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Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

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Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#101

Post by thwarted »

> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.

There's that word "just".

There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)

I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#102

Post by [deleted] »

megaloblasto wrote: post #13
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

[deleted]

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#103

Post by gregorygoc »

crazygringo wrote: post #89
gregorygoc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

> Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders. > Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements…

Any efficiency gains which come from cleaner organization structure are gone because of the lossy translation mechanism between a PM and Eng team. You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it from someone in this role. Perceived enjoyment of one’s role is a separate topic, but not completely orthogonal. If someone just wants to code and they force them to be a PM then their personal productivity might drop. This is why I asserted in the beginning I’m talking about feature teams, where a role fit I described is more likely.

As engineering becomes less expensive with generative models I can imagine efficiency tilts even further in favor of engineers doing more PM-like work.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#104

Post by wolvesechoes »

megaloblasto wrote: post #84
mattmanser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were, where are their products and open source projects? Let's circle back. One thing I've noticed about the super-AI enthusiasts on HN is that not a single one ever have a single comment linking to a repo of work they've made with it. I check. I actually always do because I'm really keen to learn how to use these magical super-AI workflows. I've watched streams, replicated clause MD files, tried all the cont…

Damn bro. Deep dive into the comments. The bad algo was a scaling problem for one equation. That particular equation wasn't some y = mx + b thing, it was the result of a discontinuous galerkin finite element scheme that I wrote from scratch. The actual equation was one that I found after about 2 pages of hand written derivations with high level math. Not really a coding issue, just an algebra issue after really inten…

I, on the other hand, tried to vibe-code BDF-like ODE solver. Not some rough prototype, because I can do the rough prototype easily myself, but something robust and fast, with event handling etc. AI couldn't do it. Actually it couldn't do correctly anything more complex than out-of-the-textbook explicit RK4, but this is something undergrad students do while learning numerical methods for the first time.

And solvers are actually a simpler aspect of the project I am working on. It also includes (or rather aims to include) optimizing compiler with DAE to ODE reduction, advanced numerical debugging etc.

This is why these discussions are pointless - AI works well for some people in some contexts, for others not so much, yet both sides extrapolate their experience as universal.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#105

Post by jzelinskie »

LtWorf wrote: post #59
jayd16 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the nomenclature is malevolently vague. PM conflates product management with project management and they are not the same.

But what's the difference? Does anyone actually know?

I've written a reference because I've had this conversation so many times, haha

https://jzelinskie.com/posts/p-what/

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#106

Post by pan69 »

I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work.

The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#107

Post by megaloblasto »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #104
megaloblasto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn bro. Deep dive into the comments. The bad algo was a scaling problem for one equation. That particular equation wasn't some y = mx + b thing, it was the result of a discontinuous galerkin finite element scheme that I wrote from scratch. The actual equation was one that I found after about 2 pages of hand written derivations with high level math. Not really a coding issue, just an algebra issue after really inten…

I, on the other hand, tried to vibe-code BDF-like ODE solver. Not some rough prototype, because I can do the rough prototype easily myself, but something robust and fast, with event handling etc. AI couldn't do it. Actually it couldn't do correctly anything more complex than out-of-the-textbook explicit RK4, but this is something undergrad students do while learning numerical methods for the first time. And solvers a…

I see what your saying but I would argue that vibe coding an ODE solver is an incorrect use of the tool. For something like and ODE solver you need to have a really solid understanding of what data structures you will use,and solid general knowledge of the numerical methods you want to implement. Then, you can use AI as an assistant when you get stuck, or to deepen your understanding, look over your implementation, etc.

It seems like developers used to always joke about how much they used stack exchange (even senior devs). Now it seems like there are suddenly so many people who claim to never need any help and can just smoothly bust out beautiful code all day long.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#108

Post by LtWorf »

pan69 wrote: post #106

I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around an…

Let's not forget the part where they call for a meeting to ask a stupid question instead of checking wikipedia.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#109

Post by LtWorf »

knoopx wrote: post #39
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

bullshit, open source is blooming as never before. also we already have good xml libraries, nobody is interested in that. but yeah i agree with the sentiment that ai is not the magical tool you were promised, useful nevertheless.

Is it? Can you link me to a succesful product that actually has human users that does heavy use of AI for writing code?

(and blooming would mean that there are hundreds of these)

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#110

Post by LtWorf »

brookst wrote: post #6
bgwalter wrote: post #5

I wonder what his colleague Knuth at Stanford says about commercially driven hype like: "AI has made coding the easy part." "Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.

Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code. All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.

Humans don't need to read all of the existing code to produce new code. In fact humans invented code into existance.
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