Speak for yourself, I have never thrown away code at this rate in my entire career. I couldn't keep up this pace without AI codegen.
Codegen is not productivity
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Re: Codegen is not productivity
#42I recently started using AI for personal projects, and I find it works really well for 'spike' type tasks, where what you're trying to do is grow your knowledge about a particular domain. It's less good at discovering the correct way of doing things once you've decided on a path forward, but still more useful than combing through API docs and manpages yourself.
It might not actually deliver working things all that much faster than I could, but I don't feel mentally drained by the process either. I used to spend a lot of time reading architecture docs in order to understand available solutions, now I can usually get a sense for what I need to know just from asking ChatGPT how certain things might be done using X tool.
In the last few days, I've stood up syncthing, tailscale with a headscale control plane, and started making working indicators and strategies in PineScript, TradingView's automated trading platform. Things I had no energy for or would have been weeklong projects take hours or a day or so. AI's strengths synergize really well with how humans want to think.
I just paste an error message in, and ChatGPT figures out what I'm trying to do from context, then gives me not just a possible resolution, but also why the error is happening. The latter is just as useful as the former. It's wrong a lot, but it's easy to suss out.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#43There is a saying you need to write an essay 3 times. The first time its puked out, the second is decent and the third is good. It’s quite similar with code, and with code less is more. for try 1 and 2
Unfortunately, this post was published at the puked out phase (;
(author here)
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#44Bold claims that writing code was never the bottleneck. It may not be the only bottleneck but we conveniently move goal posts now that there is a more convenient mechanism and our profession is under threat.
I actually consider that the claim is not that bold, and in fact has been common in our industry for most of the short time it has been around. I included a few articles and studies with time breakdowns of developer activity that I think help to illustrate this.
If an activity (getting code into source files) used to take up I made no argument with regard to threat to the profession, and I make none here.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#45A well considered article, despite the author categorizing it as a rant. I appreciate the appendix quotations, as well as the acknowledgement that they are appeals to authority. Whilst the author clearly has a belief that falls down on one side of the debate, I hope folks can engage with the "Should we abandon everything we know" question, which I think is the crux of things. Evidence that AI-driven-development is a…
I didn't set out to teach you anything, change your behavior, or give you practical takeaways, so it's a rant (: Emotions can be expressed with citations.
I am fully on board with gen AI representing a paradigm shift in software development. I tried to be careful not to take a stance on other debates in the larger conversation. I just saw too many people talking about how much code they're generating as proof statements when discussing LLMs. I think that, specifically---i.e., using LOC generated as the basis of any meaningful argument about effectiveness or productivity---is a silly thing to do. There are plenty of other things we should discuss besides LOC.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#46Hey, author here. Never thought I'd see my pokey little blog on HN and all that. Happy to discuss further.
Hey, I like your writing. You got an rss feed or anything?
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#47[flagged]
It would be interesting seeing how good LLMs are at interactive system design type work. I find them to be way too positive when I need them to shut me down or redirect my ideas entirely. We need a comparison between an LLM and an experienced engineer reviewing a juniors system design for some problem. I imagine the LLM will be way too enthusiastic about whatever design is presented and will help force poor designs i…
I’ve found them to be pretty good if you tell them to be more critical and to operate as a sophisticated rubber duck. They are actually pretty decent at asking questions that I can answer to help move things forwards. But yeah by default they really like to tell me I’m a fucking genius. Such insight. Wow.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#48I went to look at some of the authors other posts and found this: https://www.antifound.com/posts/advent-of-code-2022/ So much of our industry has spent the last two decades honing itself into a temple built around the idea of "leet code". From the interview to things like advent of code. Solving brain teasers, knowing your algorithms cold in an interview was always a terrible idea. And the sort of engineers it invit…
> The complaints about LLM's that lack any information about the domains being worked in, the means of integration (deep in your IDE vs cut and paste into vim) and what your asking it to do (in a very literal sense) are the critical factors that remain "un aired" in these sorts of laments.
I'm not sure if this is a direct response to the article or a general point. The article includes an appendix about my use of LLMs and the domains I have used them in.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#49Bold claims that writing code was never the bottleneck. It may not be the only bottleneck but we conveniently move goal posts now that there is a more convenient mechanism and our profession is under threat.
our profession is under threat. It is. But I don't think it's AI that threatens it. It's susceptible to hype people who, unfortunately, have the power over people's jobs. C-level management who don't know anything better than parroting what others in the industry are saying. How is that "all engineers will be replaced in 6 months" going?
We've seen something similar in the past decades: outsourcing. And it worked completely differently how it was envisioned a few decades ago, at least in the field of software development. So let's wait what happens. Some kind of backlash has been already started in the past months.
Re: Codegen is not productivity
#50> Humans and LLMs both share a fundamental limitation. Humans have a working memory, and LLMs have a context limit. But there’s a more important difference: I can’t spin up 20 decent human programmers from my terminal. The argument that "code was never the bottleneck" is genuinely appealing, but it hasn’t matched my experience at all. I’m getting through dramatically more work now. This is true for my colleagues too.…
Would you entertain the idea that "work was never the bottleneck", or even "building products was never the bottleneck"? We need to address Jevons' Paradox somehow.
I love Jevons’ paradox too, but if we apply it here don’t we still end up with more software?
Definitely would entertain -- I do agree with your framing. I just think the article undersells the impact of fast+cheap codegen.
Lowering the cost of implementation will (has) expose new bottlenecks elsewhere. But imho many of those bottlenecks probably weren’t worth serious investment in solving before. The codegen change will shift that.