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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#161

Post by halfcat »

its_ethan wrote: post #145
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?

Is it not sort of implied by the stats later: "Revenues from Claude Code, a program for coding that Anthropic introduced earlier this year, already are said to be running at an annual rate of $1 billion. Revenues for the other leader, Cursor, were $1 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and they, too, are expected to reach $1 billion this year." Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to gen…

> Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?

Yes. And all code is tech debt. Now generated faster than ever.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#162

Post by jimbokun »

johnfn wrote: post #86
n8cpdx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do 5-10 years of work in the year after you adopted AI? If you started after AI came in to existence 3 years ago (/s) you should have achieved 30 years of work output - a whole career of work.

I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like meetings, alignment, etc, etc. But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was abl…

Ah, I was going to say it’s impossible to get 5x increase in productivity, because writing code takes up less than 20% of a developer’s time. But I can understand that kind of improvement on just the coding part.

The trick now is deciding what code to write quickly enough to keep Claude and friends busy.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#163

Post by [deleted] »

zahlman wrote: post #154
9rx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true for me. I type in what I want and then the AI system (compiler) generates the code. Doesn't everyone work that way?

Describing a compiler as "AI" is certainly a take.

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#164

Post by Esophagus4 »

lizknope wrote: post #46
RyanOD wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio. Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.

I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20. Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over…

I heard of stories like that!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50476...

That lesson is part of why I dump my company's shares the first chance I get.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#165

Post by jimbokun »

johnfn wrote: post #137
dingnuts wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Carmack was paid 100x more than the average engineer once equity from the acquisition of his company is taken into account.

Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#166

Post by Esophagus4 »

rvz wrote: post #97
rvz wrote: post #4

TLDR: Yes.

Sorry to pop your bubble... ...it is a bubble and we all know it. (I know you have RSUs / shares / golden handcuffs waiting to be vested in the next 1 - 4 years which is why you want the bubble to continue to get bigger.) But one certainty is the crash will be spectacular.

I presume, given your confidence in a crash, you have a massive short? Hedged? Something clever to capture the downside you're so confident will come?

I would love to see your portfolio, if you wouldn't mind showing the class. Let us see what your allocation reveals about what you really think...

Re: Is it a bubble?

#167

Post by n8cpdx »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #155
johnfn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like meetings, alignment, etc, etc. But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was abl…

I'm not sure why, but it seems like your comment really brought out the ire in a few commenters here to discredit your experience. Is it ego? Defensiveness? AI anxiety? A need to be the HN contrarian against a highly visible technology innovation? I don't think I understand... I haven't seen the opposite view (AI wastes a ton of time) get hammered like that. At the very least, it certainly makes for an acidic comment…

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims.

That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk.

If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not make you 10x more productive.

Meanwhile, the people claiming 10x productivity are taken at face value by people who don’t know any better, and we end up in an insane hype cycle that has obvious externalities. Things like management telling people that they must use AI or else. Things like developer tooling making zero progress on anything that isn’t an AI feature for the last two years. Things like RAM becoming unaffordable because Silicon Valley thinks they are a step away from inventing god. And I haven’t scratched the surface.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#168

Post by IceDane »

9rx wrote: post #136
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…

I'm wondering: do you genuinely not understand how compilers work at all or is there some deeper point to your AI/compiler comparison that I'm just not getting?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#169

Post by zahlman »

zparky wrote: post #70
stack_framer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even beli…

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

I suspect, rather strongly, that what really specifically wears programmers down is boilerplate.

AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it.

I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#170

Post by 9rx »

IceDane wrote: post #168
9rx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm wondering: do you genuinely not understand how compilers work at all or is there some deeper point to your AI/compiler comparison that I'm just not getting?

My understanding is that compilers work just like originally described. I type out what I want. I feed that into a compiler. It takes that input of what I want and generates code.

Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?

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