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Codegen is not productivity

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Re: Codegen is not productivity

#21

Post by jwilliams »

> Humans and LLMs both share a fundamental limitation. Humans have a working memory, and LLMs have a context limit.

But there’s a more important difference: I can’t spin up 20 decent human programmers from my terminal.

The argument that "code was never the bottleneck" is genuinely appealing, but it hasn’t matched my experience at all. I’m getting through dramatically more work now. This is true for my colleagues too.

My non-technical niece recently built a pretty solid niche app with AI tools. That would have been inconceivable a few years ago.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#22

Post by Frieren »

some_random wrote: post #3

You can write cope like this all you want but it doesn't change the fact I can ship a feature in few days that previously would have taken me a few weeks.

> I can

You can because, I guess, your project may have a small scope, few people working on it, no dependencies etc.

I cannot, because each line that I change has an effect in millions of other lines and hundreds of other people, and millions of users.

Different situation, different needs.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#23

Post by avabuildsdata »

honestly the thing that trips me up is when codegen makes me feel productive but I haven't actually validated anything. like I'll have claude write a whole data pipeline in 20 minutes and then spend 2 hours debugging edge cases it didn't think about because it doesn't know our data

the speed is real but it mostly just moves where I spend my time. less typing, more reading and testing. which is... fine? but it's not the 10x thing people keep claiming

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#24

Post by Sparkle-san »

nyrulez wrote: post #2

Bold claims that writing code was never the bottleneck. It may not be the only bottleneck but we conveniently move goal posts now that there is a more convenient mechanism and our profession is under threat.

Writing good code might be a bottleneck and the same can't be said about code in general.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#25

Post by hibikir »

emp17344 wrote: post #4

The collaboration aspect is what many AI enthusiasts miss. As humans, our success is dependent on our ability to collaborate with others. You may believe that AI could replace many individual software engineers, but if it does so at the expense of harming collaboration, it’s a massive loss. AI tools are simply not good at collaborating. When you add many humans to a project, the result becomes greater than the sum of…

I look at it backwards: A few humans improves a project. But once you get to sufficient sizes, principal-agent problems dominate. What is good for a division and what is good for the company disagree. What is good for a developer that needs a big project for their promotion package is not what the company needs. A company with a headcount of 700 is more limber and better aligned than when it's 3,000 or 30,000. It's amazing how little alignment there ever is when you get to the 300k range.

AI, if anything, is amazing at collaborating. It's not perfectly aligned, but you sure can get it to tell you when your idea is unsound, all while having lessened principal-agent issues. Anything we can do to minimize the number of people that need to align towards a goal, the more effectively we can build, precisely due to the difficulties of marshalling large numbers of people. If a team of 4 can do the same as a team of 10, you should always pick the team of 4, even if they are more expensive put together than the 10.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#27

Post by nubg »

For me it's simple:

1. Assume you're to work on product/feature X.

2. If God were to descend and give you a very good, reality-tested spec:

3. Would you be done faster? Of course, because as every AI doomer says, writing code was never the bottleneck!!1!

4. So the only bottleneck is getting to the spec.

5. Guess what AI can help you with as well, because you can iterate out multiple versions with little mental effort and no emotional sunk cost investment?

ergo coding is a solved problem

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#28

Post by demorro »

jwilliams wrote: post #21

> Humans and LLMs both share a fundamental limitation. Humans have a working memory, and LLMs have a context limit. But there’s a more important difference: I can’t spin up 20 decent human programmers from my terminal. The argument that "code was never the bottleneck" is genuinely appealing, but it hasn’t matched my experience at all. I’m getting through dramatically more work now. This is true for my colleagues too.…

Would you entertain the idea that "work was never the bottleneck", or even "building products was never the bottleneck"?

We need to address Jevons' Paradox somehow.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#29

Post by nubg »

avabuildsdata wrote: post #23

honestly the thing that trips me up is when codegen makes me feel productive but I haven't actually validated anything. like I'll have claude write a whole data pipeline in 20 minutes and then spend 2 hours debugging edge cases it didn't think about because it doesn't know our data the speed is real but it mostly just moves where I spend my time. less typing, more reading and testing. which is... fine? but it's not t…

Would getting to the same edge-case-free outcome have taken you less than 2h20min if you didn't have AI?

I think it would typically have taken you longer.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#30

Post by orphea »

Frieren wrote: post #22
some_random wrote: post #3

You can write cope like this all you want but it doesn't change the fact I can ship a feature in few days that previously would have taken me a few weeks.

> I can You can because, I guess, your project may have a small scope, few people working on it, no dependencies etc. I cannot, because each line that I change has an effect in millions of other lines and hundreds of other people, and millions of users. Different situation, different needs.

Wise words. Exactly what I would except from a millenium-old elf :P
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