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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#231

Post by projektfu »

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 have heard many software developers confidently tell me "pilots don't really fly the planes anymore" and, well, that's patently false but also the jetliners autopilots do handle much of the busy work during cruise, and sometimes during climb-out and approach. And they can sometimes land themselves, but not efficiently enough for a busy airport.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#232

Post by tom_m »

Yes. It is a bubble. Also a useful tool...but 100% a bubble. There's going to unfortunately be a bunch of folks caught by it.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#233

Post by n8cpdx »

johnfn wrote: post #171
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…

But I really did do around 4 to 5 weeks of work in a single week on my personal site. At this point you just seem to be denying my own reality.

If you read my comments, you’ll see that I did no such thing. I asked if you did 5-10 years of work in the last year (or 5-10 weeks of work in the last week) and didn’t get a response until you accused me of denying your reality.

You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much code written on a side project).

It’s not a personal attack, it is a corrective to the trend of claiming 5,10,100x improvements to developer productivity, which rarely if ever holds up to scrutiny.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#234

Post by keeda »

mjr00 wrote: post #122
dist-epoch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source: me I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput websocket data collector. Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow, storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all implemented with agents. Works perfectly, no bugs.

Since when is a 4000 line of code project "advanced software"? That's about the scope of a sophomore year university CompSci project, something where there's already a broad consensus AI does quite well.

I think you're parsing the original claim incorrectly. "Advanced software teams" does not mean teams who write advanced software, these are software teams that are advanced :-)

Re: Is it a bubble?

#235

Post by XenophileJKO »

jimbokun wrote: post #162
johnfn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like meetings, alignment, etc, etc. But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was abl…

Ah, I was going to say it’s impossible to get 5x increase in productivity, because writing code takes up less than 20% of a developer’s time. But I can understand that kind of improvement on just the coding part. The trick now is deciding what code to write quickly enough to keep Claude and friends busy.

I will say for example now at work.. if I see a broken window I have an AI fix it. This is a recent habit for me, so I can't say it will stick, but I'm fixing issues in many more adjacent code bases then I normally would.

It used to be "hey I found an issue..", now it is like "here is a pr to fix an issue I saw". The net effort to me is only slightly more. I usually have to identify the problem and that is like 90% of fixing it.

Add to the fact that now I can have an AI take a first pass at identifying the problem with probably an 80%+ success rate.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#236

Post by rester324 »

stack_framer wrote: post #58
f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even beli…

I love to write code too. But what usually happens is that I go through running the gauntlet of proving how brilliant code I can write in a job interview, and then later conversely being paid for listening to really dumb conversations of our stakeholders and sitting in project planning, etc meetings just so that finally everybody can harass me to implement something that a million programmer implemented before me a million times, at which point the only metric that matters to either my fellow developers or my managers or the stakeholders is the speed of churning the code out, quality or design be damned. So for this reason in most cases in my work I use LLMs.

How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#237

Post by cal_dent »

rglover wrote: post #39

I've enjoyed Howard Marks writing/thinking in the past, but this is clearly a person who thinks they understand the topic but doesn't have the slightest clue. Someone trying to be relevant/engaged before really thinking on what is fact vs. fiction.

he clearly states he doesn't understand the topic.

But you don't need to understand to explore the ramifications which is what he's done here and it's an insightful & fairly even-handed take on it.

It does feel like AI chat here gets bogged down on "its not that great, its overhyped etc." without trying to actually engage properly with it. Even if it's crap if it eliminates 5-10% of companies labour cost that's a huge deal and the second order effects on economy and society will be profound. And from where i'm standing, doing that is pretty possible without ai even being that good.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#238

Post by cal_dent »

jimlawruk wrote: post #76

If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to today.... > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.

i also wonder about p/e ratio comparisons over time because our world view of what long term economic growth is going forward is less now that it was then. That is always subtly implicit when we think about p/e ratio. So what's to say a 30x p/3 isnt equivalent to a 40x then

Re: Is it a bubble?

#239

Post by waterTanuki »

The amount of people who think because something has a few useful edge cases being incompatible with a bubble is staggeringly high. Dot com was a bubble, and yet we still use the internet widely today. Real-estate was a bubble, and people still need a place to live and work.

Just because YOU find the technology helpful, useful, or even beneficial for some use cases does NOT mean it has been overvalued. This has been the case for every single bubble, including the Dutch Tulip mania.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#240

Post by stego-tech »

f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

I'm right there with you, and it's been my core gripe since ChatGPT burst onto the stage. Believe it or not, my environmental concerns came about a year later, once we had data on how datacenters were being built and their resource consumption rates; I had no idea how big things had very suddenly and violently exploded into, and that alone gave me serious pause about where things are going.

In my heart, I firmly believe in the ability of technology to uplift and improve humanity - and have spent much of my career grappling with the distressing reality that it also enables a handful of wealthy people to have near-total control of society in the process. AI promises a very hostile, very depressing, very polarized world for everyone but those pulling the levers, and I wish more people evaluated technology beyond the mere realm of Computer Science or armchair economics. I want more people to sit down, to understand its present harms, its potential future harms, and the billions of people whose lives it will profoundly and negatively impact under current economic systems.

It's equal parts sobering and depressing once you shelve personal excitement or optimism and approach it objectively. Regardless of its potential as a tool, regardless of the benefit it might bring to you, your work day, your productivity, your output, your ROI, I desperately wish more people would ask one simple question:

Is all of that worth the harm I'm inflicting on others?

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