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

State of AI-assisted software development

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#61

Post by bluefirebrand »

surgical_fire wrote: post #5
wiz21c wrote: post #2

> This indicates that AI outputs are perceived as useful and valuable by many of this year’s survey respondents, despite a lack of complete trust in them. Or the respondents have hard times admitting AI can replace them :-) I'm a bit cynical but sometimes when I use Claude, it is downright frightening how good it is sometimes. Having coded for a lot of year, I'm sometimes a bit scared that my craft can, somtimes, be…

In a report from Google, who is heavily invested in AI becoming the future, I actually expect the respondents to sound more positive about AI than they actually are Much like in person I pretend to think AI is much more powerful and inevitable than I actually think it is. Professionally it makes very little sense to be truthful. Sincerity won't pay the bills.

Everyone lying to their bosses about how useful AI is has placed us all in a prisoner's dilemma where we all have to lie or we get replaced

If only people could be genuinely critical without worrying they will be fired

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#62

Post by philipwhiuk »

kemayo wrote: post #57
karakot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, just assume it's an IDE with 'smarter' autosuggest.

That's fair -- the vibe of the post was making me think of the more "Claude, write a function to do X" style of development, but a bunch of people answering the survey with "oh yeah, Xcode added that new autocomplete didn't it?" would do a lot to get us to that kind of number.

I’ve always assumed that’s the point of these things. Ask a broad question that will allow you to write a puffy blogpost that backs your conclusion and then write it in a way that pushes your tools.

The amount of free training coming out on AI shows just how keen they are to push adoption to meet their targets.

Eventually these training will no longer be free as they pivot to profit.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#63

Post by bluefirebrand »

akomtu wrote: post #52
xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

When neuralink becomes usable, the same hordes of people will rush to install the AI plugin so it can relieve their brains from putting in any effort. The rest will be given a difficult choice: do the same or become unemployable in the new AI economy.

I can't wait until people are writing malware that targets neuralink users with brain death

Cyberpunk future here we come baby

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#64

Post by signatoremo »

xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

Your rant is misplaced. It should be placed on hiring — candidates screening, on training — getting junior developers ready for their job, on engineering - code review and testing, and so on.

If anything, AI helps expose shortcomings of companies. The strong ones will fix them. The weak ones will languish.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#65

Post by dbs »

No need for evidence of net benefits to get mass adoption. We have mass adoption of digital touchpads in cars despite evidence they are not safe. We have widespread adoption of open spaces despite evidence of them not increasing productivity..

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#66

Post by surgical_fire »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #61
surgical_fire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a report from Google, who is heavily invested in AI becoming the future, I actually expect the respondents to sound more positive about AI than they actually are Much like in person I pretend to think AI is much more powerful and inevitable than I actually think it is. Professionally it makes very little sense to be truthful. Sincerity won't pay the bills.

Everyone lying to their bosses about how useful AI is has placed us all in a prisoner's dilemma where we all have to lie or we get replaced If only people could be genuinely critical without worrying they will be fired

I agree. I also don't make the rules.

And to be honest, I don't really care. It is a very comfortable position to be in. Allow me to explain:

I genuinely believe AI poses no threat to my employment. I identify the only medium term threat the very likely economic slowdown in the coming years.

Meanwhile, I am happy to do this silly dance while companies waste money and resources on what I see as a dead-end, wasteful technology.

I am not here to make anything better.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#67

Post by saulpw »

JLO64 wrote: post #42
xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

I'm not surprised to see reports like this for open source projects where the bar for contributing is relatively low, but am surprised to see it in the workplace. You'd imagine that devs like that would be filtered out via the hiring process... I'm a coding tutor and the most frustrating part of my job is when my students use LLM generated code. They have no clue what the code does (or even what libraries they're usi…

> You'd imagine that devs like that would be filtered out via the hiring process...

...except when the C-suite is pressuring the entire org to use AI tools. Then these people are blessed as the next generation of coders.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#68

Post by saulpw »

driverdan wrote: post #51
xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

> We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span This isn't about age. I'm in my 40's and my attention span seems to have gotten worse. I don't use much social media anymore either. I see it in other people too regardless of age.

Same. What do you think it's about? Future shock? Smartphone use (separate from social media)? Singularity overwhelm? Long Covid?

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#69

Post by Archelaos »

xgbi wrote: post #58
Archelaos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you I spent 45 min reviewing instead of outright rejecting it? (Honest question.)

Cause the codebase wasn't in my scope originally and I had to review in emergency due to a regression in production. I took the time to understand the issue at hand and why the code had to change. To be clear, the guy moved back a Docker image from being non-root (user 1000), to reusing a root user and `exec su` into the user after doing some root things in the entrypoint. The only issue is that when looking at the p…

Thank you for your explanation. I wondered what might motivate someone to devote so much time to something like this. An emergency due to a regression in production is, of course, a valid reason. And also thank you for sharing the details. It brought a sarcastic smile to my face.

Re: State of AI-assisted software development

#70

Post by jdiff »

signatoremo wrote: post #64
xgbi wrote: post #33

Rant mode on. For the second time of the week this morning, I spent 45 min reviewing a merge request where the guy has no idea what he did, didn’t test, and let the llm hallucinate a very bad solution to a simple problem. He just had to read the previous commit, which introduced the bug, and think about it for 1min. We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about…

Your rant is misplaced. It should be placed on hiring — candidates screening, on training — getting junior developers ready for their job, on engineering - code review and testing, and so on. If anything, AI helps expose shortcomings of companies. The strong ones will fix them. The weak ones will languish.

Assuming you're right, I don't believe the effect will be at all dramatic. The vast majority of businesses are not in breakneck, life-or-death, do-or-die competition. The vast majority of business do quite a lot of languishing in a variety of areas, and yet they keep their clients and customers and even continue to grow despite not just languishing, but solid leaps backwards and even direct shots to the foot.

How do you propose that AI will do what you suggest, exposing shortcomings of companies? Right now, when it's being implemented, it's largely dictates from above with little but FOMO driving it, no cohesive direction to guide its use.

Post reply on HN