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

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

#311
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you sure it's increasing your productivity if it "makes no sense" to even quantify that? What are the receipts you have?

I have linked my github above. I don't know how that fares in the bigger scope of things, but I went from 0 opensource to hundreds of tools and frameworks and libraries. Putting a number on "productivity" makes no sense to me, I would have no idea what that means. I generate between 10-100k lines of code per day these days. But is that a measure of productivity? Not really...

Who’s reviewing 10-100k lines of code per day? This sounds like a slop nightmare

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

#312

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…

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company".

Tell him to code it himself then? If it can be done with only prompting, and he's able to type a sentence or two in a web form, what's stopping him?

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

#313
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…

Does not sound like a trillion dollar industry

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

#314
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

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…

It is not tribalism - I am self-aware enough to recognize my self-interest, and it in conflict with the interests of Sam Altmans of this world and modern slave-masters, sorry, managers.

But I am not claiming that AI is useless. It is useful, but I would rather destroy every data center that enjoy strengthening of techno-feudalism.

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

#315
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…

> Stop using a hammer on nails. sorry, what am I supposed to use on nails?

I think it was a typo and should have been "Stop using a hammer on screws," suggesting tool / application mismatch.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find a way to make sure workers get the value of ai labor instead of bosses and the workers will like it better. If the result is "you do the same work but managers want everything in 20% of the time" why would anyone be happy?

[flagged]

> The original premise of the site was for startup founders and hackers to discuss startup founder and hacker things.

Good that people finally open their eyes.

> But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business

And that's a false-consciousness at its finest. You are closer to these workers than to those that really own capital.

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

#318
post #19

Most of it doesn't exist beyond videos of code spraying onto a screen alongside a claim that "juniors are dead." I think the "why" for this is that the stakes are high. The economy is trembling. Tech jobs are evaporating. There's a high anxiety around AI being a savior, and so, a demi-religion is forming among the crowd that needs AI to be able to replace developers/competency. That said: I personally have gotten imp…

At least in my experience, it excels in blank canvas projects. Where you've got nothing and want something pretty basic. The tools can probably set up a fresh React project faster than me. But at least every time I've tried them on an actual work repo they get reduced to almost useless. Which is why they generate so much hype. They are perfect for tech demos, then management wonders why they aren't seeing results in…

Even scaffolding a new project is not easy work, especially a new stack or new versions of existing tools. For example, I have never been able to create a Vue 3 project with Vite and Tailwind setup correctly. I tried top SOTA models. Maybe my prompting skills are not good, but everytime it fails to set up a project correctly. Everytime it gives me some old configurations that's not relevant anymore.

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

#319

[flagged]

2000 developers mocked Dreamviewer: "Ability to generate 10k LOC of crap HTML in 30 minutes is not productivity".

Yeah, billion years ago or whenever: Jelly Fish - screw these fish, wanting to try out land .. we are happy drifting around the ocean, shapeless instead of this evolution thing …

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

#320

Its really interesting to bring graphs of 'new ios releases per month' or 'total domain name registrations' into the argument - thats a good way of keeping the argument tied to the real world

Especially Steam games graph as well. Most of the non game developers at least once wanted to release their own games and feels like this is the good time to do that.
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