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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#151

Post by sublinear »

margalabargala wrote: post #118
d4mi3n wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this to be an incredibly myopic viewpoint. Software engineering is not defined by a single tool or technology, but rather how we design, implement, and maintain processes of value we want to automate or scale. LLMs will certainly be an aide, but assuming adoption of them is required across a whole _field_ ignores whole classes of problems, domains, and constraints the production of software covers. Rather, we…

On the contrary, taken at face value I find the GP comment to be spot on. They aren't saying LLM adoption is required across 100% of the field. They are pointing out that LLMs have reached an impressively capable state, and someone insufficiently inclined to test new tooling that they still dismiss LLMs as "just fancy autocomplete" is exactly who gets left behind when technology advances. Two things can be true at th…

Can you elaborate on how someone would get "left behind"? Isn't the whole point of LLMs that they use natural language and require less effort?

If they're so easy to use, wouldn't the opposite be true? i.e. people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency? Nobody gives a rat's ass if you did something in an hour or took all night. The deadline is still next week because of all the meetings. What's the point? Anyone at any point in human history can tell you that doing too much too early has extremely high odds of failure. You're much better off thinking about the business concerns at hand instead of getting lost in the weeds playing with the code.

There's also zero chance of the cadence speeding up because software engineers were never the bottleneck, and LLMs don't work so well for everyone else's job.

If you can't pull rabbits out of hats when the time is right without an LLM, you're already at a disadvantage compared to everyone else who can (anyone who isn't a junior dev today).

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#152

Post by vonnieda »

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…

> 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.

According to this list of top Github repos by stars[1], of the top 10, nine of them are informational and one is OpenClaw, which certainly has plenty of AI generated code.

The next 10 include react which has a CLAUDE.md and a .claude, and lots of landed PRs that look like AI. And linux, which, we all read Linus' stance. He sees the value. And superpowers, ECC, and hermes-agent. All of which are AI stuff.

I think it would be reasonable to ask which major open source projects aren't using AI assistance?

> 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.

That is not why. Or at least not the majority of it. The biggest part is that maintainers just can't keep up. They don't have time to do in depth reviews for the number of PRs coming in to find out if it: works, does what it says it does, meets a need, has docs, is well written, meets criteria, etc. That does not mean all those PRs are trash. Some might be trash, some might be gold. Just like human generated ones.

What it comes down to is vibes. Anti-AI folk don't like AI for reasons (that are valid) and they don't want to find any value in it. So they don't. But lots of people are. Lots of really cool, interesting, clever, new software is being written and getting used and building communities but people see CLAUDE.md and go "slop, no thanks" and won't even give it a try.

[1]: https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#153

Post by ryoshu »

xendo wrote: post #60
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…

@antirez is a very prominent open source contributor that gets lot of shit done with LLMs. Mitchel Hashimoto is also open about using LLMs to speed up his work. There are some caveats attached: neither of them is doing crazy loops or graphs producing thousands of lines of code, they are both amazing software engineers and they know what they are doing.

Yes. Feels like the better you are at your craft the better the tools work.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#154

Post by IsTom »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #32

I was fairly skeptical of agentic coding before I used it for a real product. Although I still have to be heavily involved in planning the code that LLMs write for me, they can write code much faster than I can, and they know more about edge cases than I do, so they can handle edge cases/subtle bugs that I would have missed. I have been paid to write code at every level of the stack from assembly to frontend javascri…

Adding too many tests was a real issue before LLMs. You end up in situations where you when you add a feature there's 200 (out of e.g. 10k) tests that fail and you have to figure out which of them should fail and you need to fix them and which are actual bugs.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#155

Post by margalabargala »

sublinear wrote: post #151
margalabargala wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, taken at face value I find the GP comment to be spot on. They aren't saying LLM adoption is required across 100% of the field. They are pointing out that LLMs have reached an impressively capable state, and someone insufficiently inclined to test new tooling that they still dismiss LLMs as "just fancy autocomplete" is exactly who gets left behind when technology advances. Two things can be true at th…

Can you elaborate on how someone would get "left behind"? Isn't the whole point of LLMs that they use natural language and require less effort? If they're so easy to use, wouldn't the opposite be true? i.e. people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency? Nobody gives a rat's ass if you did something in an hour or took all night. The deadline is still next week because of all the meetings. What's th…

> people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency

What if what people become weaker at, is no longer the core competency? Then people who maintain their skills at what used to be the core competency, at the expense of what is actually the core competency, will be left behind.

