After at least a century of labour saving devices being produced and widely adopted in all areas of our lives, how much less time do we spend labouring now?
The AI Vampire
71–80 of 107 posts
Re: The AI Vampire
#72>With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value. I keep hearing about this 10x productivity, but where is it materializing? Most developers at my company use Claude Code, but we don't seem to be shipping new features at ten times the rate. In fact, tickets still take roughly the same amount of time to complete.
10x is doing a year's work in ~5 weeks No shot I'm seeing that some tickets are "finished" (i.e. ready for PR) more quickly, but they end up needing so many changes and to be re-reviewed so many times it takes longer than it ever did because someone is saying yes to the LLM instead of designing software. When it's clear your review comments are just going back into the maw of the LLM, I've given up trying to guide an…
Nothing is more infuriating at work than when you say something to someone in a message or PR comment, and they just paste the LLM response back to you.
Re: The AI Vampire
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exact same experience. Here's what I find Claude Code (Opus) useful for: 1. Copy-pasting existing working code with small variations. If the intended variation is bigger then it fails to bring productivity gains, because it's almost universally wrong. 2. Exploring unknown code bases. Previously I had to curse my way through code reading sessions, now I can find information easily. 3. Google Search++, e.g. for decidin…
>> 1. Copy-pasting existing working code with small variations. If the intended variation is bigger then it fails to bring productivity gains, because it's almost universally wrong. This does not match my experience. At all. I can throw extremely large and complex things at it and it nails them with very high accuracy and precision in most cases. Here's an example: when Opus 4.5 came out I used it extensively to migr…
Interesting. I've had it fail on much simpler tasks.
Example: was writing a flatbuffers routine which translated a simple type schema to fbs reflection schema. I was thinking well this is quite simple, surely Opus would have no trouble with it.
Output looked reasonable, compiled.. and was completely wrong. It seemed to just output random but reasonable looking indices and offsets. It also inserted in one part of the code a literal TODO saying "someone who understands fbs reflection should write this". Had to write it from scratch.
Another example: was writing a fuzzer for testing a certain computation. In this case, there was existing code to look at (working fuzzers for slighly different use cases), but the main logic had to be somewhat different. Opus managed to do the copy paste and then messed up the only part where it had to be a bit more creative. Again, showing the limitation of where it starts breaking. Overall I actually considered this a success, because I didn't have to deal with the "boring" bit.
Another example: colleague was using Claude to write a feature that output some error information from an otherwise completely encrypted computation. Claude proceeded to insert a global backdoor into the encryption, only caught in review. The inserted comments even explained the backdoor.
I would describe a success story if there was one. But aside from throwing together simple react frontends and SQL queries (highly copy-pasteable recurring patterns in the training set) I had literally zero success. There is an invisible ceiling.
Re: The AI Vampire
#74Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…
To each their own.
> I use these tools daily and I just don't see it.
So why use them if you see no benefit?
You can refuse to use it, it's fine. You can also write your code in notepad.exe, without a linter, and without an Internet connection if you want. Your rodeo
I don't understand the defensiveness.
Re: The AI Vampire
#75Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…
I also don’t believe the hype. The boosters always say I would believe if I were to just experience it. But that’s like saying all I have to do is eat a hamburger to experience how nutritious it is for me.
I love hamburgers, and nothing in my experience tells me I shouldn’t eat them every day. But people have studied them over time and I trust that mere personal satisfaction is insufficient basis for calling hamburgers healthy eating.
Applied to AI: How do you know you have “10x’d?” What is your test process? Just reviewing the test process will reverse your productivity! Therefore, to make this claim you probably are going on trust.
I you have 10x the trust, you will believe anything.
Re: The AI Vampire
#76Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…
I am with you on this, and you can't win, because as soon as you voice this opinion you get overwhelmed with "you dont have the sauce/prompt" opinions which hold an inherent fallacy because they assume you are solving the same problems as them. I work in GPU programming, so there is no way in hell that JavaScript tools and database wrapper tasks can be on equal terms with generating for example Blackwell tcgen05 warp…
Anthropic has a challenge of optimizing GPU code.
The current leader is Opus 4.5
Re: The AI Vampire
#77AI takes jobs faster than it creates new ones. It should be banned in current form. No junior positions available - only those who lasted even have the chance to use them in commercial settings. After layoffs you will get how BAD it is :/ (if you are 35+)
Even as a software developer affected by it, I don't think it should be banned. Productivity improvements are how we get richer in aggregate over the long term, even if those impacted (like you & me) might feel the brunt of transitional pain.
> Even as a software developer affected by it, I don't think it should be banned. Productivity improvements are how we get richer in aggregate over the long term, even if those impacted (like you & me) might feel the brunt of transitional pain.
FYI: software developers can be pretty dumb, and believe (and spread!) the propaganda fed to them even when it's starkly against our interests. I think it has something to do with being smart and wanting to appear clever.
You won't be richer over the long term. AI is a technology for concentrating wealth further, and some cheap crap will be your consolation prize for losing.
Re: The AI Vampire
#78Every time I say I don't see the productivity boost from AI, people always say I'm using the wrong tool, or the wrong model. I use Claude with Sonnet, Zed with either Claude Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.6, Gemini, and ChatGPT 5.2. I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. The vampire in the room, for me, seems to be feeling like I'm the only person in the room that doesn't believe the hype. Or should I say, being in roo…
To each their own. > I use these tools daily and I just don't see it. So why use them if you see no benefit? You can refuse to use it, it's fine. You can also write your code in notepad.exe, without a linter, and without an Internet connection if you want. Your rodeo I don't understand the defensiveness.
I have the same experience and still use it. It's just that I learned to use it for simplistic work. I sometimes try to give it more complex tasks but it keeps failing. I don't think it's bad to keep trying, especially as people are reporting insane productivity gains.
After all, it's through failure that we learn the limitations of a technology. Apparently some people encounter that limit more often than others.
Re: The AI Vampire
#79All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself. Maybe when AIs a…
> Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.
Funny you say that, I encountered this in a seemingly simple task. Opus inserted something along the lines of "// TODO: someone with flatbuffers reflection expertise should write this". I actually thought this was better than I anticipated even though the task was specifically related to fbs reflection. And it was because I didn't waste more time and could immediately start rewriting it from scratch.
Re: The AI Vampire
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience LLMs are useless for GPU compute code, just not enough in the training set.
Another thing I've never got them to generate is any G code. Maybe that'll be in the image/3d generator side indirectly, but I was kind of hoping I could generate some motions since hand coding coordinates is very tedious. That would be a productivity boost for me. A very very niche boost, since I rarely need bespoke G code, but still.
Oh HELL no. :P Gcode is (at least if you’re talking about machining) the very definition of something you want to generate analytically using tried and tested algorithms with full consideration taken for the specifics of the machine and material involved.
I guess if you just want to use it to wiggle something around using a stepper motor and a spare 3D printer control board, it might be OK though. :)