As usual I don't take financial advice from Hacker News comments and do well.
Is it a bubble?
41–50 of 605 posts
Re: Is it a bubble?
#42> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, s…
[deleted]
Re: Is it a bubble?
#43> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, s…
I regularly try to use various AI tools and I can imagine it is very easy for it to produce 95% of your code. I can also imagine you have 90% more code than you would have had you written it yourself. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, code is a means to an end, and if your business is happy with the outcomes, great, but I’m not sure percentages of code are particularly meaningful.
Every time I try to use AI it produces endless code that I would never have written. I’ve tried updating my instructions to use established dependencies when possible but it seems completely averse.
An argument could be made that a million lines isn’t a problem now that these machines can consume and keep all the context in memory — maybe machines producing concise code is asking for faster horses.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#44Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?
Re: Is it a bubble?
#45> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
Part of the issue is that I think you are underestimating the number of people not doing "advanced" programming. If it's around ~80-90%, then that's a lot of +1s for AI
Re: Is it a bubble?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.
Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio. Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.
I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20.
Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for years.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#47Re: Is it a bubble?
#48I think this gives an excellent framework for how to think of this. Is it a bubble? Who knows is a perfectly valid answer.
I do think there’s something quite ironic that one of the frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can’t really say “I don’t know”. Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No surprises that our tools are the same.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, s…
>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments…
Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm.
To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I care a lot more about chunks and AI could reasonably validate. Instead of thinking “what’s the biggest chunk I could reasonably ask AI to solve” I think “what’s the biggest piece I could ask an AI to do that I can write a script to easily validate once it’s done?” Allowing the AI to validate its own work means you never have to worry about chunking again. (OK, that's a slight hyperbole, but the validation is most of my concern, and a secondary concern is that I try not to let it go for more than 1000 lines.)
For instance, take the example of an AI rewriting an API call to support a new db library you are migrating to. In this case, it’s easy to write a test case for the AI. Just run a bunch of cURLs on the existing endpoint that exercise the existing behavior (surely you already have these because you’re working in a code base that’s well tested, right? right?!?), and then make a script that verifies that the result of those cURLs has not changed. Now, instruct the AI to ensure it runs that script and doesn’t stop until the results are character for character identical. That will almost always get you something working.
Obviously the tactics change based on what you are working on. In frontend code, for example, I use a lot of Playwright. You get the idea.
As for code legibility, I tend to solve that by telling the AI to focus particularly on clean interfaces, and being OK with the internals of those interfaces be vibecoded and a little messy, so long as the external interface is crisp and well-tested. This is another very long discussion, and for the non-vibe-code-pilled (sorry), it probably sounds insane, and I feel it's easy to lose one's audience on such a polarizing topic, so I'll keep it brief. In short, one real key thing to understand about AI is that it makes the cost of writing unit tests and e2e tests drop significantly, and I find this (along with remaining disciplined and having crisp interfaces) to be an excellent tool in the fight against the increased code complexity that AI tools bring. So, in short, I deal with legibility by having a few really really clean interfaces/APIs that are extremely readable, and then testing them like crazy.
EDIT
There is a dead comment that I can't respond to that claims that I am not a reliable narrator because I have no A/B test. Behold, though: I am the AI-hater's nightmare, because I do have a good A/B test! I have a website that sees a decent amount of traffic (https://chipscompo.com/). Over the last few years, I have tried a few times to modernize and redesign the website, but these attempts have always failed because the website is pretty big (~50k loc) and I haven't been able to fit it in a single week of PTO.
This Thanksgiving, I took another crack at it with Claude Code, and not only did I finish an entire redesign (basically touched every line of frontend code), but I also got in a bunch of other new features, too, like a forgot password feature, and a suite of moderation tools. I then IaC'd the whole thing with Terraform, something I only dreamed about doing before AI! Then I bumped React a few majors versions, bumped TS about 10 years, etc, all with the help of AI. The new site is live and everyone seems to like it (well, they haven't left yet...).
If anything, this is actually an unfair comparison, because it was more work for the AI than it was for me when I tried a few years ago, because because my dependencies became more and more out of date as the years went on! This was actually a pain for AI, but I eventually managed to solve it.
Re: Is it a bubble?
#50> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of this year.
So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's the value then?