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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

#471
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…

This keeps happening to me. I keep coming across big files written during my Cursor hype period from 3 months ago and finding huge non DRY chunks and genuinely useless nonsense. Yes, I should have reviewed better, but it's a lot to wade through and it ostensibly "worked," as in, the UI looked as it should.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post doesn't make any sense. I've never seen an LLM proclaim anyone to be an expert unabetted, alone the leading expert globally. And on the other side of the coin, very few people are willing to believe an obvious sycophant making claims of their greatness they themselves don't even believe.

“Vibe physics” - https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai

I don't think much of Travis Kalanick, but this kind of journalism sucks, the paper is so yellow I can barely read it.

I don't want to forego addressing your point though, and yeah, Kalanick seems to be one of the people delusional enough to believe what the bots tell him. That said, I'd argue that even then, it isn't the LLM that's puffing up his ego, it's actually his self-aggrandizing interpretation of the interaction. I doubt Grok was fawning over him and telling him he's was the smartest specialist physicist out there.

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

#473
post #366

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'…

I find that the main way it saves time is in situations where yes I know how to write code but I am looking to write something in a domain I’m less familiar with. And regex.

++1

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you also expect I mention that I used Intellisense and syntax highlighting too? No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental model of how the code works. But, I guess that's not a priority anymore if you're willing to sacrifice $2400 a year to Anthropic.

$2400? Mate, I have a free GitHub Copilot subscription (Microsoft hands them out to active OSS developers), and work pays for my Claude Code via our cloud provider backend (and it costs less per working day than my morning Monster can). LLM inference is _cheap_ and _getting cheaper every month_. > No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental…

Writing the tests by hand, but letting the AI write the code sounds horribly dull.

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

#475
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

I think you’re willfully ignorant if you’re going to claim that Slack and Kubernetes haven’t created any value. And of course these are just random examples that I happened to think of. I would say that these technologies/products being so wildly popular puts burden of proof on you to show me some kind of evidence that these technologies aren’t productive. Like are you trying to say that something had better deployme…

> I think you’re willfully ignorant if you’re going to claim that Slack and Kubernetes haven’t created any value.

The juice hasn't been worth the squeeze. You can look at all societal indicators except the stock market pointing downward to get to that conclusion. Nothing is actually better than it was in 2010 despite Uber, Airbnb, Kubernetes, Slack, and all the other SV tech "innovations". People are not happier or wealthier because of the tech coming from Silicon Valley. In general the end result of the last 15 years of tech is that it's made us more neurotic, disconnected, depressed, and angry.

We don't need "better deployment velocity and reliability for high-complexity application infrastructure deployments for large enterprises". Listen to yourself man, you sound like you've been hypnotized by the pointy-haired boss. The tech sector makes false promises about a utopia future, and then it just delivers wealth for shareholders, leaving everyone else worse off.

Grandma especially doesn't need deployment velocity, she's being evicted by her landlord because he wants to turn her flat into an Airbnb. She can't get to the grocery store because the town won't invest in public transport and Uber is the only option. She's been radicalized by Meta and Youtube and now she hates her own trans grandchild because her social media feed keeps her algorithmically outraged. Oh, and now she's getting scammed by AI asking her to invest her life savings in shitcoins and NFTs.

> The analogy is that you’re basically saying that zippers aren’t really better than buttons but then literally everyone is overwhelmingly wearing pants and coats with zippers and very strongly prefer zippers.

I don't agree that the ubiquity and utility are necessarily correlated, so I don't see the zippers and Kubernetes as analogous.

But the proliferation of zippers has more to do with the fact they are easier for manufacturers to integrate into products compared to buttons -- they come pre-measured and installing them is a straight stitch that can be done with a machine, whereas installing buttons is more time-consuming.

Zippers are worse for consumers in many ways, repairability chief among them. But really they are part of a general trend over my lifetime of steadily falling garment quality, as manufacturers race to the bottom.

> In any event, my web app example was just a poorly thought out example of a web app, I really just mean a website that has a little more utility than a static site.

You said it, not me. We had the technology to throw up a static site in 2010 and my grandmother could actually do that with dreamweaver and FTP, and it worked fine.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage. When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happen…

I believe we are vastly underestimating the number of programmers needed, as some companies reap unusually high rewards from hiring programmers. Companies like Google can pay huge sums of money to programmers because they make even higher sums of money from the programmer's work. This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development…

But if only Google or similarly sized companies can pay that well, and there’s tons of programmers, obviously the average salary will balance out lower than what Google pay but will still be competitive to the thousands of programmers who didn’t get hired at Google.

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

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's where we're going to see a lot of entry-level jobs go away, in many domains.

And to me this is worse news. People in higher paying jobs are the ones that would hurt the economic fabric more, but by that token they’d have more power and influence to ensure a better safety net for the inevitable rise of AI and automation in much of the workforce.

Entry level workers can’t afford to not work, they can’t afford to protest or advocate, they can’t afford the future that AI is bringing closer to their doorsteps. Without that safety net, they’ll be struggling and impoverished. And then will everyone in the higher paying positions help, or will we ignore the problem until AI actually is capable of replacing us, and will it be too late by then?

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

#478
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…

Recently I tried to scaffold a website with a well known coding agent. It didn’t work. I asked a colleague. He had the same problem. Turned out it was using out of date setup instructions for a major tool that has changed post training. After spending time fixing the problem, I realised (1) it would have been faster to do it myself and (2) I can no longer trust that tool to set anything up - what if it’s doing someth…

You'd run into the same issues if you followed a slightly outdated medium tutorial on the topic!

React had this issue when they changed away from create react app. Basically every tutorial for years was instantly made obsolete, despite occupying all the top search results slots.

Forums where filled with confusion for quite awhile.

Now days most libraries seem to rely on "content producers" to document how to actually do things and don't bother with great docs filled with examples. In decades gone past, companies would hire actual authors to write real physical books on how to use new APIs.

LLMs just have a higher latency on updating their reference material.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2400? Mate, I have a free GitHub Copilot subscription (Microsoft hands them out to active OSS developers), and work pays for my Claude Code via our cloud provider backend (and it costs less per working day than my morning Monster can). LLM inference is _cheap_ and _getting cheaper every month_. > No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental…

Writing the tests by hand, but letting the AI write the code sounds horribly dull.

I'm an infrastructure/platform engineer. If the code is boring, that probably means I'm doing my job well. This isn't hobby coding.

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's where we're going to see a lot of entry-level jobs go away, in many domains. And to me this is worse news. People in higher paying jobs are the ones that would hurt the economic fabric more, but by that token they’d have more power and influence to ensure a better safety net for the inevitable rise of AI and automation in much of the workforce. Entry level workers can’t afford to not work, they can’t afford…

> will everyone in the higher paying positions help, or will we ignore the problem until AI actually is capable of replacing us, and will it be too late by then

if history is anything to go by, it'll be the latter, sadly

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