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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

#41

Post by balder1991 »

kmnc wrote: post #17

No one wants it? If there is no demand, then no one is going to become a supplier. You don’t even want the apps you’re dreaming of building, you wouldn’t use them. If you would use them, you would already be using apps that are available. It’s why developers claim huge benefits but the output is the same, there isn’t much demand for your average software company to push more output, the bottleneck is customer demand.…

The argument isn’t only applied to creating new todo apps. If the speed up was true, we’d be existing open source tools with more and more features, more polished than ever etc.

Instead I’m not waiting for something like Linux on smartphones to come so soon.

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

#42

Post by leoc »

rglover wrote: post #27
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…

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company". Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.

I think Chuck Prince's "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." from the GFC https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/funds/ex-citi-ceo-de... is the more relevant famous line here.

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

#43

Post by trenchpilgrim »

droidjj wrote: post #30
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour. Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and…

The author’s main point is that there hasn’t been an uptick in total code shipped, as you would expect if people are 10x-ing their productivity. Whether folks admit to using AI in their workflow is irrelevant.

The bottleneck on how much I ship has never been how fast I can write and deploy code :)

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

#44

Post by quantumcotton »

wrs wrote: post #2

This makes some sense. We have CEOs saying they're not hiring developers because AI makes their existing ones 10X more productive. If that productivity enhancement was real, wouldn't they be trying to hire all the developers? If you're getting 10X the productivity for the same investment, wouldn't you pour cash into that engine like crazy? Perhaps these graphs show that management is indeed so finely tuned that they'…

Today you will learn what diminishing returns are :)

You can only utilize so many people or so much action within a business or idea.

Essentially it's throwing more stupid at a problem.

The reason there are so many layoffs is because of AI creating efficiency. The thing that people don't realize is it's not that one AI robot or GPU is going to replace one human at a one to one ratio. It's going to replace the amount of workload one person can do. Which in turn gets rid of one human employee. It's not that you job isn't taken by AI. It's started. But how much human is needed is where the new supply demand lies and how long the job lasts. There will always be more need for more creative minds. The issue is we are lacking them.

It's incredible how many software engineers I see walking around without jobs. Looking for a job making $100,000 to $200,000 a year. Meanwhile, they have no idea how much money they could save a business. Their creativity was killed by school.

They are relying on somebody to tell them what to do and when nobody's around to tell anybody what to do. They all get stuck. What you are seeing isn't a lack of capability. It's a lack of ability to control direction or create an idea worth following.

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

#45

Post by leoc »

warkdarrior wrote: post #39
droidjj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author’s main point is that there hasn’t been an uptick in total code shipped, as you would expect if people are 10x-ing their productivity. Whether folks admit to using AI in their workflow is irrelevant.

Maybe people are working less and enjoying life more, while shipping the same amount of code as before. If someone builds a faster car tomorrow, I am not going to go to the office more often.

"In this economy?", as the saying goes.

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

#46

Post by bsder »

rglover wrote: post #27
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…

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company". Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.

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."

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

#47

Post by larve »

droidjj wrote: post #30
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. On many days 90% of my code output by lines is Claude generated and things that took me a day now take well under an hour. Also, a good chunk of my personal OSS projects are AI assisted. You probably can't tell from looking at them, because I have strict style guides that suppress the "AI style", and I don't really talk about how I use AI in the READMEs. Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and…

The author’s main point is that there hasn’t been an uptick in total code shipped, as you would expect if people are 10x-ing their productivity. Whether folks admit to using AI in their workflow is irrelevant.

Their main point is "AI coding claims don't add up", as shown by the amount of code shipped. I personally do think some of the more incredible claims about AI coding add up, and am happy to talk about it based on my "evidence", ie the software I am building. 99.99% of my code is ai generated at this point, with the occasional one line I fill in because it'd be stupid to wait for an LLM to do it.

For example, I've built 5-6 iphone apps, but they're kind of one-offs and I don't know why I would put them up on the app store, since they only scratch my own itches.

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

#48

Post by trenchpilgrim »

larve wrote: post #47
droidjj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author’s main point is that there hasn’t been an uptick in total code shipped, as you would expect if people are 10x-ing their productivity. Whether folks admit to using AI in their workflow is irrelevant.

Their main point is "AI coding claims don't add up", as shown by the amount of code shipped. I personally do think some of the more incredible claims about AI coding add up, and am happy to talk about it based on my "evidence", ie the software I am building. 99.99% of my code is ai generated at this point, with the occasional one line I fill in because it'd be stupid to wait for an LLM to do it. For example, I've bui…

Oh yeah, I love building one off tools with it. I am working on a game mod with a friend, we are hand writing the code that runs when you play it, but we vibe code all sorts of dev tools to help us test and iterate on it faster.

Do internal, narrow purpose dev tools count as shipped code?

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

#49

Post by daxfohl »

captainkrtek wrote: post #28
nicce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> implements some logic from scratch where there certainly is more than one suitable library, making this code we now own - is some behemoth of a PR trying to do all the things Depending on the amount of code, I see this only as positive? Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.

I'm not talking about generating a few lines instead of importing left-pad. In recent PRs I've had: - Implementing a scheduler from scratch (hundreds of lines), when there are many many libraries for this in Go. - Implementing some complex configuration store that is safe for concurrent access , using generics, reflection, and a whole other host of stuff (additionally hundreds of lines plus more for tests). While I c…

And that may be where the discrepancy comes in. You feel fast because, whoa I created this whole scheduler in ten seconds! But the you also have to spend an hour code reviewing that scheduler, which, still it feels fast to have a good working scheduler in such a short time. But without AI, maybe it feels slow to find and integrate with some existing scheduling library, but in wall clock time it was the same.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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