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Is it all just vapourware?

kirahowe.com

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#161

Post by satvikpendem »

20k wrote: post #95
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.

Its always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains with technical debt. This is why the bar I'm interested in is long term projects, which have proven to have long term success, instead of a small disposable project where the code quality doesn't matter

Difference is whether it's a false dichotomy now, because models like Fable can write better code than most devs I know.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#162

Post by kmclean »

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 strongly suspect that what we're seeing is that much of the tech code-writing economy had already become completely performative prior to AI turning up. It no longer matters in the current age if your code is good, or works, because your job is to give the illusion of product development while the stock market price gets pumped, until you all cash out your share value, get bought, or hop jobs in 2 years.

I think this is probably the answer. Working as a professional software engineer actually has very little to do with writing good code and maybe never has. The job is to “ship products”, and as long as you keep up a sufficiently convincing illusion of progress toward that end the bills get paid and nobody really cares about the impact on end users.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#163

Post by margalabargala »

sublinear wrote: post #158
margalabargala wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> Why else do you think a dev is in all those meetings

Piss-poor management by scleratic and top-heavy organizations, mainly.

You're trying to start a fight by casually accusing me of stances I didn't take, mixed in with insults. There are healthier ways to deal with your insecurities.

Nothing I said is incompatible with devs being responsible for what they produce. Though you seem to be saying that someone should be fired because their code managed to hit a nondeterministic compiler bug? Why didn't they double check the assembly? They should take accountability.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#164

Post by burnto »

No, but a lot is.

You see a version of this in every tech boom cycle, but this one is way more reflexive.

Mature technical software projects are slow moving because they have real users building other real software and businesses with them. Their engineering involves navigating the ecosystem and dep and compatibility constraints.

Any project moving super fast pumping out PRs either isn’t burdened/blessed with real usage OR doesn’t care about (reap real value from) the users it has.

Related theory is that the LLM “labs” are actually not particularly incentivized to prioritize stable API surfaces. They want machine interfaces to constantly rapidly change so that we must depend on model based natural language surfaces to navigate the complexity.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#165

Post by RealWed5 »

Kira is probably too young (good for her! I am not cynical here) to remember how the software development worked when PHP just came out. We are at that point of time now, again.

Next stop will be Perl: write only language.

And then we will hit the "Java EE" wall. Again.

And our LinkedIn will get red hot from recruiters looking for "experienced crisis devlopers".

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#166

Post by satvikpendem »

y1n0 wrote: post #117
satvikpendem wrote: post #59

[flagged]

I don't think you really deserved downvotes. Some people are more geared toward evangelizing technology (or evangelizing anything really), and some are not. I'm pretty much in the 'not' camp. I'll share my experiences and how I do things, but I'm not about to engage in arguments about it. If you don't want to use it, then don't. What I do I care?

Exactly. So I find the sort of blog posts as TFA here quite strange, like who are they arguing against? I just follow ones that talk about how they use the tools rather than meta debates on their usage.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#167

Post by mihaelm »

lordnacho wrote: post #34

I don't know how you can claim it's all vapour ware. Two years ago, I couldn't just roughly describe my backlog and then have the code fixed. I had to type it out myself, run it, look at logs, fix toolchain issues, and so on. It was tedious. Or I could get a junior to do it. Now can get these things done quite fast, without concentrating nearly as hard. Clearly, it isn't vapour. It delivers something. That something…

On your last point, I think it has a lot to do with how it's introduced in organizations. If everyone just goes hog wild with it, enamored with their newfound productivity, not only will the little gains be lost, I'd argue all the generated noise will be a net negative. And people will hate that.

That's the result of AI adoption in a company being people just getting a subscription and doing their own thing, instead of systematically introducing and finding a common ground; a trivial example of that would be open source projects increasingly adopting LLM policies to get everyone on the same page.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#168

Post by vatsachak »

simonw wrote: post #156
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

That's a fair use case for them though. LLMs are superhuman at short term performance engineering/debugging/testing. But even that comes with the caveat that these commits come from talented coders using LLMs as a grad student. I think that OP is against the claim that "agent in a loop beats a talented human at long term coding tasks".

Because if it was true then open source projects such as GIMP could basically be as feature heavy as Photoshop overnight.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#169

Post by potsandpans »

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…

You have to consider that there is a chilling effect in the open source space because llm use has now become an ideological battle, and people have lost their collective minds over it.

Bun did a nearly 100% hands off keyboard rewrite. And people largely ridiculed the effort with mud slinging and goal post moving.

There are plenty of measurable examples of the productivity boost when there is a well defined oracle, such as rewrites and (kind of)formally verified specifications.

I've got an agent harness that I built that decompiles games. Don't want to dox myself on this account, so this is all I'll say about it.

I may have been able to decompile 1 game a year into readable source. Now I can offload nearly all of that process to an Nvidia 5090 and the extremely cheap deepseek v4 flash.

With dedicated focus and a lot of personal time, or employer time, I may have been able to reconstruct a good amount of react linting rules to biome. But instead, by focusing on a harness that can prove parity, I can get all of the rules ported while I sleep or solve other institutional problems.

Once you can prove the outcome, however hard or soft you need based on the domain, the output gains are literally undeniable.

Imo the vaporware is all of these "one-shot" projects that people love to show off. Once the market corrects and the hypecycle dies down theres going to be a lot of interesting engineering in this space. Right now there's a bit of a Cambrian explosion of ideas, and for better or worst that space fills up with the over the enthusiastic and chareltons.

Fragmented thoughts I'm typing while walking, the point is murky

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#170

Post by vinyl7 »

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…

LLMs work well for boring stuff that other people have already done a hundred times. Where the LLMs fail is solving difficult problems that aren't explored as well. The people seeing the 10x speed up are likely just doing CRUD apps or other software that have already been well documented by Stack Overflow or cloned a million times on Github. In my own use, it completely breaks down when for solving actually difficult things.
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