Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 605 posts

Re: Is it a bubble?

#131

Post by foobarian »

johnfn wrote: post #32
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, s…

I'm on track to finish my current gig having written negative lines of code. It's amazing how much legacy garbage long running codebases can accumulate, and it's equally amazing how much it can slow down development (and, conversely, how much faster development can become if legacy functionality is deleted).

Re: Is it a bubble?

#132

Post by overfeed »

johnfn wrote: post #49
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments…

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

> I am the AI-hater's nightmare...

I-know-what-kind-of-man-you-are.jpeg

You come off as a zealot by branding people who disagree as "haters".

Edit: AI excels at following examples, or simple, testable tasks that require persistence, which is intern-level work. Doing this narrow band of work quickly doesn't result in 10x productivity.

I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.

1. Even for junior level work

Re: Is it a bubble?

#133

Post by johnfn »

overfeed wrote: post #132
johnfn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

> I am the AI-hater's nightmare... I-know-what-kind-of-man-you-are.jpeg You come off as a zealot by branding people who disagree as "haters". Edit: AI excels at following examples, or simple, testable tasks that require persistence, which is intern-level work. Doing this narrow band of work quickly doesn't result in 10x productivity. I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks…

Did you see the comment that I was responding to? It said "your intuition is a liar" and said they would only believe me if I was compensated 10x a normal engineer. If that's not the comment of a hater, I'm not sure what qualifies.

> I'm yet to find a single person who has shown evidence to go through 10x more tasks in a sprint[1], or match the output of the rest of their 6-10-member team by themselves.

If my website, a real website with real users, doesn't qualify, then I'm not sure what would. A single person with evidence is right in front of you, but you seem to be denying the evidence of your own eyes.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#134

Post by [deleted] »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#135

Post by asdff »

catigula wrote: post #6

>I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that “new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.” I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those j…

New jobs might materialize but who knows if they will be good jobs. Think of all the towns around the US set up around resource extraction or manufacturing that went away, and in its wake you have jobs like selling geekbars in the 7/11 to the other minimum wage workers and people scrapping along on the dole in the area. People living on the poverty line today while their parents bought a home and two cars on a single income from the steel mill a generation or two previous. Most of the population up and left.

How about when offices went digital? All the file runners, calculators, switchboard operators, secretaries, transcribers, etc. Where are they now? Probably not working good jobs in IT. Maybe you will find them bagging groceries past retirement age today.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#136

Post by 9rx »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them.

Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you.

But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#137

Post by johnfn »

dingnuts wrote: post #60
johnfn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

> Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case. If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim…

> Have you received a 5-10x pay increase?

Does Amazon pay everyone who receives "Not meeting expectations" in their perf review 0 dollars? Did Meta pay John Carmack (or insert your favorite engineer here) 100x that of a normal engineer? Why do you think that would be?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#138

Post by tennex »

Whether it's a bubble depends on pricing. Is it worth the price, is it worth the future price, and by how much?

In the case of AI coding, yes: AI does exceptionally well at search (something we have known for quite some time, and have a variety of ML solutions for).

Large codebases have search and understanding as top problems. Your ability to make horizontal changes degrades as teams scale. Most stability, performance, quality, etc., changes are are horizontal.

Ironically, I think it's possible that AI's effectiveness at broad search give software engineers additional effectiveness, by being their eyes. Yes, I still review every claude code PR I submit, and yes, I typically take longer to create a claude code PR than a manual one. But I can be more satisfied that the parallel async search agents and massive grep commands are searching more locations, more quickly, and more thoroughly than I would.

Yes, it probably is a bubble (overvalued). No, that doesn't mean it's going to go away. The market is simply overcorrecting as it determines how to price it. Which--net net, is a positive effect, as it encourages economic growth within a developing sector.

Bubble is also not the most important concern--it's rather a concern that the bubble is in the one industry that's not in the red. More important to worry about are other economic conditions outside of AI and tech, which are causing general instability and uncertainty rather than investor appetite. Market recalibrating on a developing industry is fine, as long as it's not your only export.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#139

Post by Night_Thastus »

f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

Don't worry that much about 'AI' specifically. LLMs are an impressive piece of technology, but at the end of the day they're just language predictors - and bad ones a lot of the time. They can reassemble and remix what's already been written but with no understanding of it.

It can be an accelerator - it gets extremely common boiler-plate text work out of the way. But it can't replace any job that requires a functioning brain, since LLMs do not have one - nor ever will.

But in the end it doesn't matter. Companies do whatever they can to slash their labor requirements, pay people less, dodge regulations, etc. If not 'AI' it'll just be something else.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#140

Post by Night_Thastus »

ozten wrote: post #52
Sprotch wrote: post #34

He thinks "AI" "may be capable of taking over cognition", which shows he doesn't understand how LLM work...

Why is AI limited to just a raw LLM. Scaffolding, RL, multi-modal... so many techniques which can be applied. METR has shown AI's time horizon for staying on task is doubling every 7 months or less. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-...

Because LLMs are just about all that actually exists as a product, even if an inconsistent one.

Maybe some day a completely different approach could actually make AI, but that's vapor at the moment. IF it happens, there will be something to talk about.

Post reply on HN