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The first 40 months of the AI era
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#102> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…
> better API documentation and conventional coding tools
Agreed, and it depends on the language I suppose. I'm a C++ developer and when you start working with templates even at a non-casual level, the compiler errors due to either genuine syntactic errors or 'seems correct but the standard doesn't support' can be infuriatingly obtuse. The LLM 'just knows' the standard (kind of, all 2k pages), and can figure out and fix most of those errors far faster than I can. In fact one of my preferred usages is to point Codex at my compiler output and get it to do nothing more than fix template errors.
Kotlin, for example, is much more in your face, in the IDE which does a correctness pass, before you even invoke the compiler (in the traditional sense) and the language spec is considerably leaner with less (no?) UB, unlike C++.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.
There is natural incentive for engineers working on a project to keep Claude skills up to date. I cannot say the same for general documentation.
That's the weird best thing about LLMs - there is finally incentive for projects to create documentation, CLIs, tests, and well organized modular codebases, since LLMs fall flat on their face without these things!
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#104I basically agree with the practical conclusion:
> For now at least I’m keeping my Claude Pro subscription, but given the persistant rumors of undisclosed rate limiting, and ever improving performance of local LLMs, I can easily imagine that I’ll cancel my subscription before the end of the year.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#105> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…
I agree. I think of AI as a search engine on steroids.
But I think it IS the best way to search for information, to be able to put a question in natural language. I'm always amazed just how exactly on-point the answer is.
I mean even the best of docs out there that have a great search bar like the Vue docs still only matches your search term and surfaces relevant topics.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#106> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…
My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.
Yeah, I joined a project a couple of months ago, felt completely lost.
Last week, a colleague finally added for Claude all the documentation I'd have needed on day one. Meanwhile, I'm addressing issues from the other direction, writing custom linters to make sure that Claude progressively fixes its messes.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#107> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I…
And hilariously, the worst offenders are AI frameworks themselves. A couple months ago I was helping a client build out some "agentic" stuff and we switched from OpenAI Agents library to Agno. Agents is messy enough, like making inconsistent use of its own enums etc, but with Agno you can really feel that they are eating their own dog food. Plenty of times I literally could not find the API for some object, and of course their docs page pushes you toward chatting with their goddamn docs chatbot, which barfs up some outdated function signature for you.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#108The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things. We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a d…
But 3 Indians + AI means they don’t need any of you at all. This won’t go well in the long run.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#109I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game chan…
Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents. Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Wh…
> Several of my friends who don't know any programming are creating video games and music software with AI agents.
I've seen a few live streams vibecoding video games on Twitch, and it was so hilariously bad and cringe-inducing I am back working on (hobby) game dev, my hopes restored, at least for the immediate future.
I also like how that entire field, gamers and devs, compared to regular software engineering, is so set against AI it can provide some pushback to the starry-eyed comments you read on here all the time. The only people using LLMs in gamedev are grifters and the dreaded idea people with not a single bone of talent or love for the craft in their body.
Re: The first 40 months of the AI era
#110> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.
If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?
As someone who really hopes developers get much more productive in our team, I would hope we are able to finally keep pace with the desired roadmap and fix bugs at a much faster rate so customers don’t have to wait too long for things to get fixed. Currently, we always get late and the roadmap has to be changed to remove less important things so we focus on fewer things. Which is not ideal, we are definitely losing business when we drop items, and we know that since potential customers keep running into use cases we knew would be useful but never managed to get to.