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One of these things is not like the other.
Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
121–130 of 498 posts
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#122Got your shovelware right here...with receipts.
Background: I'm building a python package side project which allows you to encode/decode messages into LLM output.
Receipts: the tool I'm using creates a markdown that displays every prompt typed, and every solution generated, along with summaries of the code diffs. You can check it out here: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/blob/master/docs/dev-summa...
Specific example: Actually used a leet-code style algorithms implementation of memo-ization for branching. This would have taken a couple of days to implement by hand, but it took about 20 minutes to write the spec and 20 minutes to review solutions and merge the solution generated. If you're curious you can see this diff generated here: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/commit/cdabc98
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…
I don’t agree. HN is full of technical people, and technical people see LLMs for what they truly are: pattern matching text machines. We just don’t buy into the AGI hype because we’ve seen nothing to support it.
I’m not concerned for my job, in fact I’d be very happy if real AGI would be achieved. It would probably be the crowning tech achievement of the human race so far. Not only would I not have to work anymore, the majority of the world wouldn’t have to. We’d suddenly be living in a completely different world.
But I don’t believe that’s where we’re headed. I don’t believe LLMs in their current state can get us there. This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit. It’s a bubble and anyone who spends enough time in the space knows that.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company". Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.
I think Chuck Prince's "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." from the GFC https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/funds/ex-citi-ceo-de... is the more relevant famous line here.
I haven’t heard this before, this is incredible. Thanks for sharing. There were a bunch of phenomena that didn’t quite make sense to me before, which make perfect sense now that I read the quote.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#125> We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore. I see pseudo-scientific claims from both sides of this debate but this is a bit too far for me personally. "We all know" sounds like Eternal September [1] kind of reasoning. I've been in the industry about as long as the article author and I think he might be looking with rose-tinted glass…
> I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"?
This is one of my big datapoints in the skepticism, there's all these articles about how individual developers are doing amazing things, but almost no data points about the increase of productivity as a result.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#126I get excellent productivity gains from AI. Not everywhere, and not linearly. It makes the bad stuff about the work (boilerplate, dealing with things outside my specialties) tolerable and the good stuff a bit better. It makes me want to create more. Business guys missing some visualization? Hell why not, few minutes on Aider and it's there. Let's improve our test suites. And let's migrate away from that legacy framew…
> It will just bring about more software
But according to the graphs in the article, after three years of LLM chatbots and coding assistants, we're seeing exactly the same rate of new software...
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…
Did you read TFA, which shows that developers are slower with AI and think they're faster ? The two types of responses to AI I see are your very defensive type, and people saying "I don't get it".
The article is one person recording their own use of AI, finding no statistical significance but claiming since that the evaluated ratio of AI:human speed in performing various coding tasks resembled the METR study, that AI has no value. People have already talked about issues with the METR study, but importantly with that study and this blog post, it querying a small number of people using AI tools for the first time, working in a code base they already have experience and deep understanding of.
Their claim following that is that because there hasn't been an exponential growth in App store releases, domain name registrations or Steam games, that, beyond just AI producing shoddy code, AI has led to no increase in the amount of software at all, or none that could be called remarkable or even notable in proportion to the claims made by those at AI companies.
I think this ignores the obvious signs of growth in AI companies which providing software engineering and adjacent services via AI. These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product.
These trends include
1. The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. 2. The massive growth in revenue of companies that use AI including Cursor, replit, loveable etc 3. The massive valuation of these companies
Anecdotally, with AI I can make shovelware apps very easily, spin them up effortlessly and fix issues I don't have the expertise or time to do myself. I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps with capabilities avaliable today when it's clear that many many people can, have done so, have documented doing so, have made money selling those apps, etc.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted, _discovery_ of such things is something I'm still trying to solve at my own job and potentially llms can at least be leveraged to analyse and search code(bases) rather than just write it. It's difficult because you need team members to be able to work quite independently but knowledge of internal libraries can get so siloed.
I do think the discovery piece is hugely valuable. I’m fairly capable with grep and ag, but asking Claude where something is in my codebase is very handy.
I've always gone from entry point of the code (with a lot of assumptions) and then do a deep dive of one of the module or branches. After a while you develop an intuition where code may be (or follow the import/include statement).
I've explored code like FreeBSD, Busybox, Laravel, Gnome, Blender,... and it's quite easy to find you way around.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#129Got your shovelware right here...with receipts. Background: I'm building a python package side project which allows you to encode/decode messages into LLM output. Receipts: the tool I'm using creates a markdown that displays every prompt typed, and every solution generated, along with summaries of the code diffs. You can check it out here: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/blob/master/docs/dev-summa... Specific examp…
You should have used the word "steganography" in this description like you did in your readme, makes it 100% more clear what it does.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…
Find a way to make sure workers get the value of ai labor instead of bosses and the workers will like it better. If the result is "you do the same work but managers want everything in 20% of the time" why would anyone be happy?
I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit, but the only thing that would allow this to happen are systems and incentive structures that allow that to happen. A manager's job is to increase revenue and cut costs, that's how they get their job, how they keep their job, and how they are promoted. People very rarely get free benefits outside the range of what the incentive structures they exist in allow them to.