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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

#211

Post by SrslyJosh »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #98
bsder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

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…

I know it's probably childish and irrational and a symptom of my inferior intellect, but I have to ask, where's the proof that any of this shit works as well as AI stans claim it does?

Please, enlighten me with your gigantic hyper-rational brain.

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

#212

Post by safety1st »

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?

[flagged]

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

#213

Post by mandeepj »

vkou wrote: post #159
mandeepj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you? Maybe keep your eyes open? :-)

As I thought. And for the record - my eyes are open. I'm aware I'm being bullshitted. I don't trust, I verify . But I also don't have a magical lever that I can pull to make it stop hallucinating. ... and every time I ask if one exists, I get either crickets, or a response that doesn't answer the question.

Sorry! Didn't mean to BS you. I've not come across a scenario where it hallucinated me with a non-existent library. Can you share what you were trying to do when that happened?

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

#214

Post by typewithrhythm »

wrs wrote: post #100
heavyset_go wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the rate of profit drops, value needs to be squeezed out of somewhere and that will come from the hiring/firing and compensation of labor, hence a strong bias towards that outcome. 99% of the draw of AI is cutting labor costs, and hiring goes against that. That said, I don't believe AI productivity claims, just pointing out a factor that could theoretically contribute to your hypothetical.

Maybe if you have a business where the need for software is a constant, so it’s great to get it for 90% off. (It’s not clear what business that is in 2025, maybe a small plumbing contractor?) But if your business is making software it’s hard to argue you only need a constant amount of software. I’ve certainly never worked at a software company where the to-do list was constant or shrinking!

If you expect input cost for something that's mostly labour to go dramatically down, then you also fear the value of your product crashing.

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

#215

Post by bitwize »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #89
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 because we are "an AI-first company". If we can delegate incident response to automated LLMs too, sure, why not. Let the CEO have his way and pay the reputational price. When it doesn't work, we can revert our git repos to the day LLMs didn't write all the code. I'm only being 90% facetious.

The CEO doesn't care. He'll fail upwards. Be able to spin it as increasing shareholder value by cutting costs and bounce before the chickens come home to roost.

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

#216

Post by manwe150 »

vkou wrote: post #159
mandeepj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you? Maybe keep your eyes open? :-)

As I thought. And for the record - my eyes are open. I'm aware I'm being bullshitted. I don't trust, I verify . But I also don't have a magical lever that I can pull to make it stop hallucinating. ... and every time I ask if one exists, I get either crickets, or a response that doesn't answer the question.

Ask it to write tests, then let it run until the tests pass (preferably in a sandbox, far from your git credentials). It is quite good at developing hypotheses and tests for them, if that is what you explicitly ask for. It doesn’t have (much) ego, so it doesn’t care if it is proven wrong and will accept any outcome fairly if it is testable. Although sometimes it comes to the wrong conclusion and doubles down that the fact should be true so it prepares to write and publish a library to make it true

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

#217

Post by mildweed »

searls wrote: post #73

The answer is that we're making it right now. AI didn't speed me up at all until agents got good enough, which was April/May of this year. Just today I built a shovelware CLI that exports iMessage archives into a standalone website export. Would have taken me weeks. I'll probably have it out as a homebrew formula in a day or two. I'm working on an iOS app as well that's MUCH further along than it would be if I hand-r…

Interested in this Homebrew. Share when ready?

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

#218

Post by cmckn »

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…

> He's the one who will get fired.

I wouldn’t count on it.

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

#219

Post by adithyassekhar »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #208
herpdyderp wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use GitHub Copilot from work in agent mode with GPT5 and it’s great! I don’t use the suggestions, fix, or explain features, I agree they’re almost always not helpful.

Is that a separate product you have to pay for? I've never seen an agent feature in the VS code plugin.

It's there next to the model selector in chat.

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

#220

Post by medvezhenok »

sumeno wrote: post #120
searls wrote: post #73

The answer is that we're making it right now. AI didn't speed me up at all until agents got good enough, which was April/May of this year. Just today I built a shovelware CLI that exports iMessage archives into a standalone website export. Would have taken me weeks. I'll probably have it out as a homebrew formula in a day or two. I'm working on an iOS app as well that's MUCH further along than it would be if I hand-r…

It's amazing how whenever criticisms pop up the responses for the last 3 years have been "well you aren't using , it's finally good!"

Indeed. The LLMs have been pretty useful for greenfield projects & one off scripts for a while, but GPT-5 was the first time I've found a model to be quite helpful on large-scale legacy code (>1M LOC).
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