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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#81

Post by sandcat_ »

badlibrarian wrote: post #43
skrebbel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did but it was followed by "holy shit now I gotta review this +3000 -500 LOC PR full of subtly wrong abstractions, needless diversions and incorrect assumptions". People keep repeating your sentiment here but I simply can't follow, are we even on the same planet? Or did everyone switch to just not caring about maintainability and code quality anymore? Or are your work tasks simply so mindnumbingly, stupidly simple…

Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.

Wait, only six weeks ago? That's not long enough to be reporting success, genuinely. Come back in a few months, bare minimum. I'm far from a skeptic, but I've also personally had a number of moments over the past 12 months where I've declared "this is the future!" about some new app I vibe-coded, or some new workflow I started following, only to abandon it a few weeks later. And it's not just me. Check back in on many of the vibe-coded projects or AI tools you see shared and you'll see the same. It's happened at my work too — people taking over entire meetings to discuss their new revolutionary AI workflow and then, a week later, nothing...

A big problem is that these codebases rot. Agents move incredibly fast at first, but then as you pay less attention (or perhaps no attention at all) to the architecture, they slowly fall to bits. So then you decide, I'll use AI to rewrite it! And it gets better for a while until, well, you get it.

That's not to say there isn't value here, there absolutely is, just — chill. A little.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#82

Post by 20k »

mark242 wrote: post #72
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

If that were true, we'd expect to see massively accelerated velocity of open source projects by these engineers. They should be creating new open source projects at a truly astounding rate, with new tooling springing up every day that dwarfs the existing open source space as their productivity completely eclipses traditional development

Instead, software is plodding along exactly the same as it did prior to LLM code generation, and there's no evidence of superprogrammers making superprojects in 1/10th of the time. With a 10x productivity gain, what used to take a year should take a month

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#83

Post by gmueckl »

gryfft wrote: post #55

It's strange to me that the voices naysaying agentic coding capabilities seem to be getting louder in recent weeks. I almost wonder if there's a campaign to start suppressing public awareness of where SOTA capabilities really are.

The discontent is real. The deficiencies these people mention are real. And it's not actually getting better. Sure, web devs and CRUD app devs may be screwed over a bit harder now, but when it gets into really deep complex stuff, the usability of the output goes way, way down. This cliff is real. I assure you. And it's not getting better.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#84

Post by nowcomeonnow »

It seems nobody is user testing/pentesting their projects anymore. The notion of an MVP being good enough has been pushed a lot recently but it seems that the user experience of these MVPs has not been taken into consideration.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#85

Post by smargopulos »

skrebbel wrote: post #46
badlibrarian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.

To be fair, a "very very senior dev" wouldn't tell me that I'm doing it wrong without telling me what I'm doing wrong.

A very very senior dev can use LLMs with confidence and definitely doesn't get surprised by them.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#87

Post by 20k »

vatsachak wrote: post #74
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#88

Post by pixelesque »

gmueckl wrote: post #66
pixelesque wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had DeepSeek 4 Pro do a very good job yesterday of loop-unrolling and SIMD-ifying (both SSE/AVX and ARM Neon versions) some very old scalar Col3f image processing and resampling/resizing C++ code I hadn't touched in 12 years or so. It also wrote some unit tests that validated the kernel sampling weights, and wrote some Jupyter notebooks to go along with the kernel algorithms as comparisons. It's not just web dev...…

This is still rather basic stuff to be absolutely honest with you.

The tests and notebooks maybe: not the unrolling and re-architecting to use masking SIMD-ification. I used to do SIMD stuff a lot over the last 17 years, and it would have taken me probably a day to do that (convert 7 algorithms, all with support for various wrapping/mirroring/clamping extent-handling, so around 800 raw source file lines of templated C++) to use SIMD - and well.

Then it probably would have taken me at least half a day to think about what tests to write and to make them.

It did it in around 5 minutes. I had to check it, and it wasn't perfect, but it compiled, ran, and was very close.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#89

Post by gr_norm »

mark242 wrote: post #72
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

If so, where are all the new features in the open-source projects I use? Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? Why hasn't CUDA been fully reverse-engineered as an open source toolchain? These are unreasonable expectations, but only in response to unreasonable claims of productivity. What before took ten years should now only take one, right?

It seems likely that the gains from generating tons of code are being offset by the debt incurred to understanding what you're doing. We see lots of greenfield projects one-shotted with GPT or GLM or whatnot, but very little on the side of projects with long-term maintenance goals. This is telling, to me, that the _effective_ gains are much lower than perceived (it's lots of fun to see the thing crank out code at breakneck pace, probably contributing to this). Still quite nice, and very useful, but not a totally new paradigm.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#90

Post by ropbear »

vatsachak wrote: post #74
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

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