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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#101

Post by zbentley »

firasd wrote: post #14

I wonder if there is cargo culting afoot There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the brows…

> some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc

That's accurate. There are a lot of people (some of them quite senior and/or skilled) who operate in the way you described.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#102

Post by onion2k »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful.

There are two incentives for contributing to open source. The first is to make the app better (add a feature, improve the code, fix a bug, etc.) It's possible that LLMs don't meet the bar but if a human has put the effort in it's not always obvious that it's AI. More likely LLM code is accepted when it's good and rejected when it's bad. The system works.

However, the second incentive is that open source contributions are seen as a 'ahortcut' to making a name for yourself. Being a contributor on a big project goes on resumes and GitHub profiles. Often people who use AI for that don't review the code or even check it does what they say it does. That slop needs to be banned. The downside is losing the good contributions, but it's still a net win.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#103

Post by badlibrarian »

ethin wrote: post #63
badlibrarian wrote: post #17

It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.

Okay. Please generate using an AI model code for a safety-critical system which is able to be incorporated into an aircraft and that passes the coding standards and requirements in that domain and come back and tell us all about it. Surely, if AI was so good across the entire domain of software engineering, this would be trivial to do. Edit: although you might be subject to an NDA... But this is pretty much my test f…

Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#104

Post by vatsachak »

gr_norm wrote: post #89
mark242 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

If so, where are all the new features in the open-source projects I use? Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? Why hasn't CUDA been fully reverse-engineered as an open source toolchain? These are unreasonable expectations, but only in response to unreasonable claims of productivity. What before took ten years should now only take one, right? It seems likely that the gains from generating tons of code are being offset…

Yeah, why hasn't AMD added every single CUDA feature lol

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#105

Post by [deleted] »

vatsachak wrote: post #100
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

I would submit it but the pr was too long to fit on GitHub

[deleted]

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#106

Post by weakfish »

vatsachak wrote: post #100
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

I would submit it but the pr was too long to fit on GitHub

… doesn’t Linux work through email, not GitHub?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#107

Post by y1n0 »

solomonb wrote: post #23

The churn in this space puts javascript to shame. As an example, its only been a few months and AFAICT no one is even talking about openclaw anymore.

Did that get bought by openai? Lost its rogue cool factor.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#108

Post by uncivilized »

pixelesque wrote: post #45
uncivilized wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is a web developer bub

I had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev...…

Yeah I expect it to be helpful in some basic image processing stuff, but it will quickly fail once you try to implement research papers on the topic.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#109

Post by TeMPOraL »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly?

Selection bias? OSS has a thing proprietary projects don't - an endless cohort of opportunists trying to wedge in a "contribution" for personal gain, be it a Hacktober t-shirt or resume boost or an occasional vulnerability (with the resume boosting being by far most likely). The good LLM-based contributions, you probably won't recognize as AI-assisted unless the author explicitly decided to label them, and if they're really good and use LLMs responsibly, they probably don't even have any ethical obligation to label LLM involvement, much less any benefit.

OSS involvement in general stopped being an indicator of skill once Github activity became a factor for job applications.

Edit:

There's also a second factor: many people (myself included) use LLMs to code one-off personal tools with no intent of them having more than one user, ever. Get an itch, have an LLM scratch it for you, carry on with your life. You'll see little trace of it, because it's hard to distinguish a single-user program that's good enough for specific purpose from a pile of autogenerated slop that probably doesn't work, and neither of these will show up as PRs to big OSS repos anyway.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#110

Post by marcosdumay »

vatsachak wrote: post #70
satvikpendem wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a greenfield project at our company, yes proprietary, now taking us months where previously it'd have taken weeks for even a single feature. We definitely see the (whatever)x performance boost with our own eyes.

> now taking us months where it'd have taken weeks... So 0<whatever<1

Nah, the GP's claim is weeks for each feature, versus a few months in total. On a greenfield project.

Weeks for each feature in a greenfield project... Yeah, LLMs make unworking code way faster than that.

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