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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#721

Post by munksbeer »

overgard wrote: post #170
whynotminot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with…

> and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place.

I agree. I'm constantly correcting the code it generates. But then, I do the same for humans when I review their PRs, and the LLM generated the code in a 100th of the time (or whatever figure you prefer).

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#722

Post by groundzeros2015 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #706
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read my comments here engaging with the ideas in the text and specifically your concern that bullshit jobs are just jobs that don’t feel important.

You have written bunch of comments regarding advertising, single comment criticizing Graeber for using concepts in uncommon way, and one reply to my comment that doesn't really connect with the content of that comment. Did I miss something?

Yes, David graeber talks a lot about the idea of bullshit jobs but fails to identify them concretely. As we see in this thread, whenever someone puts up an example, there is actually value he misses because he is unfamiliar with the workplace and business.

The example used here was advertising. And then when we push on the example the fallback is to the subjective - feeling unfilled, definition.

So I am still look for concrete examples of bullshit jobs to justify the original comment that AI will find efficiencies by letting us throw these away.

Got any? You are an expert on the text so I’m hoping you can identify one.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#723

Post by chrystalkey »

csa wrote: post #661
Wilder7977 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets? Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

> And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets? > Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful? Yes. Products will become more tailored/bespoke rather than a lot of the one size fits all approach that is pervasive now.

No? I dont see any indication that this would be a good idea. Or even looked for.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#724

Post by Wojtkie »

SoftTalker wrote: post #121
mr_toad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI? Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives?

> Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives? Not to get off on a tangent but this has got to be a "tell" for how much a company is managed by formula and how much it's actually got thinking people running things. Every time I've had to write my own review I fill out the form with some corporatese bullshit, my supervisor approves it and adds some more bullshit, it disappears i…

This is pretty much how every performance review I've had in the past 5 years has gone. Even up to my VP it's considered pretty useless. I'm not sure where it actually gets used by HR, but I'm sure it's selectively applied.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#725

Post by groundzeros2015 »

bubblewand wrote: post #646
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing redundant effort from competition as waste. Is it a waste of effort when both people try to get the same job and only one succeeds? Is it a waste of effort when two companies try to make the best electric car? If it is wasteful what does aw orld look like where nobody ever spends resources on a goal which overlaps with someone else?

I think you’ve misunderstood what I’ve written here. Graeber’s book might make it clearer for you, he probably did a better job of explaining it than I do. It’s about spendy Red Queen’s races, not just trying to make something better or trying to compete in general. The application of the idea to military spending is pretty much standard and uncontroversial stuff (hell, it was 100-plus years ago) while his observatio…

I agree that advertising has some of the worst symptoms of an arms race. I think regulations can reduce the most annoying modes of ads (I live in an area with no billboards). I don’t think advertising is a bullshit job - it’s essential, and I don’t think there exists a society without it.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#726

Post by keeda »

overgard wrote: post #714
scoopdewoop wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompting LLMs for code simply takes more than a couple of weeks to learn. It takes time to get an intuition for the kinds of problems they've seen in pre-training, what environments it faced in RL, and what kind of bizarre biases and blindspots it has. Learning to google was hard, learning to use other peoples libraries was hard, and its on par with those skills at least. If there is a well known design pattern you…

Let me clarify, I've been using the latest models for the last two weeks, but I've been using AI for about a year now. I know how to prompt. I don't know why people think it's an amazing skill, it's not much different from writing a good ticket.

Writing a good ticket is not a common skill. IMO it seems deceptively easy but usually requires years of experience to understand what to include and express it in the most concise yet unambiguous terms possible for the intended audience.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#727

Post by csa »

chrystalkey wrote: post #723
csa wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets? > Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful? Yes. Products will become more tailored/bespoke rather than a lot of the one size fits all approach that is pervasive now.

No? I dont see any indication that this would be a good idea. Or even looked for.

> No? I dont see any indication that this would be a good idea. Or even looked for.

Do you spec software for a variety of businesses?

I do.

It’s rare that one SaaS or software package does what the people paying want it to do. Either they have to customize internally (expensive and limited to larger orgs with a tech department) or Frankenstein a solution like Salesforce or WordPress with a lot of add ons. And even then, it’s not hitting all pain points.

Being able to spin up or modify an app cheaply and easily will be a massive boon for businesses.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#728

Post by bravetraveler »

caminante wrote: post #549
coffeebeqn wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have Claude code churn out some Harry Potter fan fiction for an hour a day and you’ll meet your KPI easily

"You haven't hit your spell quota today, Harry. I'm putting you on a Wizard Improvement Plan."

"Harry! Did you put your prompt into the model of language?" Dumbledore asked calmly

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#729

Post by bunderbunder »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #111

The slow part as a senior engineer has never been actually writing the code. It has been: - reviews for code - asking stakeholders opinions - SDLC latency (things taking forever to test) - tickets - documentations/diagrams - presentations Many of these require review. The review hell doesn't magically stop at Open source projects. These things happen internally too.

And, hear me out here - perhaps for the sake of morale it makes sense to leave a smidge of the part of the job that actually attracts people to this profession in the first place on their plates. Otherwise we may find that, after the novelty wears off, we’re left with a net productivity dropoff because there’s not as much left to keep people motivated to do à good job of the remaining work.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#730

Post by amrocha »

simonw wrote: post #235
amrocha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Here are a few of mine from the past month - for all of them 90%+ of the code written by Claude Code: - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast - https://github.com/simonw/showboat - 292 stars - https://github.com/simonw/datasette-showboat - https://github.com/simonw/rodney - 290 stars and 4 contributors who aren't me or Claude - https://github.com/simonw/chartroom Noting…

Props for your work on these but they’re toys mate. These are things you built for yourself that other people happened to find useful. That’s great! I’m not shitting on that, but it doesn’t really convince me that AI coding really is this amazing productivity booster in all cases. It’s good for small greenfield projects, I’ll admit that.
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