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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
301–310 of 498 posts
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beef wellington with deathcap mushrooms anyone?
Oh yes please, they're delicious when you soak them in vinegar to deactivate the poison. And the tangy vinegar addition goes really nicely with the rest of the Wellington.
THIS IS FALSE.
I don't know if this is intended as a joke, if yes this is in very poor taste.
Death cap mushrooms are incredibly dangerous and shouldn't even touch food containers or other food.
There is no safe way to consume death caps. They are the most common cause of human death by mushroom poisoning.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Setting up a scaffolding for a new website? LLMs are amazing at it. So amazing that every single stat showed by the author in the article has been flat at best, despite all being based on new development rather than work on existing code-bases.
Maybe the world has run out of interesting websites to create. That they are created faster doesn't necessarily imply they'll be created more frequently.
AI still fails to extrapolate. It can interpolate between things it’s trained on but that’s not exactly a new interesting product. If it truly could extrapolate at human-ish levels we would actually maybe have 10x more games and websites and whatnot
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#304Multiple 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…
Recently I tried to scaffold a website with a well known coding agent. It didn’t work. I asked a colleague. He had the same problem. Turned out it was using out of date setup instructions for a major tool that has changed post training. After spending time fixing the problem, I realised (1) it would have been faster to do it myself and (2) I can no longer trust that tool to set anything up - what if it’s doing someth…
Sorry to say, but skill issue.
Use MCP servers, specifically context 7.
This gets up to date docs as long as you include the library name on your prompt and ask to use context 7.
You did the equivalent of raw dogging gpt4(an old model) for recent news versus using an agent with web search tooling.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#305I completely agree with the thesis here. I also have not seen a massive productivity boost with the use of AI. I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy... Yee, AI is not the 2x or 10x technology of the future ™ is was promised to be. It may the case th…
Same - I use it at work at a big tech company and the real world efficiency gains on net are probably nonexistent. We have multiple large and not so large codebases. In a super trivial script or creating a struct from documentation it does the thing - great. For unit tests it’s about 50-50 if it’s useful or if I waste a few hours and delete the change set. In any moderately complex codebase Claude Sonnet or GPT in agent mode builds unneeded complexity, gets lost in a spiraling amount of nonsense steps, builds things that already exist in the codebase constantly. The best outcome I have to edit and review so heavily it’s like I’m jumping in on someone else’s PR halfway and have to grok what the heck did they misunderstand.
The only actually net positive is the Claude.md that some people maintain - it’s actually a good context dump for new engineers!
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#306> Github Copilot themselves say that initially, users only accept 29% of prompted coding suggestions (which itself is a wild claim to inefficiency, why would you publicize that?), but with six months of experience, users naturally get better at prompting and that grows to a whopping 34% acceptance rate. Apparently, 6 months of experience only makes you 5% better at prompting.
Or, alternatively, exposure to our robot overlords makes you less discerning, less concerned with, ah, whether the thing is correct or not.
(This _definitely_ seems to be a thing with LLM text generation, with many people seemingly not even reading the output before they post it, and I assume it's at least somewhat a thing for software as well.)
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#307These 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…
My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.
> we are heading towards a big recession
Who is we? One country heading into a recession is hardly enough to nudge the trend of "all things code"
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the answer. Programming was never the bottleneck in delivering software, whether free-range, organic, grass-fed human-generated code or AI-assisted. AI is just a convenient excuse to lay off many rounds of over-hiring while also keeping the door open for potential investors to throw more money into the incinerator since the company is now “AI-first”.
The point was that "programming" is far more than just "writing code".
Just like writing Lord of the Rings is actually not just about typing. You have to live a life, go to war, think deeply for years, research languages and cultures and then one day you type all that out
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is bracing for a labor supply shock. It will move in the direction opposite what investors expect. 2030 will be 2020 all over again.
Why?
If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage.
When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happened, no-one will ever hire a programmer again" phase, and there were about 50 people in my starting class. I think in the same course two years ago, there'd been about 200. The 'correct' number, for actual future demand, was certainly closer to 200 than 50, and the industry as a whole had a bit of a labour crunch in the early 10s in particular.
Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that there will be neurological fatigue occurring whereby if software engineers are not actively practicing problem-solving, discernment, and translation into computer code - those skills will atrophy... I've found this to be the case with most (if not all) skills, even riding a bike. Sure, you don't forget how to ride it, but your ability to expertly articulate with the bike in a synergistic and tool-like…
Yes and this is the placid version where lazy programmers elect to lighten their cognitive load by farming out to AI. An insidious version is AGI replacing human cognition. To replace human thought is to replace a biological ability which progresses on evolutionary timescales - not a Moore's law approximate curve. The issue in your skull will quite literally be as useful as a cow's for solving problems... think about…
There's no connection between AI and AGI, apart from hopes. Besides which, if you're talking about AGI, you're talking about artificial people. That means:
• They don't really want to be servants.
• They have biases and preferences.
• Some of them are stupid.
• If you'd like to own an AGI that thinks for you, the AGI would also like one.
• They are people with cognition, even if we stop being.