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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#471

Post by eudamoniac »

I have always been an AI quality sceptic. I don't believe quality software is coming out of these models, but I figured it would probably speed up the development of poor quality software. What's surprising is that is seems to not even be doing that. We've had three years of claimed "3x-10x productivity" which means thousands of people have had 9-30 developer years to do something. Where is that output? I haven't seen a single AI developed thing reach Show HN or anywhere else that was worth a damn.

So at this point I have to just assume this shit doesn't work very well for some reason, because no one is outputting anything with it that resembles good, useful software.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#472

Post by lenkite »

ok_dad wrote: post #406
hparadiz wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.

The productivity comes from not having the startup costs. You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation. I find it still takes T hours to actually implement X with an agent, but if I didn’t know how to do X it eliminates that startup cost which might make it take 3T hours instead. The only downside is not learning about method Y or Z that work differently than X…

> just verify that X works via tests and documentation.

No, its verify that X approach is semantically correct, architecturally makes sense, design is valid and then add tests and documentation. Basically, 80% of the work.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#474

Post by piva00 »

llmthrow0827 wrote: post #365
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

This would be a more compelling argument if the conversations weren't so extremely dull and derivative, with most of the articles written in LLMspeak. I see a lot of discussion and not a lot of substance; articles and discussions about AI have a much smaller chance of being compelling compared to any other technical subject posted on HN.

The signal-to-noise ratio seems worse than many other hypes but it's the general way hypes go.

It's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff at this point but I've been positively surprised by the relatively few articles sharing their more advanced workflow, lessons learnt which helps me to avoid the traps, patterns emerging that taught me something new (or at least validated approaches I tried on my own which worked). Gets tiresome to keep pace so I try to not fall for FOMO, and avoid experimenting too much to not get lost until I see a pattern emerging from different sources.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#475

Post by cowboylowrez »

PixelForg wrote: post #404

I'm so conflicted about it. My main worry is that I go all in and when I'm used to it the prices increase drastically and I can't work without it. I'm also learning art and I'll never use AI here, so I thought I have less time for hobby programming and I could just use AI for that but then I come back to the concern I mentioned above.Plus I can't proudly share anything I made with it either because I wouldn't have do…

yeah the models are great and all but will they continue to be great? anthropic has some real miserable looking finances, and as a counter example, googles gemini is starting to get stingy with its tokens or whatever (I get this from complaints in reddits antigravity threads). I suspect that googles the one who's homing in on the actual costs as anthropic and others are still in startup launch mode with all the big investments.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#476

Post by deadbabe »

hparadiz wrote: post #388
throwawaytea wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Im a novice self taught developer that somehow pushed through and made a decent PM tool for the construction industry. It works, if your users aren't malicious or too demanding. Now I'm working on a second project, all with AI. I haven't written a single line. It works better than a non programmer would make because I knew what to ask for. But I'll admit I'm not learning anything.

Can't say the same. I've been super hands on with a C project. Really getting into the details of the event bus and how to make things performant. The AI is still writing 99% of the code but I'm being super strict about what I consider acceptable.

And when you get memory leaks and don’t know how to debug?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#477

Post by catlifeonmars »

xvector wrote: post #422
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working conditions did decline as a result of industrialization. It wasn't until around the 20th century that we could say working conditions were better for most people than pre-industrial society.

More workers died working the fields prior to the Industrial Revolution, than in factories.

Source?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#478

Post by xvector »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #448
xvector wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same detractors I know today that use AI, said that LLMs were useless slop generators that would never amount to anything just a year or two ago. Detractors, doomers, and techno-pessimists have got to be the most consistently wrong group in history. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

I think the techno-pessimists were right about NFTs.

Everyone and their grandma weren't using NFTs to get real work done.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#479

Post by doublerabbit »

amelius wrote: post #344
s_u_d_o wrote: post #184

Gosh how i miss the old HN Days… where one would actually code, read docs, and develop stuff and feel happy about it. Not write a prompt and watch a chatbox do all the work in a matter of seconds. It’s like we’re losing the meaning of building something… dk how to explain it more. But yeah, it’s tech! Nothing stays the same

The old HN was full of people feeling smug about their intellectual capabilities. The new HN is full of people filled with anxiety about being replaced by an advanced calculator. To an outsider, it could almost be funny if it wasn't so sad.

And when that advanced calculator calculates division by zero. that's when it's the time to run.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#480

Post by xvector »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #477
xvector wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More workers died working the fields prior to the Industrial Revolution, than in factories.

Source?

> The rapid urbanisation that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Britain is often argued to have been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of urban conditions [...] However, demographic evidence suggests that death rates were much higher in towns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than in the nineteenth century, and that the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by profound improvements in the survival of urban residents, especially infants and rural migrants.

> early industrialisation coincided with significant improvements in survival, especially in towns (Buer, 2013; Davenport, 2020a; Landers, 1993; Wrigley et al., 1997)

> population growth rates in excess of 1% per year would have resulted in falling real wages and hunger in any previous period [...] the fact that wages kept pace at all with increasing population should be viewed as a major achievement (Crafts and Mills, 2020; Wrigley, 2011).

Davenport, Romola J. (2021). "Mortality, migration and epidemiological change in English cities, 1600–1870." International Journal of Paleopathology, 34, 37–49. PMC7611108.

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