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

391–400 of 498 posts

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

#391

Post by DrillShopper »

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…

> It's an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning.

Damn, when did it become wrong for me to advocate in my best interests while my boss is trying to do the same by shoving broken and useless AI tools up my ass?

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

#392

Post by rglover »

dmonitor wrote: post #188
rglover wrote: post #19

Most of it doesn't exist beyond videos of code spraying onto a screen alongside a claim that "juniors are dead." I think the "why" for this is that the stakes are high. The economy is trembling. Tech jobs are evaporating. There's a high anxiety around AI being a savior, and so, a demi-religion is forming among the crowd that needs AI to be able to replace developers/competency. That said: I personally have gotten imp…

By "knowing what you're doing" do you mean "have enough experience to it by hand", "have experience with a specific AI tool and its limitations" or a combination?

The first one.

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

#394

Post by osigurdson »

rsynnott wrote: post #309
denkmoon wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage. When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happen…

I think it might be worse that that as staff reductions are across the board, not just in software development roles. My hope is start up creation will be unprecedented to take advantage of the complacency. They will wonder why AI deleted their customers when they thought it was supposed to delete their employees.

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

#395

Post by dep_b »

dangus wrote: post #372
torginus wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

25 years ago I uploaded zip files with my PHP update to overwrite my older site, and possibly I had to do a MySQL migration before I could go live again. And when I don't have to care about anybody else's professional standards, that's still how I make simple websites.

Apart from doing the styles and layout, I don't think current tools have less friction. They're a lot safer though. Can't say I never dropped a production database.

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

#396

Post by duxup »

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…

If it's 5hs, why not distract his own engineers?

That's pretty much nothing ... to me that line indicates a whole lot of other possible things.

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

#397

Post by card_zero »

tempodox wrote: post #345
card_zero wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These postulated entities are by definition people. Not humans, because they lack the biology, but that's a detail.

If you think they're going to be trained on all the world's data, that's still supposing them to be an extension of AI. No, they'll have to pick up their knowledge culturally, the same way everybody else does, by watching cartoons - I mean by interactions with mentors. They might have their own culture, but only the same way that existing groups of people with a shared characteristic do, and they can't weave it out of air; it has to derive from existing culture. There's a potential for an AGI to "think faster", but I'm skeptical about what that amounts to in practice or how much use it would be to them.

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

#398

Post by patapong »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #343
culopatin wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Yep agreed... It's a bit like sifting gold, most of what it produces is crap, but if you stay with it long enough and put in enough effort you will eventually have something that works well.

Part of the issue is that it is so fast to get to a working prototype that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

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

#399

Post by bofis »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #242
SrslyJosh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's probably childish and irrational and a symptom of my inferior intellect, but I have to ask, where's the proof that any of this shit works as well as AI stans claim it does? Please, enlighten me with your gigantic hyper-rational brain.

If you believe AI is overvalued and is a bubble waiting to burst then you are free to short NVDA. AI stans don’t become AI stans for no reason. They see the many enormous technological leaps and also see where progress is going. The many PhDs currently making millions at labs also have the right idea. Just look at ChatGPT’s growth alone. No product in history compares, and it’s not an accident.

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - Keynes

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

#400

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

This makes the logical fallacy that reasoning born out of resentment is always wrong, of course. It is possible for someone to be as you describe and also correct - I imagine this armchair psychoanalysis is way off though.
Post reply on HN