Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by yetihehe » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

patapong wrote: post #398

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

People made tools specifically to make templates look like templates and not a finished product, just because client was ready to push the product just after seeing real looking mockups of interface.

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

#422

Post by Gormo » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

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…

I'd suspect that a very large proportion of code has always been "private code" written for personal or intra-organizational purposes, and which never get released publicly.

But if we expect the ratio of this sort of private code to publicly-released code to remain relatively stable, which I think is a reasonable expectation, then we'd expect there to be a proportional increase in both private and public code as a result of any situation that increased coding productivity generally.

So the absence of a notable increase in the volume of public code either validates the premise that LLMs are not actually creating a general productivity boost for software development, or instead points to its productivity gains being concentrated entirely in projects that never do get released, which would raise the question of why that might be.

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

#423

Post by Gormo » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

quantum2022 wrote: post #355

You're missing the forest for the trees. It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%. We could see a flourishing of ideas and programs coming out of 'regular' people. The kind of people that approach programmers with the 'I have an idea' and get ignored. Maybe the programs will be basic, but they'll be a template for something better, which then a programmer might say 'I see the value in that idea' and hel…

> It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%.

I'm not sure how that challenges the point of the article, which is that metrics of the total volume of code being publicly released is not increasing. If LLMs are opening the door to software development for many people whose existing skills aren't yet sufficient to publish working code, then we'd expect to see a vast expansion in the code output by such people. If that's not happening, why not?

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

#424

Post by vkou » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

mandeepj wrote: post #213

vkou wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I thought. And for the record - my eyes are open. I'm aware I'm being bullshitted. I don't trust, I verify . But I also don't have a magical lever that I can pull to make it stop hallucinating. ... and every time I ask if one exists, I get either crickets, or a response that doesn't answer the question.

Sorry! Didn't mean to BS you. I've not come across a scenario where it hallucinated me with a non-existent library. Can you share what you were trying to do when that happened?

I wish I had the transcript. I don't, and I'm afraid that the passage of time has muddied the interaction to the point of uselessness (when it comes to listing specifics).

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

#425

Post by bluefirebrand » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

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…

> Setting up a scaffolding for a new website? LLMs are amazing at it

This is trivial work that you should have automated after doing it once or twice anyways :/

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

#426

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:41 PM UTC

denkmoon wrote: post #294

baselessness wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is bracing for a labor supply shock. It will move in the direction opposite what investors expect. 2030 will be 2020 all over again.

Why?

Combine a bunch of factors:

1) fewer students are studying computer science, I'm faculty at a top CS program and we saw our enrollment decline for the first time ever. Other universities are seeing similar slowdowns of enrollment [1]

2) fewer immigrants coming to the united states to work and live, US is perhaps looking at its first population decline ever [2]

3) Current juniors are being stunted by AI, they will not develop the necessary skills to become seniors.

4) Seniors retiring faster because they don't want to have to deal with this AI crap, taking their knowledge with them.

So we're looking at a negative bubble forming in the software engineering expertise pipeline. The money people are hoping that AI can become proficient enough to fill that space before before everything bursts. Engineers, per usual, are pointing out the problem before it becomes one and no one is listening.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/computer...

[2]: https://nypost.com/2025/09/03/us-news/us-population-could-sh...

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

#427

Post by some-guy » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

materielle wrote: post #229

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 opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

I have never, ever seen SVPs, CEOs, and PMs completely misunderstand a technology before. And I agree with you, I think it's more of an excuse to trim fat--actual productivity is unlikely to go up (it hasn't at our Fortune 500 company)

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

#428

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

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…

Their point was that we don't need things like Heroku, Kubernetes, Slack, TensorFlow, etc. They're not creating value, they're propping up a tech stack, whose value is questionable, given the amount we've invested in it. It seems that over the past 15 years of tech, the end result is that a few companies and people became fabulously wealthy, and the rest of us are pretty much worse off. Tech isn't transforming our lives or society the way tech companies promised it would 15 years ago.

As for grandma, 15 years ago she could have just posted her sewing club on Facbook, she doesn't need Heroku or AI.

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

#429

Post by osigurdson » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

some-guy wrote: post #427

materielle wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

I have never, ever seen SVPs, CEOs, and PMs completely misunderstand a technology before. And I agree with you, I think it's more of an excuse to trim fat--actual productivity is unlikely to go up (it hasn't at our Fortune 500 company)

>> productivity is unlikely to go up

I wonder how that would even be measured? I suppose you could do it for roles that do the same type of work every day. I.e. perhaps there is some statistical relevance to number of calls taken in a call center per day or something like that. One the software development side however, productivity metrics are very hard to quantify. Of course, you can make a dashboard look however you want, but impossible, essentially to tie those metrics to NPV.

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

#430

Post by insane_dreamer » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

I haven't really found a major productivity boost using LLMs for _production_ software. Writing up the prompt and iterating can take as much time as just doing it. The auto-complete is better _IF_ it gets the syntax correct (depends a lot on how well it knows or can infer the framework).

Where I have found them very useful are for one-off scripts and stuff I need done quick and dirty, that isn't too complex and easily verifiable (so I can catch the mistakes it makes, and it does make them!), and especially in languages I don't know that well or don't like (i.e., bash, powershell, javascript)