Live data from Hacker News

The AI Vampire

steve-yegge.medium.com

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: The AI Vampire

#41
Am I getting Steve's point? It's a bit like what happened with the agricultural revolution.

A long time ago, food took effort to find, and calories were expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/calories. We got fat, because we can not moderate our food intake. It is killing us.

A long time ago, coding took effort, and programmer productivity was expensive. Then we had a breakthrough in cost/per/feature. Now we are exhausted, because we can not moderate our energy and attention expenditure. It is killing us.

Re: The AI Vampire

#42
I’m in Steve’s demographic, showing similar symptoms, and I’m as worried as he is about how we’re going to cope.

It’s a matter of opportunity cost. It used to be that when I rested for an hour, I lost an hour of output. Now, when I rest for an hour, I lose what used to be a day of output.

I need to rewire my brain and learn how to split the difference. There’s no point in producing a lot of output if I don’t have time to live.

The idea that you’ll get to enjoy the spoils when you grow up is false. You won’t. Just produce 5x and take some time off every day. You may even be more likely to reflect, and end up producing the right thing.

Re: The AI Vampire

#43
post #13

Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements.

When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges.

A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic. There just isn't much complexity inherent in any of the feature sets.

Re: The AI Vampire

#44
>With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.

Re: The AI Vampire

#45
post #13

Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

― Roy Amara

Re: The AI Vampire

#46
It's real and I've been telling all the people around me who get vested in this sort of exponential growth, to be very wary of the impeding burnout, which spares no soul hungry to get high on information. getting high on information is now a thing, it is not cyberpunk fiction anymore, and burnout is a real threat - VR or not. perhaps one can burn out on tiktok these days.

Re: The AI Vampire

#47

All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself. Maybe when AIs a…

At what point does the project outgrow the AI in your experience? I have a 70k LOC backend/frontend/database/docker app that Claude still mostly one shots most features/tasks I throw at it. Perhaps, it's not as good remembering all the intertwined side-effects between functionalities/ui's and I have to let it know "in the calendar view, we must hide it as well", but that takes little time/effort. Does it break down a…

I find that with more complex projects (full-stack application with some 50 controllers, services, and about 90 distinct full-feature pages) it often starts writing code that simply breaks functionality.

For example, had to update some more complex code to correctly calculate a financial penalty amount. The amount is defined by law and recently received an overhaul so we had to change our implementation.

Every model we tried (and we have corporate access and legal allowance to use pretty much all of them) failed to update it correctly. Models would start changing parts of the calculation that didn't need to be updated. After saying that the specific parts shouldn't be touched and to retry, most of them would go right back to changing it again. The legal definition of the calculation logic is, surprisingly, pretty clear and we do have rigorous tests in place to ensure the calculations are correct.

Beyond that, it was frustrating trying to get the models to stick to our coding standards. Our application has developers from other teams doing work as well. We enforce a minimum standard to ensure code quality doesn't suffer and other people can take over without much issue. This standard is documented in the code itself but also explicitly written out in the repository in simple language. Even when explicitly prompting the models to stick to the standard and copy pasting it into the actual chat, it would ignore 50% of it.

The most apt comparison I can make is that of a consultant that always agrees with you to your face but when doing actual work, ignores half of your instructions and you end up running after them to try to minimize the mess and clean up you have to do. It outputs more code but it doesn't meet the standards we have. I'd genuinely be happy to offload tasks to AI so I can focus on the more interesting parts of work I have, but from my experience and that of my colleagues, its just not working out for us (yet).

Re: The AI Vampire

#48

Some interesting parts in the text. Some not so interesting ones. The author seems to be thinking that he's a big deal it seems, though - a month ago, I did not know who he is. My work environment has never heard of him (SDE at FAANG). Maybe I'm an outlier and he indeed influences the whole expectation management at companies with his writing, or maybe the success (?) of gastown got to him and he thinks he's bigger t…

He's early Amazon early Google so he's seen two companies super scale. Few people last two paradigm shifts so that's no guarantee of credentials. But at the time he was famous for a specific accidentally-public post that exposed people to the amount that Bezos's influence ramified through Amazon and how his choices contrasted with Google's approach to platforms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876

Re: The AI Vampire

#49
post #34

This is a good time to repeat that software engineers need a union. We needed this ten years ago, and we need it a lot more now.

As a european, yes please America, get a union. Get 2 even. You're going too fast, you're way too successful, we can't keep up. So yes, please adopt our work ethic and legal framework. It's going to help us tremendously.

Are there any software engineer\quality assurance\any other IT related unions in EU? How do I join one?

Re: The AI Vampire

#50
post #13

Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…

I don't understand what including the time of "4 years" does for your arguments here. I don't think anyone is arguing that the usefulness of these AIs for real projects started at GPT 3.5/4. Do you think the capabilities of current AIs are approximately the same as GPT 3.5/4 4 years ago (actually I think SOTA 4 years ago today might have been LaMDA... as GPT 3.5 wasn't out yet)?

Yeah. I started integrating AI into my daily workflows December 2024. I would say AI didn't become genuinely useful until around September 2025, when Sonnet 4.5 came out. The Opus 4.5 release in November was the real event horizon.
Post reply on HN