Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mikelovesrobots.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–498 of 498 posts

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

#491

Post by chipsrafferty »

roncesvalles wrote: post #487
phatskat wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People absolutely do care what their salary is. And most people never work at Google...

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

#492

Post by chipsrafferty »

osigurdson wrote: post #429
some-guy wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never, ever seen SVPs, CEOs, and PMs completely misunderstand a technology before. And I agree with you, I think it's more of an excuse to trim fat--actual productivity is unlikely to go up (it hasn't at our Fortune 500 company)

>> productivity is unlikely to go up I wonder how that would even be measured? I suppose you could do it for roles that do the same type of work every day. I.e. perhaps there is some statistical relevance to number of calls taken in a call center per day or something like that. One the software development side however, productivity metrics are very hard to quantify. Of course, you can make a dashboard look however y…

Productivity = profit / employees

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

#493

Post by chipsrafferty »

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…

15 years ago I couldn't order mozzarella sticks in bed from my phone.

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

#494

Post by chipsrafferty »

dangus wrote: post #467
ModernMech wrote: post #428

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…

Zippers actually are worse than buttons. I can fix a broken button, if my zipper breaks I have to throw away the pair of pants.

You're assuming that people wear pants with zippers because they have a preference for it, and not because you literally cannot buy pants with buttons in 99% of stores.

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

#495

Post by jrochkind1 »

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.

> 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.

Not too different in that respect from non-AI-assisted coding! The "last 10%" is always more like 50-80%.

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

#496

Post by jrochkind1 »

some-guy wrote: post #427
materielle wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession. As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.

I have never, ever seen SVPs, CEOs, and PMs completely misunderstand a technology before. And I agree with you, I think it's more of an excuse to trim fat--actual productivity is unlikely to go up (it hasn't at our Fortune 500 company)

> I have never, ever seen SVPs, CEOs, and PMs completely misunderstand a technology before.

I'm legit not sure if that's sarcasm or not

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

#497

Post by LEDThereBeLight »

quantum2022 wrote: post #355

You're missing the forest for the trees. It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%. We could see a flourishing of ideas and programs coming out of 'regular' people. The kind of people that approach programmers with the 'I have an idea' and get ignored. Maybe the programs will be basic, but they'll be a template for something better, which then a programmer might say 'I see the value in that idea' and hel…

Great point, one that I think gets missed when you write code for a living and are comfortable with the ecosystem. But I remember when I was getting started making projects - even figuring out what I needed to google to get unblocked could feel impossible. I think AI will help bring a lot of people who are “on the border” between building something with code or giving up on the idea the boost over that line.

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

#498

Post by roncesvalles »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #491
roncesvalles wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

People absolutely do care what their salary is. And most people never work at Google...

Well clearly not enough to make the two modes meet.
Post reply on HN