yet we had the dotcom bubble.

> It doesn't matter that revenues exist (mostly fake and circular).

Oh people are paying for AI now, but will they do so when costs go up? Will they do so when the hype dies down and they realise that it doesn't provide the benefits it claims? Remember it's a feedback loop, a depression in the stock market will make companies want to cut costs to improve their numbers, and questionable AI spend will be the first thing to go. Once this starts to burst, it goes down fast.

> It doesn't matter that real unit costs go down (models are getting commoditised).

Are they? Why is every model more expensive than the last? Why are company AI spends spiralling out of control?

> It doesn't matter that the margins are high (companies are secretly hiding the real costs because that would pop the bubble).

Then why is everyone except Nvidia losing money?

> In their world view, the bubble is predestined.

You don't need to be a stock market genius to look at a technology that doesn't provide the benefits promised but is being sold as if it's going to change the world and see a crash coming. The bill comes due eventually, and when it does the gap between the actual value and the promised value will need to be addressed. If that's not going to be a "bubble pop" I don't know what is.

The only way the financials work out, the only way there is not some form of bubble, is if advances in AI not only continue at the current rate but speed up, and this technology becomes the most valuable invention humanity has ever made. If you believe that's the case then you're living in a fantasy world so divorced from reality that no evidence I could present would change your mind.

Re: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

#80

Post by nicolasrocchia »

david-gpu wrote: post #37
woodruffw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with this. One of the strangest things about LLM driven engineering is holding two seemingly contradictory positions in your head: they’re both better than the median developer, and they’re also much worse at producing artifacts that are comprehensible to humans. I often find myself throwing away large amounts of LLM driven code not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t fit within my attention sp…

My experience is the same. That is why I write technical specifications for the LLM to follow, and treat the actual code they generate in the same way I treat the assembly produced by a compiler: a black box I rarely peek into. If the code passes the (extensive) tests, I don't need to read or understand it. That said, I retired before LLMs became popular, so my experience is limited to vibe coding at home.

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