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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

#431

Post by insane_dreamer »

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…

> vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress

based on your examples, I'd say you're vastly overestimating

sure, those are all new techs, but it's not like you couldn't do those things before in different ways or they are revolutionary in any way

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

#432

Post by insane_dreamer »

xbmcuser wrote: post #184
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…

For me this is the biggest disconnect the current level of AI/level is not good enough for replacing devs but is good enough to automate a lot of office work ie managers that would have cost to much time and effort to automate before. I think google seems to understand this a bit as they have replaced a lot of middle management because of AI and not as many developers.

also customer service; I was at my dental office today and there were 3 people handling checkin/checkout. I'm quite confident 80% of their workload could be automated away to where you would just need a single person to handle edge cases. That's where we're going to see a lot of entry-level jobs go away, in many domains.

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

#433

Post by ryanobjc »

larve wrote: post #16

In case the author is reading this, I have the receipts on how there's a real step function in how much software I build, especially lately. I am not going to put any number on it because that makes no sense, but I certainly push a lot of code that reasonably seems to work. The reason it doesn't show up online is that I mostly write software for myself and for work, with the primary goal of making things better, not…

The author is pointing out that aggregate productivity hasn't really gone up. The graphs are fairly compelling.

There are many reasons for your experience, and I am glad you are having them! That's great!

But the fact remains, overall we aren't seeing an exponential or even step function in how much software is being delivered!

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

#434

Post by Kiro »

iainctduncan wrote: post #416
Kiro wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you've got it backwards. If anything, people are getting tired of comments like yours.

HN votes say otherwise, lol

Not really. This is a thread that attracts a certain subset of people so it's expected. Compare the comments here to the ones in a thread with a more neutral premise.

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

#435

Post by ModernMech »

groby_b wrote: post #5

I think the author misses a few points * METR was at best a flawed study. Repo-familiarity and tool-unfamiliarity being the biggest points of critique, but far from the only one * they assume that all code gets shipped as a product. Meanwhile, AI code has (at least in my field of view) led to a proliferation of useful-but-never-shipped one-off tools. Random dashboards to visualize complex queries, scripts to drive re…

> * METR was at best a flawed study.

They didn't claim it was flawless, they had just brought it up because it caused them to question their internal narrative of their own productivity.

> * Their own self-experiment is not exactly statistically sound :)

They didn't claim it was.

> * they assume that all code gets shipped as a product.

The author did not assume this. They assumed that if AI is making developers more productive, that should apply to shovelware developers. That we don't see an increase in shovelware post-AI, makes it very unlikely AI brings an increase in productivity for more complex software.

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

#436

Post by ModernMech »

cybersquare wrote: post #194

This argument is predicated on what might become an outdated idea of software as an asset. If I can quickly generate software from natural language to solve a very specific problem, that software isn't worth maintaining, let alone publishing or selling. Its value to people who aren't me is low, and its defensibility against being copied by someone else with an adequate coding agent is even lower.

> If I can quickly generate software from natural language to solve a very specific problem

This isn't likely to happen -- if the problem is very specific, you won't be able to sufficiently express it in natural language. We invented programming languages precisely because natural languages are completely unsuited for the task of precisely specifying a problem.

So how are you going to express the specificity of the problem to the LLM in natural language? Try, and you'll discover their shortcomings for yourself. Then you'll reinvent programming languages.

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

#437

Post by ketozhang »

The data is surprising. However, I do wish this article looked carefully into barriers of entry as it can explain the lack of increases in your data.

For example, in Steam, it costs $100 to release a game. You may extend your game with what's called a DLC and that costs $0 to release. If I were to build shovelware with especially with AI-generated content, I'd more keen to make a single game with a bunch of DLC.

For game development, integration of AI into engines is another barrier. There aren't that many choices of engines that gives AI an interface to work with. The obvious interface is games that can be entirely build with code (e.g., pygame; even Godot is a big stretch)

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

#439

Post by Terr_ »

scrubs wrote: post #258
atleastoptimal wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI. You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call. It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI i…

" ..hate ai..." Bad framing and worse argument. It's emotional. Every engineer here is evaluating what ai claims it can do as pronounced by ceos and managers (not expert in software dev) v reality. Follow the money.

> Follow the money.

Yeah, it's frustrating to see someone opine "critics are motivated by resentment rather than facts" as if it were street-smart savvy psychoanalysis... while completely ignoring how many influential voices boosting the concept have a bajillions of dollars in motive to speak as credulously and optimistically as possible.

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

#440

Post by sarchertech »

bmiselis wrote: post #325

That's all based on the assumption that if you can build something in 10% of the time it'd take you to build the same thing without AI, then you'll spend this 90% of your new spare time to build something else next. What if you don't and you'll just use that time to spend with your family? The data won't show it.

Sure some people would do that. But plenty of other would use the whole 90%, more would use 80%, even more 50%… So you’d surely expect an explosion in new software.
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