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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

#371

Post by sotix »

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…

At my company, the tech leaders aren't doing it out of mass hysteria. They're very smart individuals. The push is coming from our investors that come from the ring of classic YC-affiliated VCs. My friend who runs a YC-backed company has been told to do it by his investors too. It's a coordinated effort by external investors rather than a mass panic by individual tech leaders. If you read VC investor literature, it's full of incredible claims about how companies who don't use AI will be left behind. The exact type of stuff you'd expect to hear from groups who aim to hit the lottery with a few of their investments.

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

#372

Post by dangus »

torginus wrote: post #276
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…

The whole 'startup/scaleup' culture (which have become the industry titans of today) - is insane and have been insane for as long as it has been a thing - the culture of either 'just grow and figure out how to monetize'(Social media, food delivery etc.) or 'we're selling you this technology that doesn't exist yet but going to be insanely valuable in the future (AGI, self driving)' or 'we're selling shovels to the fir…

> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.

While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong.

You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it.

15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own.

10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release.

Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old.

TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday.

I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.

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

#373

Post by sotix »

emodendroket wrote: post #256
SchemaLoad wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah LLMs get me _an_ answer far faster than I could find it myself, but it's often not correct. And then I have to verify it myself which was exactly the work I was trying to skip by using the LLM to start with. If I have to manually verify every answer, I may as well read the docs myself.

Is it really that different from scrolling through Stack Overflow answers and rejecting the ones that aren't suitable? A lot of times you can tell it what specifically you didn't like about the solution and get another crack anyway (e.g., "let's iterate over the characters to do this rather than using a regex")

I wasn't using stack overflow before LLMs. It had already declined too much in quality and discouraged me from posting legitimate questions on there. I was more focused on reading documentation to gain a solid understanding. So for me, it's a much different experience.

It's incredible how quickly an LLM can answer. I've also crossed checked its responses with documentation before and discovered that it suggested implementing a deprecated feature that had a massive warning banner in the documentation that the LLM failed to indicate. I'm still a fan of reading documentation.

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

#374

Post by aranelsurion »

quantum2022 wrote: post #355

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 hel…

I think that was the point they made.

If AI enables regular folks to make programs, even if the worst quality shovelware, there should’ve been an explosion in quantity. All the programs that people couldn’t made, they would start making them in the past two years.

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

#375

Post by larve »

larve wrote: post #351
coffeebeqn wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since I get downvoted because I guess people don’t believe me, I’m sitting at breakfast reading a book. I suddenly think about yaml streaming parsing, start a gpt research, dig a bit deeper into streaming parser approaches, and launch a deep research on streaming parsing which I will print out and read tomorrow at breakfast and go through by hand. I then take some of the gpt discussion and paste it into Manus, saying:

“ Write a streaming go yaml parsers based on the tokenizer (probably use goccy yaml if there is no tokenizer in the standard yaml parser), and provide an event callback to the parser which can then be used to stream and print to the output.

Make a series of test files and verify they are streamed properly.”

This is the slot machine. It might work, it might be 50% jank, it might be entire jank. It’ll be a few thousand lines of code that I will skim and run. In the best case, it’s a great foundation to more properly work on. In the worst case it was an interesting experiment and I will learn something about either prompting Manus, or streaming parsing, or both.

I certainly won’t dedicate my full code review attention to what was generated. Think of it more as a hyper specific google search returning stackoverflow posts that go into excruciating detail.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68b98724-a8cc-8012-9bee-b9c4a77fe9...

https://manus.im/share/kmsyzuoRHfn1FNjg5NWz17?replay=1

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

#376

Post by larve »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #367
larve wrote: post #16

In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work. The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not…

I mean it's definitely shovelware, I'll give you that. https://github.com/go-go-golems/ai-in-action-app/blob/main/c...

Not sure what you mean? This was a demo in a live session that took about 30 minutes, including ui ideation (see pngs). It’s a reasonably well featured app and the code is fairly minimal. I wouldn’t be able to write something like that in 30 minutes by hand.

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

#377

Post by InsideOutSanta »

camdenreslink wrote: post #361
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we are vastly underestimating the number of programmers needed, as some companies reap unusually high rewards from hiring programmers. Companies like Google can pay huge sums of money to programmers because they make even higher sums of money from the programmer's work. This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development…

If a company could benefit from software developers but can’t afford them, then they can purchase Saas offerings written by companies that can afford developers. I don’t think we’ve run out of opportunities to improve the business world with software quite yet.

The fact that there is a market for these products, but they are almost universally terrible, supports my point.

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

#378

Post by bergie »

rsynnott wrote: post #342
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.

Exactly what I wanted to say. LinkedIn was slop before there was AI slop. So that's probably where LLM generated stuff fits the best. That, and maybe Medium.

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

#379

Post by danaris »

isodev wrote: post #307
materielle wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

> we are heading towards a big recession Who is we? One country heading into a recession is hardly enough to nudge the trend of "all things code"

Enough of the tech industry is America-based that a US recession is enough to do much more than nudge the trend of "all things code". Much as I would prefer that it were not so.

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

#380

Post by rsynnott »

bergie wrote: post #378
rsynnott wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly what I wanted to say. LinkedIn was slop before there was AI slop. So that's probably where LLM generated stuff fits the best. That, and maybe Medium.

Even medium, you'll sometimes see people who can write properly on medium. LinkedIn is kind of fascinating in that, even before LLMs, everything highly rated on LinkedIn was in that grotesque almost content-free style beloved by LLMs.
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