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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

201–210 of 605 posts

Re: Is it a bubble?

#201

> 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?

Here's the lede they buried:

>The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress.

They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money. They simply need not hold the bag to be successful.

Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it all implodes.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#202

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

Internetspeed is a 3 years old app. So what exactly are you talking about?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#203

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

Looking at both of these I'm struggling to understand why AI exponentially increased the productivity and quality of either of these examples. Especially since I don't see open source code anywhere, I can't get a good gauge of quality either. I've built tools like this on the web in the past. They were never more than a weekends worth of work to begin with. I am looking for exponential increases, with quality to back…

Tools like this in the past? Open source isn't even necessary to prove the point, you want to see exponential increase, closing half an open source projects and year long pending bugs in span of minutes? https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover/commits?author=...

Re: Is it a bubble?

#204

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

Internetspeed is a 3 years old app. So what exactly are you talking about?

This is what you remember https://web.archive.org/web/20231106214450/https://www.inter.... What you see now, I did in an afternoon with AI; it's monumental. No way I could of done that in that time. At all.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#205
post #136

> 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…

Compilers are not AI, and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense. It is highly dishonest to call someone who is not a competent software engineer a "developer" even if their job consists entirely of telling actual software engineers or "coders" what to do.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#206
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain. As automated process output are public domain, and the companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input unencumbered, too. It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.

So you're saying machine code is public domain if it's compiled from C? If not, why would AI generated code be any different?

Derivatives inherit.

Public domain in, public domain out.

Copyright'd in, copyright out. Your compiled code is subject to your copyright.

You need "significant" changes to PD to make it yours again. Because LLMs are predicated on massive public data use, they require the output to PD. Otherwise you'd be violating the copyright of the learning data - hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#207
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments…

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

Use case mapping matters. I use AI tools at work (have for a few years now, first Copilot from GitHub, now I use Gemini and Claude tools primarily). When the use case maps well, it is great. You can typically assume anything with a large corpus of fairly standard problems will map well in a popular language. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, these have huge training datasets from open source alone.

The combination of which, deep training dataset + maps well to how AI "understands" code, it can be a real enabler. I've done it myself. All I've done with some projects is write tests, point Claude at the tests and ask it to write code till those tests pass, then audit said code, make adjustments as required, and ship.

That has worked well and sped up development of straightforward (sometimes I'd argue trivial) situations.

Where it falls down is complex problem sets, major refactors that cross cut multiple interdependent pieces of code, its less robust with less popular languages (we have a particular set of business logic in Rust due to its sensitive nature and need for speed, it does a not great job with that) and a host of other areas I have hit limitations with it.

Granted, I work in a fairly specialized way and deal with alot of business logic / rules rather than boiler plate CRUD, but I have hit walls on things like massive refactors in large codebases (50K is small to me, for reference)

Re: Is it a bubble?

#208
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well If you ever find yourself at the point where you are insulting a guy's passion project in order to prove a point, perhaps have a deep breath, and take a step back from the computer for a moment. And maybe you should look deep inside yourself, because you might have crossed the threshold to being a jerk. Yes, my site has is…

Look, buddy. You propped yourself up as an Experienced Dev doing cool stuff at Profitable Startup and don't understand Advanced Programming, and your entire argument is that you can keep doing the same sort of high quality(FSOV) work you've been doing the past 10 years with AI, just a lot faster. I'm just calling spade a spade. If you didn't want people to comment on your side project given your arguments and the top…

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#209

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

I feel like comments like this don’t consider non webdev software engineering.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#210
post #65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's the value then?

They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have clauses like this: "4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output." h…

What about patents - if you didn't use cleanroom then you have no defence?

Patent trolls will extort you: the trolls will be using AI models to find "infringing" software, and then they'll strike.

¡There's no way AI can be cleanroom!

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