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

#441

Post by ansgri » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:08 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #381

dangus wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where? 25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whateve…

100% this. At that time if one needed a simple custom database client with GUI and analytical reports, the go-to solution was MS Access and it was working well. Could even be placed on a shared drive. Now, as accepted solution, you either pay for different SaaSes, each with a fraction of functionality, or have to code a bespoke website using overcomplicated frameworks.

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

#442

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:12 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.

Us devs always (justifiably) complain how the PHBs of the world go all "looks great, now ship it" when presented a minimal prototype hacked together in a week, missing 95% of all the time-consuming parts. Apparently it’s easy to fall into the same trap even when you should know better…

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

#443

Post by saulpw » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

larve wrote: post #418

saulpw wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tuned in to a random spot at a random episode, didn't see any coding but did get to hear you say: "I'm a person who hates art now...I never want to see art again. All I want to see is like, AI stuff. That's how bad it's gotten. Handmade? nuh-uh. Handmade code? ... anything by humans, just over. I'm just gonna watch pixels." https://www.youtube.com/live/APkR4qRg1vM?si=XLGmH9uEjG08q-6x... I watched a little more but…

I'm always a very serious person while I wait for people to join the stream. I'm sorry you weren't impressed, but tbf that's not really my goal, I just like building things and yapping about it.

I'm not sure why you bother yapping about it yourself. It's too human. Just give an LLM a list of lowercase bullet points and have an AI voiceover read them. It'll be 10x more efficient.

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

#444

Post by card_zero » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

tavavex wrote: post #413

card_zero wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These postulated entities are by definition people. Not humans, because they lack the biology, but that's a detail. If you think they're going to be trained on all the world's data, that's still supposing them to be an extension of AI. No, they'll have to pick up their knowledge culturally, the same way everybody else does, by watching cartoons - I mean by interactions with mentors. They might have their own culture,…

> These postulated entities are by definition people. Why? Does your definition postulate that people are the only thing in the universe that can measure up to us? Or the inverse, that every entity as sentient and intelligent as us must be called a person? My opinion is that a lot of what makes us like this is physiological. Unless the developers go out of their way to simulate these things, a hypothetical AGI won't…

The latter, that intelligence is one thing, and that to imagine that an artificial intelligence would be some kind of beyond-intelligence, and would be a beyond-person, is to needlessly multiply entities. The assumption should be there's only (potential to create) people like us, because to imagine beyond-people is to get mystical about it. "Beyond-rats" is what I say to that.

I have sympathy with the point about physiology, though, I think being non-biological has to feel very different. You're released from a lot of the human condition, you're not driven by hormones or genes, your plans aren't hijacked to get you to reproduce or eat more or whatever animal thing, you don't have the same needs. That's all liable to alienate you from the meat-based folk. However, you're still a person.

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

#445

Post by ketozhang » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

noodletheworld wrote: post #282

solatic wrote: post #270

I'm not sure what to make of these takes because so many people are using such an enormous variety of LLM tooling in such a variety of ways, people are going to get a variety of results. Let's take the following scenario for the sake of argument: a codebase with well-defined AGENTS.md, referencing good architecture, roadmap, and product documentation, and with good test coverage, much of which was written by an LLM a…

> people are going to get a variety of results. Yes, but the point of this article is surely that on average if it's working, there would be obvious signs of it working by now. Even if there are statistical outliers (ie. 10x productivity using the tools), if on average, it does nothing to the productivity of developers, something isn't working as promised.

We need long running averages and 2023-2025 is still too early to determine it's not effective. The barriers of entry for 2023 and 2024, I'd argue is too high for inexperienced developers to start churning software. For seasoned developers, the skepticism and company adoption wasn't there yet (and still isn't).

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

#446

Post by Sammi » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

thegrim33 wrote: post #408

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…

"LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup" Just a random personal anecdote I wanted to throw out. I recently had to build some custom UI with Qt. I hadn't worked with Qt in a decade and barely remembered it. Seems like a perfect use case for AI to get me "up to speed" on the library, right? It's an incredibly well documented library with lots written on it…

Today I asked Claude how to ignore Typescript type checking in some vendored js files in my project. It churned on this and ended up turning off type checking on all js files in my project and proudly declaring it a great success because the errors were gone. Hurray. If I knew nothing about my project then I would be none the wiser.

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

#447

Post by techpineapple » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

gyanchawdhary wrote: post #272

techpineapple wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of these things is not like the other.

Ah yes .. such a great point

You don't really think that.

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

#448

Post by GuB-42 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:41 PM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #310

jryio wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and this is the placid version where lazy programmers elect to lighten their cognitive load by farming out to AI. An insidious version is AGI replacing human cognition. To replace human thought is to replace a biological ability which progresses on evolutionary timescales - not a Moore's law approximate curve. The issue in your skull will quite literally be as useful as a cow's for solving problems... think about…

There's no connection between AI and AGI, apart from hopes. Besides which, if you're talking about AGI, you're talking about artificial people. That means: • They don't really want to be servants. • They have biases and preferences. • Some of them are stupid. • If you'd like to own an AGI that thinks for you, the AGI would also like one. • They are people with cognition, even if we stop being.

AGI just means what it says it is: Artificial General Intelligence. AGIs don't have to have selfish traits like we do, they don't have to follow the rules of natural selection, they just need to solve general problems.

Think of them like worker bees. Bees can solve general problems, though not on level as humans do, they are like some primitive kind of AGI. They also live and die to be servants to the queen and they don't want to be queens themselves, the reason why is interesting btw, it involves genetics and game theory.

This is highly theoretical anyways, we have no idea how to make an AGI yet, and LLMs are probably a dead end as they can't interact with the physical world.

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

#449

Post by RichardCA » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 11:09 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #46

rglover wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My manager told me that the time to deliver my latest project was cut to 20% of the original estimate because we are "an AI-first company". Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do.

Do not forgive them. We already have a description for them: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

Ironically, I would far prefer the Douglas Adams idea of "Genuine People Personalities" over the current status quo.

If the self checkout scanner at the supermarket started bickering with me for entering the wrong produce code, that would wrap up the whole Turing Test thing for me.

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

#450

Post by GuB-42 » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

Same thing as all the "no-code" or "low-code" frameworks we see coming up from time to time.

No need to learn a programming language, wow, anyone can be a programmer now. A few projects come out of it, people marvel at how efficient it was, and it fizzles out and programmers continue writing code.

If anything, things like visual programming did more than AI does now. For games, if you want to see the shovelware, look at Flash, RPG maker, etc... not AI. On the business side of things, Excel is king. Can you get your vibe coded app out faster than by using Flash or Excel?