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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

#141

Post by InCom-0 »

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…

You can copy paste unsourced open source snippets just fine, ain't nothing wrong with that (usually) It is another story whether anyone should do that for other reasons having nothing to do with open source or licensing.

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

#142

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

I think it depends.

There are very simple apps I try to vibe code that AI cannot handle. It seems very good at certain domains, and others it seems complete shit at.

For example, I hand wrote a simulation in C in just 900 LOC. I wrote a spec for it and tried to vibe code it in other languages because I wanted to compare different languages/concurrency strategies. Every LLM I've tried fails, and manages to write 2x+ more code in comparatively succinct languages such as Clojure.

I can totally see why people writing small utilities or simple apps in certain domains think its a miracle. But when it comes to things like e.g. games it seems like a complete flop.

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

#143

Post by foxylad »

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…

I own my company so have no fear of losing my job - indeed I'd love to offload all the development I do, so I have no resentment against AI.

But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.

AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.

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

#144

Post by m-hodges »

This article reminds me of two recent observations by Paul Krugman about the internet:

"So, here’s labor productivity growth over the 25 years following each date on the horizontal axis [...] See the great productivity boom that followed the rise of the internet? Neither do I. [...] Maybe the key point is that nobody is arguing that the internet has been useless; surely, it has contributed to economic growth. The argument instead is that its benefits weren’t exceptionally large compared with those of earlier, less glamorous technologies."¹

"On the second, history suggests that large economic effects from A.I. will take longer to materialize than many people currently seem to expect [...] And even while it lasted, productivity growth during the I.T. boom was no higher than it was during the generation-long boom after World War II, which was notable in the fact that it didn’t seem to be driven by any radically new technology [...] That’s not to say that artificial intelligence won’t have huge economic impacts. But history suggests that they won’t come quickly. ChatGPT and whatever follows are probably an economic story for the 2030s, not for the next few years."²

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy....

² https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/ai-chatgpt-jobs-e...

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

#145

Post by ozgrakkurt »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #130
nemomarx wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And people don’t like this. Something being logical doesn’t mean people have to accept it.

Also AI has been basically useless every time I tried it except converting some struct definitions across languages or similar tasks, it seems very unlikely that it would boost productivity by more than 10% let alone 400%.

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

#146

Post by The_Fox »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #127
gdbsjjdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

> The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

You can't use growth of AI companies as evidence to refute the article. The premise is that it's a bubble. The growth IS the bubble, according to the claim.

> I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps

I agree... One-off apps seem like a place where AI can do OK. Not that I care about it. I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.

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

#147

Post by captainkrtek »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #80
daxfohl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that may be where the discrepancy comes in. You feel fast because, whoa I created this whole scheduler in ten seconds! But the you also have to spend an hour code reviewing that scheduler, which, still it feels fast to have a good working scheduler in such a short time. But without AI, maybe it feels slow to find and integrate with some existing scheduling library, but in wall clock time it was the same.

The trick is that no one is actually carefully reviewing this stuff. Reviewing code is properly extremely hard. I'd say even harder than writing it from scratch. But there's no minimum amount of work you have to do. If you just do a quick skim over the result, no one will know you didn't carefully review every single detail. Then it gets merged to production full of mistakes.

To add to this:

If I as a reviewer don’t know if the author used AI, I can’t even assume a single human (typically the author) has even read any or major parts of the code. I could be the first person reviewing it.

Not that it’s a great assumption to make, but it’s also fair to take a PR and register that the author wrote it, understands it, and considers it ready for production. So much work, outside of tech as well, is built on trust at least in part.

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

#148

Post by captainkrtek »

adelie wrote: post #67
nicce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> implements some logic from scratch where there certainly is more than one suitable library, making this code we now own - is some behemoth of a PR trying to do all the things Depending on the amount of code, I see this only as positive? Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.

i've seen this fairly often with internal libraries as well - a recent AI-assisted PR i reviewed included a complete reimplementation of our metrics collector interface. suspect this happened because the reimplementation contained a number of standard/expected methods that we didn't have in our existing interface (because we didn't need them), so it was considered 'different' enough. but none of the code actually use…

I’ve seen this as well as PR feedback to authors of AI assisted PRs: “hey we already have a db driver and interface we’re using for this operation, why did you write this?”

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

#149

Post by captainkrtek »

skydhash wrote: post #128
captainkrtek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely, I’ve based a lot of my debugging on this. AI is just another tool in the toolbox for my searching, but usually not my first tool.

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

#150

Post by atleastoptimal »

dreadnip wrote: post #123
atleastoptimal wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

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, t…

Calling LLM's "pattern matching text machines" is a catchy thought-terminating cliche, which accounts to calling a human brain a "blob of fats, salts, and chemicals". It technically makes sense, but it is seeing the forest for the trees, and ignores the fact that this mere pattern patching text machine is doing things people said were impossible a few years ago. The simplicity and seeming mundanity of a technology has no bearing on its potential or emergent properties. A single termite, observed by itself, could never reveal what it could build when assembled together with its brethren.

I agree that there are lots of limitations to current LLM's, but it seems somewhat naive to ignore the rapid pace of improvement over the last 5 years, the emergent properties of AI at scale, especially in doing things claimed to be impossible only years prior (remember when people said LLM's could never do math, or that image models could never get hands or text right?).

Nobody understands with greater clarity or specificity the limitations of current LLM's than the people working in labs right now to make them better. The AGI prognostications aren't suppositions pulled out of the realm of wishful thinking, they exist because of fundamental revelations that have occurred in the development of AI as it has scaled up over the past decade.

I know I claimed that HN's hatred of AI was an emotional one, but there is an element to their reasoning too that leads them down the wrong path. By seeing more flaws than the average person in these AI systems, and seeing the tact with which companies describe their AI offerings to make them seem more impressive (currently) than they are, you extrapolate that sense of "figuring things out" to a robust model of how AI is and must really be. In doing so, you pattern match AI hype to web3 hype and assume that since the hype is similar in certain ways, that it must also be a bubble/scam just waiting to pop and all the lies are revealed. This is the same pattern-matching trap that people accuse AI of making, and see through the flaws of an LLM output while it claims to have solved a problem correctly.

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