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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#291

Post by ipdashc »

johnfn wrote: post #32
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 only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, s…

> I'm particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code faster is an extremely contentious statement.

This hits the nail on the head, IMO. I haven't seen any of the replies address this yet, unless I missed one.

I don't even like AI per se, but many of the replies to this comment (and to this sentiment in general) are ridiculous. Ignoring the ones that are just insulting your work even though you admitted off the bat you're not an "advanced" programmer... There are obviously flaws with AI coding (maintainability, subtle bugs, skill atrophy, electricity usage, etc). But why do we all spring immediately to this gaslighting-esque "no, your personal experience is actually wrong, you imagined it all?" Come on guys, we should be better than that.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#292

Post by simianwords »

9rx wrote: post #272
simianwords wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you prove that software development is a bubble? Stock prices are at all time high and continuously growing.

> How do you prove that software development is a bubble? By looking at the software development market. How else would you do it? Salaries rose sharply from 2020-2023, but then plateaued and are now starting to decline. Slowly, however. It did not crash. It ticks the boxes: Rapid price appreciation, speculation, a disconnect from fundamentals, widespread media attention, and an eventual correction. > Stock prices ar…

1. the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not

2. definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#293

Post by keeda »

jimbokun wrote: post #282
keeda wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate reality of engineering is that we don't get paid proportional to the value we create, even the superstars. That's how tech companies make so much money, after all. If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people. For some data points, check out levels.fyi and com…

The whole premise of YCombinator is that it’s easier to teach good engineers business than to teach good business people engineering skills. And thus help engineers get paid more in line with their “value”. Albeit with much higher variance.

I would agree with that premise, but at that point they are not engineers, they are founders! I guess in the end, to capture their full value engineers must escape the bonds of regular employment.

Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.

I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#294

Post by 9rx »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #285
9rx wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compilers are not AI They are if you define them as such. But there is already a silly semantic thread going on if that's what you are looking for. > and code in high-level languages is still code in the proper sense. Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code). > 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…

>They are if you define them as such. If a compiler counts as AI then so does literally every other program out there (at least the ones with well-defined inputs and outputs). >Sure. As is natural language (e.g. criminal code). Natural language is too ambiguous and self-referential to count as a programming language, per se. While a subset of natural language can obviously be used to describe programs, we distinguish…

> If a compiler counts as AI then so does literally every other program out there (at least the ones with well-defined inputs and outputs).

You seem to be missing some context. We were talking about a system that takes a typed description of what you want as input and outputs code. There is plenty of software, even with well-defined inputs and outputs, which do not do that.

But there is a particular type of software that does exactly that. We call it a compiler in my circles. Maybe you do not in your circles, but it doesn't really matter as it was I who wrote "compiler". It was written to express my intent. Your (mis)interpretation does nothing to change my intent and is, frankly, irrelevant.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#295

Post by lovich »

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.

why periodically? Just set it up in an agentic workflow and have it work until your token limit is hit.

If companies want to value something as dumb as LoC then they get what they incentivized

Re: Is it a bubble?

#296

Post by lovich »

Windchaser wrote: post #158
its_ethan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not sort of implied by the stats later: "Revenues from Claude Code, a program for coding that Anthropic introduced earlier this year, already are said to be running at an annual rate of $1 billion. Revenues for the other leader, Cursor, were $1 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and they, too, are expected to reach $1 billion this year." Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to gen…

A back-of-the-napkin estimate of software developer salaries: There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative. This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion. So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it…

You are ignoring costs

The AI companies are currently lighting dollars on fire if you pay them a few pennies to do so.

The AI models are actually accomplishing something, but the unit economics aren't there to support it being profitable

Re: Is it a bubble?

#297

Post by returnInfinity »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #185
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…

I think your experience matches well with mine. There are certain workloads and use cases where these tools really do well and legitimately save time; these tend to be more concise tasks and well defined with good context from which to draw from. The wrong tasking and the results can be pretty bad and a time sink. I think the difficulty is exercising the judgement to know where that productive boundary sits. That's m…

My thoughts as well, good at somethings and terrible for somethings and you will lose time.

Somethings are best written by yourself.

And this is with the mighty claude opus 4.5

Re: Is it a bubble?

#298

Post by irishcoffee »

johnfn wrote: post #267
n8cpdx wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cod…

What you are seeing is the difference between what I personally feel and what I could objectively prove to an AI skeptic. If I have to "prove" my productivity in a court of law - that is to say, you - I'll down-modulate it to focus on the bits that are most objective, because I understand you will be skeptical. For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documen…

> For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time.

I think this is where the lede is buried. Yes, it takes time up front. But then you learn(ed) it and can apply those skills quickly in the future.

In 10 years when all sorts of new tech is around, will you read the docs? Or just count on an LLM?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#299

Post by gitremote »

9rx wrote: post #195
IceDane wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written more than one compiler, so I definitely understand how compilers work. It seems you're trying to call anything that transforms one thing into another a compiler. We all know what a compiler is and what it does (except maybe you? It's not clear to me) so I genuinely don't understand why you're trying to overload this terminology further so that you can call LLMs compilers. They are obviously and fundament…

> Is a natural language translation program a compiler? We have always agreed that a natural language compiler is theoretically possible. Is a natural language translation program the same as a natural language compiler, or do you see some kind of difference? If so, what is the difference?

> We have always agreed that a natural language compiler is theoretically possible.

No. Nobody here except you agrees with this. The distinction between natural languages and formal languages exists for a reason.

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