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

Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 84 posts

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#61

Post by bdangubic »

danpalmer wrote: post #50
bdangubic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

year-over-year we are at around 45% in increased productivity and this trajectory is on an upward slope

How are you measuring increased productivity? Honest question, because I've seen teams claim more code, but I've also seen teams say they're seeing more unnecessary churn (which is more code). I'm interested in business outcomes, is more code or perceived velocity translating into benefits to the business? This is really hard to measure though because in pretty much any startup or growing company you'll see better bu…

same as we have before LLMs for a decade - story points. we move faster now, we have automated stuff we could never automate before. same project, largely same team since 2016, we just get a lot more shit done, a lot more

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#62

Post by bdangubic »

lomase wrote: post #52
bdangubic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

year-over-year we are at around 45% in increased productivity and this trajectory is on an upward slope

This reads like the bullshit bulletpoints people write on their CV.

comments like this give me warm and fuzzy feeling that theoretically we compete for same jobs - no worries about job security for forseeable future :)

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#63

Post by lomase »

bdangubic wrote: post #62
lomase wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like the bullshit bulletpoints people write on their CV.

comments like this give me warm and fuzzy feeling that theoretically we compete for same jobs - no worries about job security for forseeable future :)

Someones ego got hurt.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#64

Post by vivzkestrel »

bdangubic wrote: post #21
neuronic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you getting these results? Even with grounding in sources, careful context engineering and whatever technique comes to your mind we are just getting sloppy junk out of all models we have tried. The sketchy part is that LLMs are super good at faking confidence and expertise all while randomly injected subtle but critical hallucinations. This ruins basically all significant output. Double-checking and babysitti…

I genuinely think that biggest issue LLM tools is that most people expect magic because first attempts at some simple things feel magical. however, they take insane amount of time to get expertise in. what is confusing is that I think SWEs spent immense amounts of time in general learning the tools of the trade but this seems to escape a lot of people when it comes to LLMs. on my team, every developer is using LLMs a…

dont you think it would be better off getting that expertise in actual system design, software engineering and all the programming related fields. by involving chat GPT to make code, we ll eventually lose the skill to sit and craft code like we used to do all these years. after all the brain s neural pathways only remember what you put to work daily

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#65

Post by bdangubic »

caseyf7 wrote: post #59
bdangubic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely think that biggest issue LLM tools is that most people expect magic because first attempts at some simple things feel magical. however, they take insane amount of time to get expertise in. what is confusing is that I think SWEs spent immense amounts of time in general learning the tools of the trade but this seems to escape a lot of people when it comes to LLMs. on my team, every developer is using LLMs a…

Where are you finding the best material for reading/learning?

- everything that simon writes (https://simonwillison.net/)

- anything that goes deep into issues (I seldom read “i love llms” type posts like this is great: https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09/15/ai-unit-of-work/)

- lots of experimentation - specifically I have spent hours and hours doing the exact same feature (my record is 23 times).

- if something “doesn’t work” I create a task immediately to investigate and understand it. even the smallest thing that bother me I will spend hours to figure out why it might have happened (this is sometimes frustrating) and how to prevent it from happening again (this is fun)

My collegue describes the process as Javascript developer trying to learn Rust while tripping on mushrooms :)

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#66

Post by gedy »

bdangubic wrote: post #61
danpalmer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you measuring increased productivity? Honest question, because I've seen teams claim more code, but I've also seen teams say they're seeing more unnecessary churn (which is more code). I'm interested in business outcomes, is more code or perceived velocity translating into benefits to the business? This is really hard to measure though because in pretty much any startup or growing company you'll see better bu…

same as we have before LLMs for a decade - story points. we move faster now, we have automated stuff we could never automate before. same project, largely same team since 2016, we just get a lot more shit done, a lot more

So something like: automate unit tests, where the tests are X points where you'd not have done these before?

Not snarking, but if they are automated away, then isn't this like 0 story points for effort/complexity?

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#67

Post by 0000000000100 »

cjbarber wrote: post #13
neuronic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you getting these results? Even with grounding in sources, careful context engineering and whatever technique comes to your mind we are just getting sloppy junk out of all models we have tried. The sketchy part is that LLMs are super good at faking confidence and expertise all while randomly injected subtle but critical hallucinations. This ruins basically all significant output. Double-checking and babysitti…

What are you trying to use LLMs for and what model are you using?

Depends a lot. Use it for one off scripts, particularly for anything Microsoft 365 related (expanding Sharepoint drives, analyzing AWS usage, general IT stuff). Where there is a lot of heavy context based business logic it will fail since there’s too much context for it to be successful.

I work in custom software where the gap in non-LLM users and those who at least roughly know how to use it is huge.

It largely depends on the prompt though. Our ChatGPT account is shared so I get to take a gander at the other usages and it’s pretty easy see: “okay this person is asking the wrong thing”. The prompt and the context has a major impact on the quality of the response.

In my particular line of work, it’s much more useful than not. But I’ve been focusing on helping build the right prompts with the right context, which makes many tasks actually feasible where before it would be way out of scope for our clients budgets.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#68

Post by l1ng0 »

lomase wrote: post #54
prewett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solve quantum physics" meaning generating closed-form solutions to the Schrodinger equation for atoms of any composition? Of arbitrary molecules? Good luck with that... Even for the hydrogen atom, the textbook said "so it happens that just so happens to solve this equation", instead of the derivations one would normally expect. I doubt we have even invented the math to solve the equations much above the hydrogen ato…

My mistake, he did not say solve quantum physics. He did say if Chat GTP 8 creates a theory of quantum gravity... I can't... that will mean we have reached AGI.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#69

Post by jemmyw »

naveen99 wrote: post #18

It’s not like anyone is going in debt to pay for gpu’s though. So it’s probably ok. Now if banks start selling 30 year mortgages for gpu’s, I might get a little worried.

I don't know if that was epic sarcasm, but companies are doing exactly that. CoreWeave has taken on something like $30b of debt against the value of their GPUs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2025/09/22/cor...

They aren't the only company doing this.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#70

Post by 0000000000100 »

oblio wrote: post #20
neuronic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you getting these results? Even with grounding in sources, careful context engineering and whatever technique comes to your mind we are just getting sloppy junk out of all models we have tried. The sketchy part is that LLMs are super good at faking confidence and expertise all while randomly injected subtle but critical hallucinations. This ruins basically all significant output. Double-checking and babysitti…

> Its not like there is zero benefit to it, but I am genuinely curious how you get consistently correct output for a "complicated subject matter like insurance". Most likely by trying to get a promotion or bonus now and getting the hell out of Dodge before anyone notices those subtle landmines left behind :-)

Wow the bad faith is quite strong here. As it turns out, small to mid sized insurance companies have some ridiculously poorly architected front ends.

Not everyone is the biggest cat in town with infinite money and expertise. I have no intention of leaving anytime soon, so I have confidence that the code that was generated by the AI (after confirming with our guy who is the insurance OG) is solid improvement over what was before.

Post reply on HN