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AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

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Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All LLMs use obscene tokens just programmers are more aware of it

That’s not true. The different use cases of LLMs objectively use different amounts of tokens. AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request, plus use a ton for thinking. Writing an email barely uses any in comparison.

> thinking

LLM doesn't think

> AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request

yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

and parsing source code is peanuts compared to parsing a PDF

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#92
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you know it’s crappy? Have you read the code?

Your comment is strange, he clearly did in this context - that's why he knew what went wrong?

Fwiw, I currently consider code generated by models below opus level borderline unusable. It really is horrendous there.

With opus, it's still not good - but it's a lot better then some of my colleagues write.

Well written code, carefully planned out and thought through is still only possible by either hand writing or holding the hand of the model so much that you may as well just write by have, as you'll be quicker.

However, the code opus produces is good enough... So I rarely take action anymore in private projects

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. The different use cases of LLMs objectively use different amounts of tokens. AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request, plus use a ton for thinking. Writing an email barely uses any in comparison.

> thinking LLM doesn't think > AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times... and parsing source code is peanuts compared to parsing a PDF

>LLM doesn't think

You don’t realize I’m referring to the process of generating a ton of text in an attempt to better address the request - a process that these LLM companies call “thinking”? Are you out of the loop or are you taking some kind of pointless stand here?

>yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

A worker might have one or two of those large requests a day. That stop doesn’t come close to agentic AI token usage. I’ve been applying for jobs daily, uploading both my resume and the job posting upwards of 6-7 times per day to these chatbots. I still never hit the free limit.

Agentic AI coding obviously uses far, far more. This really shouldn’t be surprising.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#94
post #69

Earlier 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…

Guess who will be held responsible when your vibe-coded robot maims or kills someone.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#95
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Guess who will be held responsible when your vibe-coded robot maims or kills someone.

I have enough experience writing code by hand and designing complex systems with a team working for me. In a sense, this is no different. When I had a half-dozen mid to senior level developers, I did not verify every line of code they wrote. I did not have any expectation that they would write perfect code, and they didn't.

But as the owner of the company, I was still liable for the product my employees made. That is the same thing here. It's not negligent to have Claude code write code for you at 10x the speed you can do it yourself. If I hadn't supervised my employees and put practices in place to control quality and safety, I would be liable. I'm actually far less worried about liability now, because I have my hands in every part of the system.

Calling it vibe coding is pejorative at this point, meant to imply that someone who has no skill or craft in software development just types a few prompts and gets something they didn't have a hand in the design or development. That's not what the professionals who are using AI coding are doing.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#96

This 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…

Who is "making apps" at work? I keep seeing AI enthusiasts talk about how many apps they are making. I've never seen a real life dev whose job is churning out apps.

Here's what happens: person comes up with an idea, asks Claude to generate it, gasps in awe, tries out for a few minutes, moves on because the idea wasn't that interesting.

When producing code is basically a solved problem, generating worthless amounts of code is literally one click away. Execution remains key, and still means iterating upon an idea for a long time, rather than generating a prototype with Claude and calling it a day.

Honestly for some it's just a compulsion that they can later brag about on forums, but it never results in anything worth showing the world.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#98
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you know it’s crappy? Have you read the code?

In which world throwing business logic to "optimize memory usage" isn't crappy solution? Or making 1T from 4G? It didn't returned decent solution, contrary it was worst than terrible

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thinking LLM doesn't think > AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times... and parsing source code is peanuts compared to parsing a PDF

>LLM doesn't think You don’t realize I’m referring to the process of generating a ton of text in an attempt to better address the request - a process that these LLM companies call “thinking”? Are you out of the loop or are you taking some kind of pointless stand here? >yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and defi…

1. You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them. Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand. Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is.

2. even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and iterate on it multiple times". one of those requests can easily be a month worth of your resume uploads at that rate.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM doesn't think You don’t realize I’m referring to the process of generating a ton of text in an attempt to better address the request - a process that these LLM companies call “thinking”? Are you out of the loop or are you taking some kind of pointless stand here? >yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and defi…

1. You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them. Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand. Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is. 2. even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on…

>You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them.

Because they largely do not. Are you actually under the impression that the average person is using chatbots to program? That’s wayyy off.

>Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand.

I’ve made no such claim, this a complete non-sequitur.

>Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is.

The average person does not do this. Come on, dude.

>even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and iterate on it multiple times".

It’s much closer to the average usage. All of that is still far less than agentic coding.

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