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

I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

frederickvanbrabant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 490 posts

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#341

Post by rubyfan »

mpyne wrote: post #138
rubyfan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We now have product owners trying to farm out their work to an LLM. The process didn’t work before because the person writing the requirements either put out vague requirements or bad requirements because they didn’t understand the business intent (or were careless). LLMs just take the same vague or poor requirements and make them look believable until you dig in to them.

> The process didn’t work before because the person writing the requirements either put out vague requirements or bad requirements because they didn’t understand the business intent (or were careless). You make it sound like writing good requirements is easy. If it were easy we wouldn't need all these concepts around PMF, product pivots and the like. And even before that was Peter Naur's paper "Programming as Theory…

> You make it sound like writing good requirements is easy.

I am certain I didn’t say that. To be a good product owner one needs skill, care and understanding of the business intent. If you know the business intent but lack the skill to express it as a useful requirement then it’s insufficient; if you have the skill but lack understanding or ability to understand the business intent then it’s insufficient; if you have the skill and understand the business intent but you are careless in your work then it’ll be insufficient too. If the problem space is emergent then having all three might not be good enough either.

It’s certainly true that good engineering teams can deeply understand the problem space enough to get to a business outcome without requirement documents.

I just wouldn’t bet that LLMs are going to make any of these realities any better, they might exacerbate those issues.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#342

Post by satvikpendem »

lr4444lr wrote: post #333
satvikpendem wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By SDET I mean one who reviews not writes code, maybe we have different definitions of that term because you also mention humans being needed to guide the processes. Even still, other professions interact with the real social world which is not necessarily the case with programming. A lawyer will always be needed because judgments are and must be made by humans only. Software on the other hand can be built and tested…

No one's arguing you can't stand up a good MVP. It's when you have to iterate to handle changing business needs, scale issues, and integrate with other systems where the entropy becomes a scary concern over a long enough timeline. And it's not just "checking" - it's wholesale rejections of code, reframing prompts to target specific classes or approaches, etc... I don't think you will take the human out planning any t…

I agree, humans will always be there.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#343

Post by Xirdus »

satvikpendem wrote: post #229
lr4444lr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine SWEs will be reduced to SDETs anymore than attorneys will be reduced to spell-checkers on AI powered case briefs. I am a very AI-forward person, but hallucinations are becoming more pernicious than ever even as they get less frequent, especially if the code actually works. A human absolutely has to guide these processes at a macro level for sustainability for SaaS as it evolves with business needs. Ma…

By SDET I mean one who reviews not writes code, maybe we have different definitions of that term because you also mention humans being needed to guide the processes. Even still, other professions interact with the real social world which is not necessarily the case with programming. A lawyer will always be needed because judgments are and must be made by humans only. Software on the other hand can be built and tested…

> A lawyer will always be needed because judgments are and must be made by humans only.

Honestly, I believe lower court judges will be the first job in the legal industry to become fully automated.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#344

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

The Gantt shown is an example of Waterfall, or some other method where there's a final destination for the software. 99.999% of software today is not made that way.

In modern software development, there is no destination. On a 2-week basis, the business decides to change what the software is supposed to do. New features. New integrations. Changed features. Upgraded/replaced components. Larger scale. Different hosting.

Over years, the software is fundamentally altered. Quality and testing goes out the window. There's a constant slog, not only of trying to deal with modifications in an ad-hoc way, but also in fighting entropy. The software becomes a living being, which gets injured, changes its lifestyle, ages. The company is a custodian of a monster, like a zoo keeper, trying to keep the depressed animal alive.

Since humans are creatures of habit, all the same problems will happen with AI. But everything will be a little bit faster, and code reviews will make code a little bit better. But simultaneously, a lack of good tests and the desire for faster deployment will make everything a little bit worse. This push and pull will result in about the same level of software quality, but moving slightly faster. So in the end we will have a faster process. But nobody will really notice, because the rest remains a slog. We will all probably get burnt out faster.

It's complex for a reason, and you can't remove the complexity without removing the reasons. You can't solve business problems with tools.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#345

Post by robertnowell »

> Every software developer knows that you can’t make projects go faster just by typing faster. If that were the case we would all be taking typing lessons.

