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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

#481

Post by cybersquare »

ModernMech wrote: post #436
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This argument is predicated on what might become an outdated idea of software as an asset.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 p…

This is a bit backwards. Formal systems engineering is rooted in defining problems in natural language. The programming languages are normally used for defining the solutions, not the problems. Even if you're taking about TDD, the executable tests are still derived from natural language test case specifications.

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

#482

Post by apercu »

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…

I tried that a few months ago. Just wanted a static site to replace an old WP site. It was a total disappointment. I’m not invested enough to do a write up but I tried 3 LLM models and multiple services and all I got was a bunch of dependencies and technologies that I explicitly said I didn’t want. I would has been better off using one of those build your website services for non technical people.

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

#483

Post by rhubarbtree »

com2kid wrote: post #478
rhubarbtree wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 You'd run into the same issues if you followed a slightly outdated medium tutorial on the topic!

You’re right, and in the past I have. So I know to always check the authorities sources for setup instructions.

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

#484

Post by KETpXDDzR »

If LLMs make devs 19% less effective on average and the number of releases is growing the same, doesn't that mean that

1. Only a handful of devs use LLMs

2. For every developer getting less productive with LLMs, there must be developers that get more productive to keep the trend

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

#486

Post by roncesvalles »

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?

1. OBBB rolled back the R&D deduction changes in Section 174 that (allegedly) triggered the layoffs and froze up hiring in 2022-2023.

2. It looks like rates will keep going down.

3. Fewer people are going into CS due to the AI hysteria. You might say oh there's a 4 year lag, but not quite. We should see an immediate impact from career changers, CS grads choosing between career and professional school, and those switching out of CS careers.

The tech AI fear hysteria is so widespread that I've even heard of people avoiding non-SWE tech careers like PM.

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

#487

Post by roncesvalles »

phatskat wrote: post #476
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>but will still be competitive to the thousands of programmers who didn’t get hired at Google

Why would this be the case? Many programmers join Google or Meta (or similar tier companies) and immediately double or triple their income. Software salaries are famously bimodal and people often transition from the lower mode to the higher mode practically overnight.

In fact (and I'm not an economist) I conjecture that the lower mode exists because the upper mode exists. That is, people purposefully don't really care what their salary is (i.e. don't put upward wage pressure) when they're at lower-mode companies because they know one day they'll make the leap to the upper-mode. In other words, the fact that Google-tier companies pay well allows other companies to pay poorly because those guys are just padding their resumes to get a 350k job at Google and don't really care whether Bank of Nowhere pays them $90k or $110k.

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

#488

Post by dangus »

ModernMech wrote: post #475
dangus wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

1. You're going off-topic, we weren't talking about societal happiness, we were talking about whether productivity and the ease of developing for the Internet has increased. E.g. if you are trying to claim that Kubernetes doesn't work better for companies than previous solutions wrestling with Chef or Puppet with dependency hell in some VMs I am just going to assume you've never touched a backend and think Terraform is something you do in Sim City 2000.

2. Like it or not, the customers of the tech industry include a lot of large enterprises that do find value in improving velocity and reliability for complex workflows. I am not some kind of corporate sellout for pointing out this plain factual reality.

3. I totally agree with your points about income inequality and happiness metrics among our population but they are not relevant to the topic at hand.

4. If Dreamweaver and FTP is your barometer, recall that Dreamweaver was an expensive paid product. There still are plenty of FTP-based web hosts and you can totally throw up a website with a tool like https://trix-editor.org/, which as I mentioned is a tool that did not exist 15 years ago. You can also just pay for a website service like SquareSpace or Wix (or not, they have free tiers).

The fact that specific individual tools do not exist/are not supported anymore is irrelevant, as there are dozens of often-better tools for throwing a website up that are definitely friendly to novices. Let's not forget the plethora of no-code application development tools that are mostly a recent development.

Mobile users prefer apps 60% over websites. So the real modern barometer is: could your Grandma put up an iPhone app in 2008 following the developer tutorials using Objective-C or would she have a much better time using Swift and/or a no-code app development solution?

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

#489

Post by jdiff »

HankStallone wrote: post #410
emodendroket wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that different from scrolling through Stack Overflow answers and rejecting the ones that aren't suitable? A lot of times you can tell it what specifically you didn't like about the solution and get another crack anyway (e.g., "let's iterate over the characters to do this rather than using a regex")

I've asked AIs for help in doing things in Salesforce, and the answers tend to be a 50/50 mix of correct steps and garbage. It's not hard to see why, because there's a lot of garbage on support sites, much of it because it's outdated. Garbage in, garbage out. The difference is that if I go directly to the support site, there's a decent chance I can quickly spot and reject the garbage based on the date, the votes it's…

Lot of support sites are AI generated themselves now. Lenovo's support site is absolute garbage, it has entire articles dedicated to explaining how to use your laptop's screen as a monitor by setting the HDMI to INPUT instead of OUTPUT, something flatly not possible on any laptop. Also mentions VGA and DVI in 2025, something no laptop they sell features.

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

#490

Post by chipsrafferty »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #340
rsynnott wrote: post #309

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…

You could make this argument about almost literally every field.
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