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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#551

Post by artur44 »

artur44 wrote: post #19

A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotc…

I think some wires got crossed. My point wasn’t that LLMs can’t produce useful infra or complex code clearly they can, as many examples here show. It’s just that neither extreme narrative AI writes everything now vs. you can’t trust it for anything serious reflects how teams actually work. LLMs are great accelerators for boilerplate, declarative configs, and repetitive logic, but they don’t replace engineering judgement they shift where that judgement is applied. That’s why I see AI as real, transformative tech inside an overhyped investment cycle, not as magic that removes humans from the loop.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#552

Post by roncesvalles »

sethammons wrote: post #27
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers."

Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time).

The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot, nor does it lower the bar for the people that you can train as pilots.

The benefits of LLM programming are mostly going to be subsumed by the operator, to make their lives easier. Very little is gonna go to their employer (despite all the pressure), and this is not due to some principal-agent breakdown; it's just intrinsic to the nature of this work.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#553

Post by mcv »

calebm wrote: post #468
mcv wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently trying to get Claude Sonnet 4.5 to produce a graph rendering algorithm, and while it's producing results, they're not the right results. I should probably do this myself and let the AI handle just the boilerplate code.

I have consistently had good results when I understand the problem and outsource the details to AI, but bad results when I try to have it work without me understanding the problem.

Yeah, but then what do you need the AI for? It's programming it myself that helps me understand all the intricacies of the problem. That's exactly the part that gets cut off by outsourcing it to AI. The AI is not a "world class programmer" if it still needs me to tell it the solution to the problem.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#554

Post by wakawaka28 »

9rx wrote: post #515
wakawaka28 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you don't know what vibecoding is. I don't believe you. As we both know, the AI we are talking about uses natural language as input. To address the ridiculous connections you are trying to make, I am forced to distinguish natural languages from programming languages. You might like to overlook the vast differences between programming languages and natural languages to try to support your point. But th…

> There is no way you don't know what vibecoding is. I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too. Is that the point of contention here? If so, that's pretty silly. When I write "compiler" it means what I mean it to mean, not what some arbitrary kid I've never met thinks it means. How can someone use a word in a way that they don't even know exists? > As we both know, the…

>I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too.

No, this all started because you asserted that compilers are equivalent to AI. Being old is not really an excuse for pulling the rhetorical stunts you've been pulling like calling someone you've never met an "arbitrary kid"... As a matter of fact, I'm old too.

This is where I started replying to you, I think:

>It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them. > >Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you. > >But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.

There are multiple issues with this comment that I have outlined in my other comments. It is so wrong, like all your other replies to me, that I think you're trolling me.

>That is not what I am talking about. Did you press the wrong reply button? That would explain your deep confusion.

This whole thread and the post itself is very much about what AI is and how it's used.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#555

Post by nomel »

roncesvalles wrote: post #552
sethammons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers." Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time). The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot,…

> ergo, we need fewer programmers.

How so? And in what context?

Where I am, headcount is based on "can we finish and sustain these planned and present required projects". If these automations allow a developer to burn less time, it reduces the need for headcount. As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#556

Post by 9rx »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #554
9rx wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way you don't know what vibecoding is. I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too. Is that the point of contention here? If so, that's pretty silly. When I write "compiler" it means what I mean it to mean, not what some arbitrary kid I've never met thinks it means. How can someone use a word in a way that they don't even know exists? > As we both know, the…

>I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too. No, this all started because you asserted that compilers are equivalent to AI. Being old is not really an excuse for pulling the rhetorical stunts you've been pulling like calling someone you've never met an "arbitrary kid"... As a matter of fact, I'm old too. This is where I started replying to you, I think: >It's not exactl…

> No, this all started because you asserted that compilers are equivalent to AI.

I asserted that typing in what you want and feeding it into something that outputs code is that something being a compiler. Call that AI if you want, but I've always known that to be a compiler. Again, I'm old, so maybe terms are changing and I'm not in touch with that. I don't know. I'm not sure I care. Logically, "compiler" when used in my writings means what I intend it to mean. It makes no difference what others think it means.

Compilers are not equivalent to AI as, at least in my day, AI is a field of computer science, not any specific type of tool. But compilers are typically designed as rule-based “expert systems”, which traditionally has fallen under the AI umbrella. Well, unless you are in the "its only AI if I don't understand it" camp. In which case nothing is AI in any meaningful sense.

Not that it matters as "compiler" always used to refer to the functionality, not how it is implemented. If you built a C compiler that used neural nets, it would still be a compiler. If you built a C compiler based on mechanical turk it would still be a compiler. We call(ed) it a compiler because of what it does, not how it works beneath the sheets.

> There are multiple issues with this comment that I have outlined in my other comments.

It seems you found multiple issues based on the false premise of "typing in what you want" referring to natural language, but I wasn't talking about natural language. I was talking about programming languages. That is what you do with programming languages: You type in what you want, pass it to a compiler, and it generates code.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#557

Post by [deleted] »

roncesvalles wrote: post #552
sethammons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers." Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time). The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot,…

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#558

Post by engineer_22 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #552
sethammons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers." Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time). The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot,…

> The benefits of LLM programming are mostly going to be subsumed by the operator, to make their lives easier. Very little is gonna go to their employer

your boss is going to let you go home if you get all your work done early?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#559

Post by ranger_danger »

immibis wrote: post #501
macrolime wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying machine code is public domain if it's compiled from C? If not, why would AI generated code be any different?

No, and your comment is ridiculously bad faith. Courts ruled that outputs of LLMs are not copyrightable. They did not rule that outputs of compilers are not copyrightable.

I think that lawsuit was BS because it went on the assumption that the LLM was acting 100% autonomously with zero human input, which is not how the vast majority of them work. Same for compilers... a human has to give it instructions on what to generate, and I think that should be considered a derivative work that is copyrightable.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#560

Post by liampulles »

> Coding, which we called “computer programming” 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI. In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. According to my guide here, “There is no speculation about whether or not human replacement will take place in that vertical.”

I'm starting to believe that AI coding optimism/pessimism maps to how much one actually cares about system longevity.

If a given developer just takes on board the demands for speed from the business and/or does not care about long-term maintainability (and I mean hey, some businesses foster that, and scaling quickly is important in many cases), then I can totally understand why they would embrace AI agents.

If you care about theory building, and domain driven design, and making a system comprehensive enough to extend in a year or two's time, then I can understand the resistance for the AI to let-it-rip. I admit to falling in this camp.

Am I off the mark here? I'd really like to hear from people who care about the long term who also let agents run relatively wild.

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