The rest of your comment, re: nothing taking less than a week because of meetings and software never being the bottleneck, is not something generally true across the industry. I'm sorry that that has been your experience; it does not sound pleasant.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#156

Post by simonw »

20k wrote: post #87
vatsachak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

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

Here are a few examples you might find credible:

- pola-rs/polars: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/pull/26823 - ~2.68x median speedup of primitive-to-boolean casting credited to Claude Opus 4.6

- pydantic/monty: https://github.com/pydantic/monty/pull/643 - ~53x speedup (488ms down to 9.2ms) of bytes substring search generated with Claude Code

- numpy/numpy: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/31573 - ~21x speedup of Python datetime → datetime64 conversion, with Claude Code used for profiling and implementing the performance improvements

- apache/datafusion: https://github.com/apache/datafusion/pull/21182 - up to 49x speedup of LIMIT queries by eliminating unnecessary sorts and pushing limits into file scans, generated with Claude Code

- apache/datafusion: https://github.com/apache/datafusion/pull/21651 - ~4.39x speedup of ClickBench Q6 by resolving MIN/MAX directly from Parquet metadata instead of scanning columns, generated with Claude Code

- pola-rs/polars: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/pull/27958 - ~3.2x speedup of Int8 Series sum, developed with assistance from Claude Fable and Claude Opus 4.8

- numpy/numpy: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/31274 - up to ~1.44x speedup of common small NumPy reductions, with the fast path written by Claude Code and manually refined

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#157

Post by ImaCake »

dd8601fn wrote: post #137
vatsachak wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why are Amazon and Walmarts mobile apps still janky crap that costs them money? Why does Meta still have four redundant, broken sign-up flows before you can give them money to advertise? Wherever these “10000x” engineering gains are… I’m wondering why they’re only for shit nobody sees or touches.

Those websites are janky despite having all the (non AI) solutions available already. They suck for reasons independent of the quality of LLMs. I have not worked inside a megacorp but my understanding is they suck because of what are essentially political roadblocks within the organisation.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#158

Post by sublinear »

margalabargala wrote: post #155
sublinear wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how someone would get "left behind"? Isn't the whole point of LLMs that they use natural language and require less effort? If they're so easy to use, wouldn't the opposite be true? i.e. people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency? Nobody gives a rat's ass if you did something in an hour or took all night. The deadline is still next week because of all the meetings. What's th…

> people who over rely on LLMs become weaker at the core competency What if what people become weaker at, is no longer the core competency? Then people who maintain their skills at what used to be the core competency, at the expense of what is actually the core competency, will be left behind. The rest of your comment, re: nothing taking less than a week because of meetings and software never being the bottleneck, is…

I'd like to see evidence of this reality you're conveniently imagining to sow doubts among the uninitiated.

You're correct that the focus is no longer just writing code after a few years of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that being held accountable for the code means it is one of your core competencies.

You cannot seriously believe anyone is going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by giving away their power to "AI". Why else do you think a dev is in all those meetings? Why do they get paid to "hurry up and wait"? That's not inefficiency. That's the real work.

Those who find this reality unpleasant have always been the ones to switch careers (and then realize all careers are the same). I'm not sure what you're trying to say other than you'd like to muddy waters because you really like AI and are allergic to code and accountability. Do not be so naive.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#159

Post by simonw »

20k wrote: post #87
vatsachak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

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

If you want to see contributions to Linus that used AI you can search for commits with tags that look like this in their commit message:

  Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5.5
  Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4.8
This search on GitHub seems to find about 2,000 of those:

  repo:torvalds/linux assisted-by (claude OR codex)
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux+assisted...

... but if you clone the git repo you can get an exact count of 824 commits (not sure why the search over-counted).

Here's a good candidate for a material performance improvement:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/e1bf79628453e6afac8...

  Single-stream throughput (MB/s):
                        Before    After    Change
  seq-write/dontcache      298      897    +201%
  rand-write/dontcache     131      236     +80%

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#160

Post by satvikpendem »

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

Feature vs full project timeline
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