^ this statement is false. typing infinitely fast would make software development much faster.

typing infinitely fast would not make shipping useful products and features instantaneous, because there is product, technical, and organizational uncertainty that requires iteration and "cross functional collaboration" to figure out.

but ai can make each iteration step a lot faster.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#346

Post by spc476 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #317
pron wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who independently tried to use it reported that it is very much not workable: - "CCC compiled every single C source file in the Linux 6.9 kernel without a single compiler error (0 errors, 96 warnings). This is genuinely impressive for a compiler built entirely by an AI. However, the build failed at the linker stage with ~40,784 undefined reference errors."( https://github.com/harshavmb/compare-claude-compiler…

Well then as you say a 10-50KLOC C compiler is workable. Could you show me the C compiler that does manage to compile a modern Linux kernel that is of that size?

TCC did several years ago. It could boot Linux from source in under 10 seconds. It's wasn't that big of a C compiler. It's in the 50,000 lines of code range.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#347

Post by davebren »

pkoird wrote: post #156
ddosmax556 wrote: post #146

This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment. Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests…

Precisely. People don't realize that it's all numbers. Given average IQ of people involved in a project is 140, an AI with an IQ of 150 can replicate each and every such individuals in the pipeline. People saying AI can't do this or AI can't do that should come to terms with the fact that this IQ gap is monotonously increasing.

Pattern matching against millions of IQ test questions from a training set in order to score 150 on an IQ test doesn't give you an intelligence equivalent to 150.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#348

Post by binary0010 »

YZF wrote: post #284
binary0010 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I can make a c compiler in a couple weeks just by looking up open source libraries and copying them. I can't make any software that people will pay me money to use without taking months/years of development, research, expiramentation and iteration. Just because the original people who invented compilers had to be genius, doesn't mean anyone has to spend much time or thought in copying that work now.

I built a compiler for a simpler language as part of my compilers course in a CS degree. It was a non-trivial exercise well beyond the majority of software applications. What open source libraries did you have in mind and what are you copying? If you can truly write a C compiler in weeks then kudos to you. How many compilers have you written so far for how many languages? I work for big tech and I would say a large %…

I'd copy and paste from all the thousands of open source ones, what do you mean?

There are plenty of open source compilers that I can copy and paste whatever I need to. I don't get why you think this would have any level of difficulty?

Of course I couldn't make a brand new compiler that was better than what's out there...

Just like a game engine, I could clone one of the thousands of engines out there pretty easily - making something better or novel would be difficult. Just making a bare bones clone of what already exists by referencing documentation and pre-existing code is relatively easy now.

Yeah, when I made a mediocre 3d game engine 20 years ago, it was brain breaking difficult work. I can make one infinitely better in a micro fraction of the time now because most of the hard stuff is done and can just be looked up now.

Do you not agree?

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#349

Post by lmm »

pron wrote: post #320
KajMagnus wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying the model failed to write a competitive C compiler makes more sense. I don't think they tried to do that though. > today's models are not yet able to produce production software without close supervision, even when uncharacteristically good specs and hand-written tests exist. That's a good point anyway

> Saying the model failed to write a competitive C compiler makes more sense. Their compiler fails to compile (well, at least link) some C programs altogether, and in other cases it produces code that is 150,000x slower than a real C compiler with optimisations turned off (interestingly, the model trained on the real compiler's source code). That's not "not competitive" but "cannot be used in the real world". But eve…

> Their compiler fails to compile (well, at least link) some C programs altogether, and in other cases it produces code that is 150,000x slower than a real C compiler with optimisations turned off

I would bet that those things are also true of at least one expensive commercial C compiler.

Re: I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

#350

Post by solenoid0937 »

monkeydust wrote: post #188
ddosmax556 wrote: post #146

This article assumes that AI only has an impact on the development phase which is certainly not true. It can speed up every part of the step. Including ideation, legal, documentation, development, and deployment. Ideation: Throw ideas back & forth, cross reference with knowledge bases, generate design documents. Documentation: Generate large parts of docs. Development: Clear. Deployment: Generate deployment manifests…

The article pretty much plays out whats happening in our place, heavy use of AI in software development but we dont see us shipping faster, about same or perhaps slower (for other reasons). Its a weird feeling as were waiting for this utopia to kick-in but its not and were cant fully put our fingers on it.

The article and the AI skepticism crowd on HN read like the blind leading the blind to me.

I'm at a FAANG. My org is moving much more quickly, maybe between 3-10x more quickly than we were pre-AI. We aren't seeing a spike in reliability issues. Things just get done faster. An org as large as mine has no right to move as fast as it does.

Post reply on HN