A take I saw recently is: if people are still asking "are we in a bubble" then we are not yet in a bubble.
I think it'd be truer to say that you can't be sure it's a bubble until after it pops.
Is it a bubble?
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Re: Is it a bubble?
#32> 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, so it's a bit of a more complex picture, but if you were to simply say "a developer is not writing the code", it would be an accurate statement.
Though I do think "advanced software team" is kind of an absurd phrase, and I don't think there is any correlation with how "advanced" the software you build is and how much you need AI. In fact, there's probably an anti-correlation: I think that I get such great use out of AI primarily because we don't need to write particularly difficult code, but we do need to write a lot of it. I spend a lot of time in React, which AI is very well-suited to.
EDIT: I'd love to hear from people who disagree with me or think I am off-base somehow about which particular part of my comment (or follow-up comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640) seems wrong. 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.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#33> 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?
The line right after this is much worse:
> Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago.
Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#34He thinks "AI" "may be capable of taking over cognition", which shows he doesn't understand how LLM work...
Re: Is it a bubble?
#35> 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 only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less.
>I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations
Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments that are both small enough for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100% correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself.
[0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
[2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/
[3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...
Re: Is it a bubble?
#36Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble. But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years. I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely…
Google said the dotcom bubble is roughly from 1995 to 2001. That's about 6 years. ChatGPT was released in 2022. Claude AI was released in 2023. DeepSeek was released in 2023.
Let's just say the AI bubble started in 2023. We still have about 3 years, more or less, until the AI bubble pops.
I do believe we are in the build out phase of the AI bubble, much like the dotcom bubble, where Cisco routers, Sun Microsystems servers... etc. sold like hotcakes to build up the foundation of the dotcom bubble
Re: Is it a bubble?
#37> 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'm on a team like that and I see it happening in more and more companies around. Maybe "many" does a heavy lifting in the quoted text, but it is definitely happening.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#38The 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 excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#39I'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.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great example is the DotCom bubble. Wiped out a lot of capital but it really did transform the world.
But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.
Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio.
Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.