Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by atleastoptimal » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:47 AM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #239

atleastoptimal wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming how i would respond before i even respond. Please allow inquiries to happen naturally without polluting the thread with meritless cynicism.

With all due respect, with a response like "What AI coding tools/models have you been using?" to a complaint that AI tools just don't seem to be effective, what difference does a reply to that even make? If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics. FWIW, my own experiences with AI have ranged from med…

Some people complain about AI but are using the free version of ChatGPT. Others are using the best models without a middleman system but still see faults, and I think it’s valuable to inquire about which domains they see no value in AI from. There are too many people saying “I tried AI and it didn’t work at all” without clarifying what models, what tools, what they asked it to do, etc. Without that context it’s hard to gauge the value of any value judgement on AI.

It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc. Of course its more difficult to provide specifics than just say it was good or bad, but there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.

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

#242

Post by atleastoptimal » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

SrslyJosh wrote: post #211

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…

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.

If you believe AI is overvalued and is a bubble waiting to burst then you are free to short NVDA.

AI stans don’t become AI stans for no reason. They see the many enormous technological leaps and also see where progress is going. The many PhDs currently making millions at labs also have the right idea.

Just look at ChatGPT’s growth alone. No product in history compares, and it’s not an accident.

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

#243

Post by carpo » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC

bad_username wrote: post #238

carpo wrote: post #197

Maybe developers are using it in a less visible way? In the past 6 months I've used AI for a lot of different things. Some highlights: - Built a windows desktop app that scans local folders for videos and automatically transcribes the audio, summarises the content into a structured JSON format based on screenshots and subtitles, and automatically categorises each video. I used it on my PC to scan a couple of TB of vi…

What did you use for transcription? Local whisper via ffmpeg?

Yeah, the app lets you configure which whisper model to use and then downloads it on first load. Whisper blows me away too. Ive only got a 2080 and use the medium model and it's surprisingly good and relatively fast.

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

#244

Post by atleastoptimal » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:54 AM UTC

neffy wrote: post #178

atleastoptimal wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling LLM's "pattern matching text machines" is a catchy thought-terminating cliche, which accounts to calling a human brain a "blob of fats, salts, and chemicals". It technically makes sense, but it is seeing the forest for the trees, and ignores the fact that this mere pattern patching text machine is doing things people said were impossible a few years ago. The simplicity and seeming mundanity of a technology ha…

No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases. And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this materi…

Look into every human’s brain and you’d see the same thing. How many humans can come up with novel, useful patents? How many novel useful patents themselves are just variations of existing tech?

All intelligence is pattern matching, just at different scales. AI is doing the same thing human brains do.

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

#245

Post by Kiro » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:55 AM UTC

daxfohl wrote: post #109

Kiro wrote: post #86

> If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? On my computer. Once I've built something I often realize the problems with the idea and abandon the project, so I'm never shipping it.

So is a flood of unshippable code now an indicator of increased productivity?

That's what the author argues, yes. It would work fine as shovelware but I have no interest in shipping that.

In fact, being able to throw it out like this is a big time saver in itself. I've always built a lot of projects but when you've spent weeks or months on something you get invested in it, so you ship it even though you no longer believe in it. Now when it only takes a couple of days to build something you don't have the same emotional attachment to it.

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

#246

Post by nicklaf » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:09 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #66

com2kid wrote: post #9

Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. LLMs do not increase general developer productivity by 10x across the board for general purpose tasks selected at random. 2. LLMs dramatically increases productivity for a limited subset of tasks 3. LLMs can be automated to do busy work and although they may take longer in terms of clock time than a human, the work is effectively done in the background. LLMs can get me…

> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again. I wax and wane on this one. I've had the same feelings, but too often I've peaked behind the curtain, read the docs and got fam…

Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades.

For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use.

The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.

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

#247

Post by musbemus » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:10 AM UTC

While I agree generally with the premise that the silver bullet that AI coding has been marketed to be has underdelivered (even if it doesn't feel that way), I gotta point out that the experiment and its results don't do a good job of capturing that. One of the biggest parts of using these AI tools is knowing which tasks they're most suitable for (and sometimes it's using them in only certain subtasks of a task). As mentioned, some tasks they absolutely excel at. Flipping a coin and deciding to use it or not is crude and unrealistic. Hard to come up with a reliable method though, I also think METR has it's glaring issues.

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

#248

Post by culopatin » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

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…

Today a friend of mine connected me with his uncle who wanted to develop an MVP for his company. He claimed he didn’t want to distract his engineers on this project, but that “it shouldn’t take you more than 5hs to do this with vibe coding”. I promptly declined, if it takes 5hs why are you reaching out to me? It would take more than 5hs just to bring me into the loop of what you want vs your own engineers. If vibe coding is that good might as well DIY while you’re showering!

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

#249

Post by culopatin » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:17 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #66

com2kid wrote: post #9

Multiple things can be true at the same time: 1. LLMs do not increase general developer productivity by 10x across the board for general purpose tasks selected at random. 2. LLMs dramatically increases productivity for a limited subset of tasks 3. LLMs can be automated to do busy work and although they may take longer in terms of clock time than a human, the work is effectively done in the background. LLMs can get me…

> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again. I wax and wane on this one. I've had the same feelings, but too often I've peaked behind the curtain, read the docs and got fam…

Before accepting an answer I’ve started asking “is there a simpler more straight forward way of achieving that?” Ans most of the time it changes the whole thing it just wrote lol

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

#250

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

dreadnip wrote: post #123

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…

I don’t agree. HN is full of technical people, and technical people see LLMs for what they truly are: pattern matching text machines. We just don’t buy into the AGI hype because we’ve seen nothing to support it. I’m not concerned for my job, in fact I’d be very happy if real AGI would be achieved. It would probably be the crowning tech achievement of the human race so far. Not only would I not have to work anymore, t…

>This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit.

LLMs are not anything like Web3, not "exactly like". Web3 is in no way whatsoever "something moderately useful", and if you ever thought it was, you were fooled by the same grifters when they were yapping about Web3, who have now switched to yapping about LLMs.

The fact that those exact same grifters who fooled you about Web3 have moved onto AI has nothing to do with how useful what they're yapping about actually is. Do you actually think those same people wouldn't be yapping about AI if there was something to it? Yappers gonna yap.

But Web3 is 100% useless bullshit, and AI isn't: they're not "exactly alike".

Please don't make false equivalences between them like claiming they're "exactly like" each other, or parrot the grifters by calling Web3 "moderately useful".