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Is it a bubble?

oaktreecapital.com

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#221

Post by throwaway2037 »

sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> 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?

I completely agree. This guy is way outside his area of expertise. For those unaware, Howard Marks is a legendary investment manager with a decades-long impressive track record. Additionally, these "insights" letters are also legendary in the money management business. Personally, I would say his wisdom is one notch below Warren Buffett. I am sure he is regularly asked (badgered?) by investors what he thinks about the current state and future of AI (LLMs) and how it will impact his investment portfolio. The audience of this letter is investors (real and potential), as well as other investment managers.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#222

Post by biophysboy »

Daishiman wrote: post #172
artur44 wrote: post #19

A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotc…

> Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them ba…

It depends on the task though, right? I promise I'm not in denial; I use these things all the time. Sometimes it works immediately; sometimes it doesn't. I have no way of predicting when it will or won't.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#223

Post by n8cpdx »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #177
n8cpdx wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because people turn off their critical thinking and make outrageous claims. That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. If you cannot make that claim, you were lying when you said it made you 10x more productive. Or at least needed a big asterisk. If AI makes you 10x more productive in a tiny portion of your job, then it did not…

> That’s why when folks say that AI has made them 10x more productive, I ask if they did 10 years worth of work in the last year. What makes you think one year is the right timeframe? Yet you seem to be so wildly confident in the strength of what you think your question will reveal… in spite of the fact that the guy gave you an example. It wasn’t that he didn’t provide it, it was that you didn’t want to hear it.

It’s a general question I ask of everyone who claims they are 10x more productive. Year/month/day/hour doesn’t matter. Did you do 10 days of work yesterday? 10 weeks of work last week?

It is actually a very forgiving metric over a year because it is measuring only your own productivity relative to your personal trend. That includes vacation time and sick time, so the year smooths over all the variation.

Maybe he did do 5 weeks of work in 1 week, and I’ll accept that (a much more modest claim than the usual 10-100x claimed multiplier).

Re: Is it a bubble?

#225

Post by giancarlostoro »

yellow_lead wrote: post #141
sethammons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

You should periodically ask Claude to review random parts of code to pump your metrics.

Has the net benefit that it points out things that are actually wrong and overlooked.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#226

Post by projektfu »

zahlman wrote: post #169
zparky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

I suspect, rather strongly, that what really specifically wears programmers down is boilerplate . AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it. I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.

Or, for me, yak shaving. I start a project with enthusiasm and then 8 hours later I'm debugging an nginx config file or something rather than working on the core project. AI gets a lot of that out of the way if you let it, and you can at least let it grind on that stuff while you think about other things.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#227

Post by cognivore »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #13

"Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level". Once I hit that line, I stopped reading. This tells me this person didn't do proper research on this matter.

That's because AI allows poor programmers to appear as good programmers, which is actually a good thing as otherwise they'd be writing crap you'd have to code-review, but their understanding of what is good code is poor, so you're back to having to vet it all anyway. At least you can us AI for that. Except you can't, without vetting it.

I literally just today watched my entire team descend into "Release Hell" where an obscure bug in business logic already delivered to thousands of customers broke right as we were about to ship a release. Obscure bug, huge impact on the customer, as they actually ended up charging people more than they should have. The team-members, and yes, not leads, used AI to write that bug and then tried to prompt their way out of the bug. It turned into a giant game of whack-a-mole as other business logic had errors introduced that thankfully got caught by tests. Then it was discovered that they never understood the code, they could only maintain it with prompts.

Let that sink in. They don't understand what they're doing, they just massage the spec into prompts and when it appears to work and pass tests they call it good.

We looked at the prompts. They were insane. They actually just kept adding more specification to the end, but if you read through it all it had contradictory logic, which I would have hoped the AI would have pointed out, but nope. It was actually just easier for me and another senior to rewrite the logic as pseudo-code, cut the size down by literally 3/4, and eventually got it all working as expected.

So that's the future, girls and boys. People putting together code they don't understand with AI, and can only maintain with AI, and then not being able to fix with AI because they cannot prompt accurately enough because English sucks at being precise.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#228

Post by xdc0 »

Daishiman wrote: post #172
artur44 wrote: post #19

A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotc…

> Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. I no longer believe this. A friend of mine just did a stint a startup doing fairly sophisticated finance-related coding and LLMs allowed them to bootstrap a lot of new code, get it up and running in scalable infra with terraform, and onboard new clients extremely quickly and write docs for them ba…

If you are in charge of that tooling, how do you ensure the correctness of the work? Or is it that at this point the responsibility goes one level higher now where implementation details are not important or relevant at all and all it matters is it behaves as described?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#229

Post by throwaway2037 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #221
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> 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?

I completely agree. This guy is way outside his area of expertise. For those unaware, Howard Marks is a legendary investment manager with a decades-long impressive track record. Additionally, these "insights" letters are also legendary in the money management business. Personally, I would say his wisdom is one notch below Warren Buffett. I am sure he is regularly asked (badgered?) by investors what he thinks about th…

Follow-up: This letter feels like a "jump the shark" moment.

Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...

Re: Is it a bubble?

#230

Post by zahlman »

projektfu wrote: post #226
zahlman wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, rather strongly, that what really specifically wears programmers down is boilerplate . AI is addressing that problem extremely well, but by putting up with it rather than actually solving it. I don't want the boilerplate to be necessary in the first place.

Or, for me, yak shaving. I start a project with enthusiasm and then 8 hours later I'm debugging an nginx config file or something rather than working on the core project. AI gets a lot of that out of the way if you let it, and you can at least let it grind on that stuff while you think about other things.

For me, the yak shaving is the part where I get the next project idea...
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