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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

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Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#131

Post by falcor84 »

neilv wrote: post #111

There's also the questionable copyright/IP angle. As an analogy, can you imagine being a startup that hired a developer, and months later finding out the bulk of the new Web app they "coded" for you was actually copy&pasted open source code, loosely obfuscated, which they were passing it off as something they developed, and to which the company had IP rights? You'd immediately convene the cofounders and a lawyer, abo…

That's a fantastic piece of short fiction, but it is fiction. In practice though, I've seen so many copy&pasted unsourced open source snippets in proprietary code that I've lost all ability to be surprised by it, and I can't think of any one time where the company was sued about that, let alone anyone facing any personal repercussions, not even those junior devs. And if anything, by being "lossy encyclopedias" rather than copy-pasters, LLMs significantly reduce this ostensible legal liability.

Oh, and then you have the actual tech giants offering legal commitment to protect you against any copyright claims:

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#132

Post by elevatortrim »

vkou wrote: post #72
some-guy wrote: post #15

These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation. This is my…

I'd like to see those SVPs and PMs, or shit, even a line manager use AI to implement something as simple as a 2-month intern project [1] in a week. --- [1] We generally budget about half an intern's time for finding the coffee machine, learning how to show up to work on time, going on a fun event with the other interns to play minigolf, discovering that unit tests exist, etc, etc.

I actually built something (a time tracking tool that helps developers log their time consistently on jira and harvest) that most developers in my company use in under a week.

I have backend development background so I was able to review the BE code and fix some bugs. But I did not bother learning Jira and Harvest API specs at all, AI (cursor+sonnet 4) figured it out all.

I would not be able to write the front-end of this. It is JS based and updates the UI based on real-time http requests (forgot the name of this technology, the new ajax that is) and I do not have time to learn it but again, I was able to tweak what AI generated and make it work.

Not only AI helped me do something in much shorter than it would take, it enabled me do something that otherwise would not be possible.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#133

Post by munificent »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #98
bsder wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

> Are you motivated by reason, or resentment?

I think most people are motivated by values. Reason and emotion are merely tools one can use in service of those.

My experience that people who hew too strongly to the former tend to be more oblivious to what's going on in their psychology than most.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#134

Post by falcor84 »

ksenzee wrote: post #114
com2kid wrote: post #9

Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. LLMs do not increase general developer productivity by 10x across the board for general purpose tasks selected at random. 2. LLMs dramatically increases productivity for a limited subset of tasks 3. LLMs can be automated to do busy work and although they may take longer in terms of clock time than a human, the work is effectively done in the background. LLMs can get me…

> Stop using a hammer on nails. sorry, what am I supposed to use on nails?

Nail polish remover

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#135

Post by copperx »

paulhodge wrote: post #35

I think different things are happening... For experienced engineers, I'm seeing (internally in our company at least) a huge amount of caution and hesitancy to go all-in with AI. No one wants to end up maintaining huge codebases of slop code. I think that will shift over time. There are use cases where having quick low-quality code is fine. We need a new intuition about when to insist on handcrafted code, and when to…

If I've learned something about humans in my 40+ years of being alive is that in the long term, convenience trumps all other considerations.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#136

Post by lowbloodsugar »

Turns out AI can’t help script kiddies write production ready applications. Also turns out that AI is good for some things and not others, and a coin toss isn’t a good method to decide which tasks to do using AI. I read that JavaScript is by far the most popular language: still not using it for the mission critical software I write. So it doesn’t bother me that 90% of HN is “AI sucks!” stories. I find it extremely effective when used appropriately. YMMV.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#137

Post by rjsw »

balder1991 wrote: post #41
kmnc wrote: post #17

No one wants it? If there is no demand, then no one is going to become a supplier. You don’t even want the apps you’re dreaming of building, you wouldn’t use them. If you would use them, you would already be using apps that are available. It’s why developers claim huge benefits but the output is the same, there isn’t much demand for your average software company to push more output, the bottleneck is customer demand.…

The argument isn’t only applied to creating new todo apps. If the speed up was true, we’d be existing open source tools with more and more features, more polished than ever etc. Instead I’m not waiting for something like Linux on smartphones to come so soon.

The human barrier to Linux on smartphones is that the drivers for them exist only in old vendor forks of the source tree and Android.

I guess someone could try a prompt of "generate a patch set from Linux tree X to apply to mainline Linux for this CPU".

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#138

Post by neilv »

falcor84 wrote: post #131
neilv wrote: post #111

There's also the questionable copyright/IP angle. As an analogy, can you imagine being a startup that hired a developer, and months later finding out the bulk of the new Web app they "coded" for you was actually copy&pasted open source code, loosely obfuscated, which they were passing it off as something they developed, and to which the company had IP rights? You'd immediately convene the cofounders and a lawyer, abo…

That's a fantastic piece of short fiction, but it is fiction. In practice though, I've seen so many copy&pasted unsourced open source snippets in proprietary code that I've lost all ability to be surprised by it, and I can't think of any one time where the company was sued about that, let alone anyone facing any personal repercussions, not even those junior devs. And if anything, by being "lossy encyclopedias" rather…

The festival of pillaging open source is suddenly so ubiquitous, and protected by deep-pocketed exploiters selling pillaging shovels, that everyone else is just going to try to get their share of the loot?

You might be right, but the point needs to be made.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#139

Post by mandeepj »

vkou wrote: post #78
mandeepj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good example of ‘getting a desired outcome based on prompt’ - use a built-in lib or not.

And when it hallucinates a non-existant library, what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you?

> what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you?

Maybe keep your eyes open? :-)

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#140

Post by com2kid »

jfengel wrote: post #60
com2kid wrote: post #9

Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. LLMs do not increase general developer productivity by 10x across the board for general purpose tasks selected at random. 2. LLMs dramatically increases productivity for a limited subset of tasks 3. LLMs can be automated to do busy work and although they may take longer in terms of clock time than a human, the work is effectively done in the background. LLMs can get me…

If it can figure out where dependencies come from I'm going to have to look more into this. I really hate the way injection makes other people's code bases impenetrable. "The framework scans billions of lines of code to find the implementation, and so can you!"

I'm not looking forward to the cancer of @ invading JavaScript code. Ugh. I am a big fan of wysiwyg. Plz don't Decorate my code....
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