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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

#171

Post by abathologist »

m-hodges wrote: post #144

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 arg…

My theory is that the digital revolution has mostly cancelled out potential productivity gains with its introduction of productivity sinks: the technology has tended to encourage less rigorous thinking, more distraction, more complexity; and even if you can do task T X times faster, most people as spending X * Y more time being distracted, overwhelmed, or just reflective button pushers.

The ways AI is being used now will make this a lot worse on every front.

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

#172

Post by pabs3 »

nemomarx wrote: post #106
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…

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?

Start a worker-owned tech co-op? Not much point though, since people are going to pay AI to write their code instead, and so the market for consultants will dry up. Probably lots of market space for fixing up broken AI code though :)

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

#174

Post by bwfan123 »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #20

Great angle to look at the releases of new software. I, too, thought we'd see a huge increase by now. An alternative theory is that writing code was never the bottleneck of releasing software. The exploration of what it is you're building and getting it on a platform takes time and effort. On the other hand, yeah, it's really easy to 'hold it wrong' with AI tools. Sometimes I have a great day and think I've figured i…

> writing code was never the bottleneck

This is an insightful observation.

When working on anything, I am asked: what is the smallest "hard" problem that this is solving ? ie, in software, value is added by solving "hard" problems - not by solving easy problems. Another way to put it is: hard problems are those that are not "templated" ie, solved elsewhere and only need to be copied.

LLMs are allowing the easy problems to be solved faster. But the real bottleneck is in solving the hard problems - and hard problems could be "hard" due to technical reasons, or business reasons or customer-adoption reasons. Hard problems are where value lies particularly when everyone has access to this tool, and everyone can equally well create or copy something using it.

In my experience, LLMs have not yet made a dent in solving the hard problems because, they dont really have a theory of how something really works. On the other hand, they have really helped boost productivity for tasks that are templated .

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

#175

Post by atleastoptimal »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #170
atleastoptimal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product. " Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.

Those are fundamentally different. If people on this site really can't tell the difference then it makes sense why people on HN assume AI is a bubble.

People paid a lot for beanie babies and various speculative securities on the assumption that they could be sold for more in the future. They were assets people aimed to resell at a profit. They had no value by themselves.

The source of revenue for AI companies has inherent value but is not a resell-able asset. You can't resell API calls you buy from an AI company at some indefinite later date. There is no "market" for reselling anything you purchase from a company that offers use of a web app and API calls.

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

#176

Post by rootusrootus »

some-guy wrote: post #15

These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation. This is my…

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate

That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? When it doesn't happen, he'll pin the blame on you, but everyone else above will pin the blame on him. He's the one who will get fired.

Laying off unnecessary developers is the answer if LLMs turn out to make us all so much more productive (assuming we don't just increase the amount of software written instead). But that happens after successful implementation of LLMs into the development process, not in advance.

Starting to think I should do the inadvisable and move my investments far far away from the S&P 500 and into something that will survive the hype crash that can't be too far off now.

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

#177

Post by toomuchtodo »

rootusrootus wrote: post #176
some-guy wrote: post #15

These claims wouldn't matter if the topic weren't so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they're missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation. This is my…

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? When it doesn't happen, he'll pin the blame on you, but everyone else above will pin the blame on him . He's the one who will get fired. Laying off unnecessary developers is the answer if LLMs turn out to make us all so muc…

VXUS

Not investing advice; the bottom 490 companies in the S&P500 are nominally flat since 2022 and down against inflation, GPUs and AI hype are holding everything together at the moment.

> In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs. If NVIDIA's growth story stumbles, it will reverberate through the rest of the Magnificent 7, making them rely on their own AI trade stories.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

> Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-...

> Two Nvidia customers made up 39% of Nvidia’s revenue in its July quarter, the company revealed in a financial filing on Wednesday, raising concerns about the concentration of the chipmaker’s clientele.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/nvidias-top-two-mystery-cust...

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

#178

Post by neffy »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #150
dreadnip wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #175
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product. " Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.

Those are fundamentally different. If people on this site really can't tell the difference then it makes sense why people on HN assume AI is a bubble. People paid a lot for beanie babies and various speculative securities on the assumption that they could be sold for more in the future. They were assets people aimed to resell at a profit. They had no value by themselves. The source of revenue for AI companies has inh…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #105
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…

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".

Bruce Tognazzini wrote that people always claim keyboard is faster than mouse but when researchers actually measured that, it turned out mouse was faster. Bruce explained that mousing is a low-cognition activity compared to keying so subjective perceptions are skewed.
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