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Where I'm at with AI

paulosman.me

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Re: Where I'm at with AI

#51

Post by dudeinhawaii »

I'm very PRO AI and a daily user but let's be real, where is the productivity gain? It's at the edges, it's in greenfield, we've seen a handful of "things written with AI" be launched successfully and the majority of the time these are shovels for other AI developers. Large corporations are not releasing even 5x higher velocity or quality. Ditto for small corporations. If the claimed multipliers were broadly real at the org level, we would be seeing obvious outward signals like noticeably faster release cycles in mainstream products, more credible challengers shipping mature alternatives, and more rapid catching-up in open-source software projects. I am not seeing that yet, is anyone else? It feels like the 'invisible productivity' version of Gross Domestic Product claims, the claims don't seem to match real-world.

And those are the EASY things for AI to "put out of work".

HARD systems like government legacy systems are not something you can slap 200 unit tests on and say "agent re-write this in Rust". They're hard because of the complex interconnects, myriad patches, workarounds, institutional data codified both in the codebase and outside of it. Bugs that stay bugs because they next 20 versions used that bug in some weird way. I started my career in that realm. I call bullshit on AI taking any jobs here if it can't even accelerate the pace of _quality_ releases of OS and video games.

I'm not saying this won't happen eventually but that eventually is doing a heavy lift. I am skeptical of the 6-12 month timelines for broad job displacement that I see mentioned.

AIs (LLMs) are useful in this subtle way like "Google Search" and _not_ like "the internet". It's a very specific set of text heavy information domains that are potentially augmented. That's great but it's not the end of all work or even the end of all lucrative technical work.

It's a stellar tool for smart engineers to do _even_ more, and yet, the smart ones know you have to babysit and double-check -- so it's not remotely a replacement.

This is without even opening the can of worms that is AI Agency.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#52

Post by libraryofbabel »

ivanstojic wrote: post #4

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.” I’m tired of the hype boss.

This point about "some people already said six months ago that it was better than it was six months ago" is regularly trotted out in threads like this like it's some sort of trump card that proves AI is just hype. It doesn't make sense to me. What else do you expect people to be saying about a rapidly-improving technology? How does it help you to distinguish technologies that are hype from those that are not?

I'm sure people were saying similar things about, say, aviation all through the first decades of the 20th century, "wow, those planes are getting better every few years"... "Until recently planes were just gimmicks, but now they can fly across the English channel!"... "I wouldn't have got in one of those death traps 5 years ago, but now I might consider it!" And different people were saying things like that at different times, because they had different views of the technology, different definitions of usefulness, different appetites for risk. It's just a wide range of voices talking in similar-sounding terms about a rapidly-developing technology over a span of time.

This is just how people are going to talk about rapidly-improving technologies for which different people have different levels of adoption at different times. It's not a terribly interesting point. You have to engage with the specifics, I'm afraid.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#53

Post by rootnod3 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #21
rootnod3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN. Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do no…

It’s already causing massive problems before we even got to models that even do anything actually useful.

Wait until other countries jump in the bandwagon and see energy prices jump.

Currently it is mostly the US and China.

And RAM and GPU prices are already through the roof with SSDs to follow.

That is for now with ONLY the US market mostly.

And those “net benefits” you talk about have very questionable data behind it.

It’s a net loss of you ask me.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#54

Post by speff »

bandrami wrote: post #34

> I use it for routine coding tasks like generating scaffolding or writing tests IDK this sounds a whole lot like paying for snippets

Framed this way, it's useful for saving time creating or finding those snippets at least.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#55

Post by goalieca »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

> increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work. Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a…

> There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that.

I don’t think typing code was ever the problem here. I’m doubtful this got any cheaper.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#56

Post by rootnod3 »

bandrami wrote: post #34

> I use it for routine coding tasks like generating scaffolding or writing tests IDK this sounds a whole lot like paying for snippets

Almost. It’s worse though. It’s using snippets without using grey matter and shifting blame if needed.

A snippet for a for loop in your editor, yeah, go ahead. A “snippet for “make this spec into half assed code” is a wholly different story.

Overpaid bubble snippets at best.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#57

Post by wiseowise »

sharifhsn wrote: post #15
rootnod3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN. Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations. The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI r…

> AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production.

It's almost like humans evolved from prehistoric times eating meat. Wild discovery, right?

> And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.

Why don't AI bros lobby the changes? Much harder than selling snake oil and getting rid of programmers, I guess.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#58

Post by sooklord »

wiseowise wrote: post #57
sharifhsn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations. The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI r…

> AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. It's almost like humans evolved from prehistoric times eating meat. Wild discovery, right? > And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations. Why don't AI bros lobby the changes? Much harder than selling snake oil and getting rid of programmers, I guess.

[dead]

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#59

Post by rootnod3 »

speff wrote: post #54
bandrami wrote: post #34

> I use it for routine coding tasks like generating scaffolding or writing tests IDK this sounds a whole lot like paying for snippets

Framed this way, it's useful for saving time creating or finding those snippets at least.

for….

Yeh, you are right. A snippet for they would have taken longer than booting an agent and let it hallucinate for—loop parameters that didn’t even exist.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#60

Post by Normal_gaussian »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #49

This article is different because it actually talks about code review, which I don’t see very often. Especially in the ultra-hype 1000x “we built an operating system in a day using agentic coding”, it seems like code review is implied to be a thing of the past. As long as code continues to need to be reviewed to (mostly) maintain a chain of liability, I don’t see SWE going anywhere like both hypebros and doomers seem…

This is one of the key elements that will shift the SWE discipline. We will move to more explicitly editing systems by their footprint and guarantees, and verifying that what exists matches those.
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