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Two kinds of AI users are emerging

martinalderson.com

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Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#191

Post by fauigerzigerk »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #157
jjav wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't this true of any greenfield project? That is a good point and true to some extent. But IME with AI, both the initial speedup and the eventual slowdown are accelerated vs. a human. I've been thinking that one reason is that while AI coding generates code far faster (on a greenfield project I estimate about 50x), it also generates tech-debt at a hyperastonishing rate. It used to be that tech debt started to cat…

In your experience, can you take the tech debt riddled code, and ask claude to come up with an entirely new version that fixes the tech debt/design issues you've identified? Presumably there's a set of tests that you'd keep the same, but you could leverage the power of ai in greenfield scenarios to just do a rewrite (while letting it see the old code). I dont know how well this would work, i havn't got to the heavy t…

Perhaps it depends on the nature of the tech-debt. A lot of the software we create has consequences beyond a paticular codebase.

Published APIs cannot be changed without causing friction on the client's end, which may not be under our control. Even if the API is properly versioned, users will be unhappy if they are asked to adopt a completely changed version of the API on a regular basis.

Data that was created according to a previous version of the data model continues to exist in various places and may not be easy to migrate.

User interfaces cannot be radically changed too frequently without confusing the hell out of human users.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#192

Post by mark_l_watson »

danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

A friendly counterpoint: my test of new models and agentic frameworks is to copy one of my half a zillion old open source git repos for some usually very old project or experiment - I then see how effective the new infra is for refactoring and cleaning up my ancient code. After testing I usually update the old projects and I get the same warm fuzzy feeling as I do from spring cleaning my home.

I also like to generate greenfield codebases from scratch.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#193

Post by chrisjj »

Antibabelic wrote: post #117
nnevatie wrote: post #115

I'd be very interested in seeing some statistics on what could be considered confidential material pasted on ChatGPT's chat interface. I think the results would be pretty shocking and I think mostly because the integrations to source services are abject messes.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/gen_ai_shadow_it_secr... "With 45 percent of enterprise employees now using generative AI tools, 77 percent of these AI users have been copying and pasting data into their chatbot queries, the LayerX study says. A bit more than a fifth (22 percent) of these copy and paste operations include PII/PCI."

No worse than MS Office on web, then?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#194

Post by srinath693 »

The real divide isn't technical vs. non-technical: it's people with new problems vs. people maintaining old solutions. AI is incredible at generating first drafts of anything. It's terrible at understanding why the existing thing is the way it is.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#195

Post by charcircuit »

aljaz823 wrote: post #189
3D30497420 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I reread the original post, I'm not actually not sure which group I fall into. I think there's a bunch of overlap depending on perspective/how you read it: > Group 1: intern/boring task executor Yup, that makes sense I'm in group 1. > Group 2: "outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are interested only in results" Also me (in this case), as I'm outsourcing…

I'd say you're still in the group 1. Your main goal is not the app but learning German. Therefore creating the app using AI is only a means to an end, a tool, and spending time coding it yourself is not important in this context.

The AI usage was not about learning German, but for creating an app. This would be group 2. He may use the tool he made to learn German, but using that tool isn't using AI

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#196

Post by chrisjj »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #67

Thought this was going to be more about programmers, but it was actually about non technical users and Microsoft’s product development failure. One tidbit I’d disagree with is that only those using the bleeding edge AI tools are reaping the benefits. There seem to be a lot of highly specialized tools and a lot of specific configurations (and mystical incantations) to get them to work, and those are constantly changin…

> all the hype of the bleeding edge is around abstracting away the entire coding process until you don’t even understand what code is being generated?

The less you understood about code to start with, the quicker you achieve this goal... and the less prepared you are for the consequences.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#197

Post by maffyoo »

this seems reasonable but isn't the conclusion a statement what we already know. These tools are really powerful, but with the ability to cause significant pain, need organisations to adapt, so that they can make best use of them but this is fraught with security problems. AI looks a lot like a technology problem but ultimately, to most small businesses, it's a procurement and change management problem.

Also (I appreciate the authors message here but..)

"Excel on the finance side is remarkably limiting when you start getting used to the power of a full programming ecosystem like Python"

With the addition of lambdas Excel formulae are Turing complete. no more need for VBA in a (mostly) functional environment.

Also on this, Claude for Excel needs a lot of work (as does any tool working with financial models) if you have ever used them in anger I dont think you'll be relying on them with your non-technical finance manager for a while...

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#198

Post by charcircuit »

stego-tech wrote: post #80
danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

Enterprise IT dinosaur here, seconding this perspective and the author’s. When I needed to bash out a quick Hashicorp Packer buildfile without prior experience beyond a bit of Vault and Terraform, local AI was a godsend at getting me 80% of the way there in seconds. I could read it, edit it, test it, and move much faster than Packer’s own thin “getting started” guide offered. The net result was zero prior knowledge t…

I've had code look having claude code use ssh with root to deploy code, change configurations, and debug bad configs / selinux policy / etc. Debugging servers is not that different than debugging code. You just need to give it a way to test.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#199

Post by chrisjj »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #99

> sandboxing agents is difficult I use this amazingly niche and hipster approach of giving the agent its own account, which through inconceivably highly complex arcane tweaking and configurations can lock down what they can and cant do. --- Can somebody for the love of god tell me why articles keep bringing up why this is so difficult?

Why? Because the purported benefit is to make everything easier and faster. Not safe.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#200

Post by daliusd »

danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

This is where engineering practices help. Based on 1.5 years data from my team I can say that I see about 30% performance increase on mature system (about 9 years old code base), maybe more. The interesting stuff - LLMs is leverage, the better engineer you are the more you benefit from LLM.
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