There are a large amount of anti-AI articles being posted on the HN front page. It is not natural. There is a clear conspiracy, but why, and who is orchestrating it?
AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#72>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…
Except that many companies are pushing "Use AI for everything" -- seriously. Because the CEO was told by KPMG or whoever that "AI is the future". And so yeah, they're pushing it regardless of whether it makes actual sense to use it or not.
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. To prove the article wrong even within the context of AI coding (which wasnt the focus of the article) you would have to present proof that creating these new AI apps resulted in you making lots of new money.
You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records. But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10…
There's other word for such code and it sounds similar. It's crappy. I was tempted to use Claude couple of days ago to help me with optimization and from 4Gb RAM and 21s it managed to squeeze 1Tb and 41s. When I asked to fixed it AI reduced it to 1Gb and 10s. It just removed most heavy business logic. So yeah. 3 days and this was only total waste of time and cash
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#74>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…
> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. They very definitely are. I'm seeing more and more front-line responses to customer support emails that are very clearly written by AI. Here's an example from this week: Thank you for reaching out and providing all of those tracking and return details right away. I am currently checking in with our Returns Team to track down your package and see why there ha…
But why if that costing anyone money? You can generate like 50 of that kind of thing using various chatbots throughout your day.
You don’t need a pro account for emails.
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#75This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…
> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. This is a contradiction. If you don't understand the code, you cannot in fact evaluate that it works correctly. If that's the approach you are taking, you are doing sloppy work that is going to blow up in your face sooner or later.
I agree, but some (most?) software being written doesn’t require a deep understanding to verify because the domain is small enough or you’re not required to solve for all of its intricacies. E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc.
I believe this is where the huge divide in perceived AI productivity in SW comes from. It’s folks working on low-understanding-required domains talking to folks working on high-understanding-required domains.
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. This is a contradiction. If you don't understand the code, you cannot in fact evaluate that it works correctly. If that's the approach you are taking, you are doing sloppy work that is going to blow up in your face sooner or later.
I agree, but some (most?) software being written doesn’t require a deep understanding to verify because the domain is small enough or you’re not required to solve for all of its intricacies. E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc. I believe this is where the huge divide in perceived AI productivity in SW comes from. It’s folks working on low-understanding-required domains talking…
> E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc.
Those things shouldn't be hugely complex. They sound actually very simple.
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. They very definitely are. I'm seeing more and more front-line responses to customer support emails that are very clearly written by AI. Here's an example from this week: Thank you for reaching out and providing all of those tracking and return details right away. I am currently checking in with our Returns Team to track down your package and see why there ha…
But why if that costing anyone money? You can generate like 50 of that kind of thing using various chatbots throughout your day. You don’t need a pro account for emails.
Not that I've ever looked into it but I would have thought that the "free" chatbot AI services would prohibit commercial/business use without a paid plan. Maybe not?
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that itself doesn't tell us yet how much time it saved you at the end of the day.
As a developer, on my very best days I probably spent no more than 50% of my day actually writing code. So call it 4 hours of actual hands-on-keyboard coding. But AI can write code much faster than a human. In 4 hours it might be able to write what would have taken me a week. Or more. Assuming it had proper specifications for that volume of code.
Do you still review the code it writes?
Typically it takes me as long to review code as it takes me to write it myself. The exception is repetitive coding tasks that cause my attention to drift, which LLMs can do very quickly.
Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#79Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why if that costing anyone money? You can generate like 50 of that kind of thing using various chatbots throughout your day. You don’t need a pro account for emails.
Not that I've ever looked into it but I would have thought that the "free" chatbot AI services would prohibit commercial/business use without a paid plan. Maybe not?
No not at all