Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mikelovesrobots.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 498 posts

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

#341

Post by InsideOutSanta »

rootusrootus wrote: post #176
some-guy wrote: post #15

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 That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? When it doesn't happen, he'll pin the blame on you, but everyone else above will pin the blame on him . He's the one who will get fired. Laying off unnecessary developers is the answer if LLMs turn out to make us all so muc…

Here's a new keyboard. I've cut all your estimations by five percent; surely you can type much faster with this.

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

#342

Post by rsynnott »

tezza wrote: post #183

“Where is the shovelware?”… It’s Coming! Changing domain to writing and images and video you can see LinkedIn is awash with everyone generating everything by LLMs. The posting cadence has quickened too as people shout louder to raise their AI assisted voice over other people’s. We’ve all seen and heard the AI images and video tsunami So why not software (yet but soon)?? Firstly, Software often has a function and AI t…

I mean, LinkedIn, even before the advent of LLMs, has been the worst and most bullshit-heavy of the social networks. There's a reason that r/LinkedInLunatics exists. "It can write a LinkedIn post" is not necessarily good evidence that it can do anything useful.

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

#343

Post by Wowfunhappy »

culopatin wrote: post #248
some-guy wrote: post #15

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…

Today a friend of mine connected me with his uncle who wanted to develop an MVP for his company. He claimed he didn’t want to distract his engineers on this project, but that “it shouldn’t take you more than 5hs to do this with vibe coding”. I promptly declined, if it takes 5hs why are you reaching out to me? It would take more than 5hs just to bring me into the loop of what you want vs your own engineers. If vibe co…

I have fully vibe coded several apps at this point (none professionally, but stuff I actively use in my life). One thing I don't think everyone understands is that it still takes time. I need to do countless rounds of testing, describing the exact problem I find, rinse and repeat again and again for hours and hours. I happen to enjoy this way of working and I do think it's faster than writing the code myself, but it's not fast.

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

#344

Post by rsynnott »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #83

All these bearish claims about AI coding would hold weight if models were stuck permanently at the capabilities level they are now with no chance at improvement. This is very likely not the case given improvements over the past year, and even with diminishing returns models will be significantly more capable both independently and as a copilot in a year.

Ah, yes, jam tomorrow.

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

#345

Post by tempodox »

card_zero wrote: post #310
jryio wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re anthropomorphizing too much.

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

#346

Post by theandrewbailey »

cmckn wrote: post #218
rootusrootus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? When it doesn't happen, he'll pin the blame on you, but everyone else above will pin the blame on him . He's the one who will get fired. Laying off unnecessary developers is the answer if LLMs turn out to make us all so muc…

> He's the one who will get fired. I wouldn’t count on it.

He will fire you before he gets fired.

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

#347

Post by tempodox »

wrs wrote: post #2

This makes some sense. We have CEOs saying they're not hiring developers because AI makes their existing ones 10X more productive. If that productivity enhancement was real, wouldn't they be trying to hire all the developers? If you're getting 10X the productivity for the same investment, wouldn't you pour cash into that engine like crazy? Perhaps these graphs show that management is indeed so finely tuned that they'…

If everyone can just generate the software they need, why would they pay anyone else to do it for them? If code generation were that good, software companies would die en masse.

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

#348

Post by KronisLV »

some-guy wrote: post #15

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".

This sounds incredibly stupid. It’s going to take as long as it will and if they’re not okay with that, their delusional estimates should be allowed to crash and burn, which would hopefully be a learning experience.

The problem is that sometimes there’s an industry wide hysteria even towards useful tech - like doing a lift and shift of a bunch of monoliths to AWS to be “cloud scale”, introducing Kubernetes or serverless without the ability to put either to good use, NoSQL for use cases it’s not good at and most recently AI.

I think LLMs will eventually weather the hype cycle and it will settle down on what they’re actually kinda okay at vs not, the question is how many livelihoods will be destroyed along the way (alongside all the issues with large scale AI datacenter deployments).

On a personal level, it feels like you should maybe do the less ethical thing of asking your employer in the ballpark of 1000-3000 USD for Claude credits a month, babysitting it enough to do the 20% of the work in the 20% new estimate, babysit it enough to ship a functional MVP and when they complain about missing functionality tell them that the AI tech just isn't mature enough but thankfully you'll be able to swoop in and salvage it for only the remaining 80% of the remaining estimate's worth of work.

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

#350

Post by muldvarp »

> 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.

How is this "deadly" serious? It's about software developers losing well-paid, comfortable jobs. It's even less serious if AI doesn't actually improve productivity, because they'll find new jobs in the future.

Pretty much the only future where AI will turn out "deadly serious" is if it shows human-level performance for most if not all desk jobs.

Post reply on HN