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

351–360 of 490 posts

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

#351

Post by solenoid0937 »

ddosmax556 wrote: post #298
echelon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The onus isn't on people using AI effectively to prove it to others. In fact, these disagreements and disbeliefs create opportunities and salients in the market.

I know and I agree. It sounds incredibly arrogant but it's frankly is a bid sad to see how much HN is lagging behind AI adaption. It's been 90% noise over the last 3-6 months about problems that aren't truly problems if you really look hard at what AI is capable to do already today. It's mostly ppl & process problems. I could post a comment like the one above below almost every article on AI. But it is what it is. It…

The HN AI skeptics are just bizarre to me. They are insisting to us that, no, the productivity gains we're experiencing every day, simply don't exist!

It's not that they're using the tool wrong, it's that the tool just isn't capable of what we see before our own eyes! I guess our eyes and ears are simply lying to us?

And then they ask for how we are managing to make things move faster. When you refuse to breach NDA and give up your competitive advantage on HN, this somehow confirms their belief that AI is useless.

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

#352

Post by YZF »

binary0010 wrote: post #348
YZF wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

If you copy and paste an entire compiler you didn't make anything. If you copy pieces from different compilers they won't work together. So I'm not sure how you "make" a compiler with copying and pasting from open source compiler. Are you saying you'll take one file from clang, one from gcc, another another from another compiler?

Sure. You can clone gcc and build it. You can close a game engine and use it.

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

#353

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

While I understand both points of view, I'm leaning towards yours, because:

- John Carmack embedded a C compiler and interpreter/runtime into Quake back in the mid 1990s as a scripting language! It was that efficient that it could be used in a real time 3D shooter. That's a solo effort as a minor component of a much larger piece of software.

- I've seen university CS courses hand out "implement a C compiler" as a homework / project exercise for students. It's not particularly difficult.

Sure, a modern C compiler like GCC has to handle inline assembly, various extensions, pragmas, intrinsics, etc... but like you said, all of those are thoroughly documented and have open source implementations to reference.

Similarly, the Rust compiler is implemented in Rust and could be used as an idiomatic reference for a generic compiler framework with input handling, parsing, intermediate representations, and so forth.

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

#354

Post by sarchertech »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #278
angarg12 wrote: post #189

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like. > This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means. But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you…

I don't agree. I regularly get pieces of work someone product guy has thought up in an afternoon. They only care about the happy path, and sometimes only part of the happy path. I work for a global company that has to abide by rules and regulations in each country we operate in. The product guy thinks up some feature, we implement the feature, then we're told "actually, we legally aren't allowed to do this in 90% of…

You realize that we were making software for decades before Product Managers existed right?

My senior year software engineering class had a whole section on requirements gathering.

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

#355

Post by tptacek »

tovej wrote: post #166
pkoird wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An AI does not have an IQ.

Sure it does. IQ is simply a measure of performance on an IQ test. A simple Python loop around Google search in 2012 had an IQ.

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

#356

Post by sarchertech »

satvikpendem wrote: post #233
decidu0us9034 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for some subset of sotware (like CRM panels or something) PMs will do everything. But if you're projecting the way one sort of software (ie user-facing, business use oriented software) is developed and put to use with software writ large, then no I don't think so

Sure, I'm just talking about 90% of software which is basic CRUD, not complex systems or microcontroller programming. In that case it's likely that just a PM could build something with LLMs.

For basic CRUD we’ve had no code solutions that PMs could have been using for decades.

The truth of the matter is that software starts as basic CRUD and then given time and users evolves into its own special snowflake. Every single system given enough time and users will become a “complex system”.

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

#357

Post by rowanG077 »

spc476 wrote: post #346
rowanG077 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was 20 years ago from what I can find. Beside that Linux now is a vastly different codebase than it was 20 years ago. That effort also did not compile Linux unmodified, it required several changes: https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot_readme.html.

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

#358

Post by lmm »

p2detar wrote: post #8

> Yes, AI can generate code quickly (whether that’s a good thing is open for debate), but that doesn’t mean it’s generating the correct code. No, the code is actually almost always correct. The way it’s added is probably not what you’re going to like, if you know your code base well enough. You know there’s some ceremony about where things are added, how they are named, how much comments you’d like to add and where e…

> Almost 2 decades in IT and I absolutely do not believe this can ever happen. And if it does, it’s so rare, it’s not even worth talking about it.

It happens completely routinely, IME. Just compare how much effort it takes to clone a system that's already written versus making that system from scratch.

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

#359

Post by AdieuToLogic »

satvikpendem wrote: post #232
hedgehog wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do that someone still needs to make sure the details make sense which, from experience, sometimes they will and sometimes they won't. When I open tickets using automation I often back into the ticket from a running implementation that passes tests so the description is at least internally consistent but there are often still issues that need corrected.

That's what a good PM and developer pair should be doing, it's just that it's a lot faster for both of them now to review and work in tandem to get the feature done, because the bottleneck is the code generation.

> That's what a good PM and developer pair should be doing, it's just that it's a lot faster for both of them now to review and work in tandem to get the feature done, because the bottleneck is the code generation.

The bottleneck is understanding, never "code generation."

Below is an an axiom which has served me well over the years. Perhaps it will for you as well.

  When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of 
  your understanding of the problem. It states to all, 
  including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and 
  appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand. 
  Choose your statements wisely.

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

#360

Post by forrestthewoods »

Here is my take on the same topic: The AI Productivity Paradox: Why the AI Multiplier is Less Than 2x. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/the-ai-productivity-par...

My hypothesis is that AI greatly accelerates only a small portion of development. It's pretty effing great at prototypes. But the net acceleration factor is just not that large currently.

Opus has been out for ~6 months. If AI were a net 100x multiplier then we'd be seeing what previously took 5 years ship in just 2.6 weeks. This is objectively not happening.

Post reply on HN