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

351–360 of 498 posts

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

#351

Post by larve »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #311
larve wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I only review what needs to be reviewed, I don’t need to fully review every prototype, shell script, dev tool etc… only what is in the critical path.

But if llms show us one thing, it’s how bad our code review tools are. I have a set of tree sitter helpers that allow me to examine different parts of a PR more easily (one that allows me to diff semantic parts of the code, instead of “files” and “lines”, one that gives me stats on what subsystems are touched and crosscorrelation of different subsystems, one for attaching metadata and which documents are related to a commit, one for managing our design documents, llm-coding intermediary documents, long lasting documents, etc… the proper version of these are for work but here’s the initial yolo from Manus: https://github.com/go-go-golems/vibes/tree/main/2025-08-22/p... https://github.com/go-go-golems/vibes/tree/main/2025-08-22/c... https://github.com/go-go-golems/vibes/tree/main/2025-08-15/d... https://github.com/go-go-golems/vibes/tree/main/2025-07-29/p...).

I very often put some random idea into the llm slot machine that is manus, and use the result as a starting point to remold it into a proper tool, and extracting the relevant pieces as reusable packages. I’ve got a pretty wide treesitter/lsp/git based set of packages to manage llm output and assist with better code reviews.

Also, every llm PR comes with _extensive_ documentation / design documents / changelogs, by the nature of how these things work, which helps both humans and llm-asssisted code review tools.

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

#352

Post by margalabargala »

paool wrote: post #304
rhubarbtree wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"My shitty company's shitty app has an API for that! It's so good sales has decided to present it to the industry as though it should be incorrect not to use it"

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

#353

Post by jcgrillo »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #98
bsder wrote: 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…

> their apparent success

Yeah so the thing is the "success" is only "apparent". Having actually tried to use this garbage to do work, as someone who has been deeply interested in ML for decades, I've found the tools to be approximately useless. The "apparent success" is not due to any utility, it's due entirely to marketing.

I don't fear I'm missing out on anything. I've tried it, it didn't work. So why are my bosses a half dozen rungs up on the corporate ladder losing their entire minds over it? It's insanity. Delusional.

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

#354

Post by tomrod »

ethanwillis wrote: post #330
tomrod wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It quickly builds a lot of technical debt that must be paid down, especially for people writing code in areas they aren't deep in. For tight tasks it can be super helpful -- like for me, an AI/Data Science guy, setting up a basic reverse proxy. But I do so with a ton of scrutiny -- pushing it, searching on Kagi or docs to at least confirm the code, etc. This is helpful because I don't have a mental map about…

What do you mean by you don't have a mental map about a reverse proxy?

That I don't have a deep understanding about nginx and how it's many options fit together across an OS with confidence that I made it secure, accurate, and/or fast. Give me python, Matlab, rust, I can put something together, but something like nginx and I've simply never dived deep enough for a solid understanding before using an LLM to understand more.

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

#355

Post by quantum2022 »

You're missing the forest for the trees. It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%. We could see a flourishing of ideas and programs coming out of 'regular' people. The kind of people that approach programmers with the 'I have an idea' and get ignored. Maybe the programs will be basic, but they'll be a template for something better, which then a programmer might say 'I see the value in that idea' and help develop it.

It'll increase incremental developments manyfold. A non-programmer spending a few hours on AI to make their workflow better and easier and faster. This is what everyone here keeps missing. It's not the programmers that should be using AI; it's 'regular' people.

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

#356

Post by 3uler »

com2kid wrote: 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…

Working with LLMs has fundamentally changed how I approach documentation and development.

Traditional documentation has always been a challenge for me - figuring out where to start, what syntax conventions are being used, how pieces connect together. Good docs are notoriously hard to write, and even harder to navigate. But now, being able to query an LLM about specific tasks and get direct references to the relevant documentation sections has been a game-changer.

This realization led me to flip my approach entirely. I’ve started heavily documenting my own development process in markdown files - not for humans, but specifically for LLMs to consume. The key insight is thinking of LLMs as amnesiac junior engineers: they’re capable, but they need to be taught what to do every single time. Success comes from getting the right context into them.

Learning how to craft that context is becoming the critical skill.

It’s not about prompting tricks - it’s about building systematic ways to feed LLMs the information they need.

I’ve built up a library of commands and agents for my Claude Code installation inspired by AgentOS (https://github.com/buildermethods/agent-os) to help engineer the required context.

The tool is a stochastic parrot, you need to feed it the right context to get the right answer. It is very good at what it does but you need to use it to its strengths in order to get value from it.

I find people complaining about LLMs often expect vibe coding to be this magic tool that will build the app for you without thinking, which it unfortunately has been sold as, but the reality is more of a fancy prompt based IDE.

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

#357

Post by tjr »

ethanwillis wrote: post #327
atleastoptimal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into every human’s brain and you’d see the same thing. How many humans can come up with novel, useful patents? How many novel useful patents themselves are just variations of existing tech? All intelligence is pattern matching, just at different scales. AI is doing the same thing human brains do.

Seeing as your LLMs need the novel output of human brains to even exist or expand capabilities, quite a lot. But even if it's not a lot, it's more than the number of LLMs that can invent new meaning which is a grand total of 0.

If tomorrow, all human beings ceased to exist, barring any in-progress operations, LLMs would go silent, and the machinery they run on would eventually stop functioning.

If tomorrow, all LLMs ceased to exist, humans would carry on just fine, and likely build LLMs all over again, next time even better.

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

#358

Post by prime_ursid »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #20

Great angle to look at the releases of new software. I, too, thought we'd see a huge increase by now. An alternative theory is that writing code was never the bottleneck of releasing software. The exploration of what it is you're building and getting it on a platform takes time and effort. On the other hand, yeah, it's really easy to 'hold it wrong' with AI tools. Sometimes I have a great day and think I've figured i…

One of the rebuttals at the end of the post addresses this.

> That’s only true when you’re in a large corporation. When you’re by yourself, when you’re the stakeholder as well as the developer, you’re not in meetings. You're telling me that people aren’t shipping anything solo anymore? That people aren’t shipping new GitHub projects that scratch a personal itch? How does software creation not involve code?

So if you’re saying “LLMs do speed up coding, but that was never the bottleneck,” then the author is saying, “it’s sometimes the bottleneck. E.g., personal projects”

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

#359

Post by tjr »

player1234 wrote: post #313
com2kid wrote: 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

More like a zillion dollar industry!

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

#360

Post by photonthug »

safety1st wrote: post #271
photonthug wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Look this isn't a forum for general advocacy of Marxist political thought, it just isn't. That's off topic. Whereas it IS a forum for discussing the biggest tech court case of the century. The site was not established to give equal time to all political ideologies in all threads, which is what you seem to be implying. This is all in the Hacker News guidelines. Let me paste the relevant part for you since you don't se…

About those rules. Any high-profile court case is by definition crime/politics, and all over TV news. Have you recently mentioned the name of any famous person(s) in your comments, offering opinions and critiques perhaps? But that's another way of saying "celebrities". So I'd say you're unambiguously failing on 4 of these criteria. In terms of forming teams and bitching about the refs decisions, not much difference between court-cases and sports either, neither are big on inspiring curiosity. But hey.. rules are for other people right boss?

And stop telling people to "look". You look. Because listen, I know that phrases like this one are well-loved by a certain type of person. Shows who's the adult in the room, and also frightens subordinates into silence, right? But understand me now when I say that it's much too transparent when used too often. Realize that there are other adults in the room, and when you toss out too many imperatives too fast then it's easy to see how much you want to control people as well as the topics under discussion.

Post reply on HN