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Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

businessinsider.com

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Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#31

Post by damon_c »

betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

One thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#32

Post by dietr1ch »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
xenotux wrote: post #19

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can…

> How many times... Literally all the time? Every single month? I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding. The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered. Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineerin…

Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#33

Post by megaloblasto »

J_McQuade wrote: post #23
megaloblasto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

> Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they? I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.

I'm speaking just to coding productivity. I think AI does very little for business development or creativity type issues.

People should realize that denying that AI can boost productivity in coding makes it look like they don't know how to use it, or believe in some conspiracy that no one is actually benefitting and it's all market hype from tech bros.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#34

Post by gregorygoc »

crazygringo wrote: post #21
shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to t…

Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.

Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#35

Post by mrbombastic »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
xenotux wrote: post #19

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can…

> How many times... Literally all the time? Every single month? I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding. The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered. Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineerin…

I find it is either coding or design but yeah not sure where the perspective of the GP come from, that has not been my experience. I have actually vented with other devs about too many brainstorming meetings, ideas of what to do we are never short on. Maybe where I agree slightly is the devil is in the maintenance, ai can maybe? help with that but i think you will quickly reach a saturation point where you have more than you can manage.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#37

Post by sillywabbit »

bonsai_bar wrote: post #30
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to t…

Gotta love that SWE arrogance.

As opposed to the person who watched Star Trek and thought scribbling down something they saw on that counted as having vision.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#38

Post by betaby »

jsnell wrote: post #17
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

I suspect somebody could. But why? Do you need a new XML library? I don't. And if you don't need one, why write one? If there is no specific use case in mind, how do you even determine what dimension "good" is measured on?

XML is used extensively everywhere. Multibillion companies depend on libxml2 which historically had multitude of vulnerabilities, see https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2

Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well,

Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that library is in the critical path literally everywhere.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#39

Post by knoopx »

betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

bullshit, open source is blooming as never before. also we already have good xml libraries, nobody is interested in that. but yeah i agree with the sentiment that ai is not the magical tool you were promised, useful nevertheless.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#40

Post by megaloblasto »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #18
megaloblasto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

> If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none. It might be that the gp is smart enough to code without a crutch.

I'll bet he's strong enough to push nails into wood so he never uses a hammer.
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