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416 points floverfelt | 27 comments | | HN request time: 0.606s | source | bottom
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jeppester ◴[] No.45057505[source]
In my company I feel that we getting totally overrun with code that's 90% good, 10% broken and almost exactly what was needed.

We are producing more code, but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up.

So instead of slowly inching towards the result we are getting 90% there in no time, and then spending lots and lots of time on getting to know the code and fixing and fine-tuning everything.

Maybe we ARE faster than before, but it wouldn't surprise me if the two approaches are closer than what one might think.

What bothers me the most is that I much prefer to build stuff rather than fixing code I'm not intimately familiar with.

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utyop22 ◴[] No.45058508[source]
"but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up."

And its going to get worse! So please explain to me how in the net, you are going to be better off? You're not.

I think most people haven't taken a decent economics class and don't deeply understand the notion of trade offs and the fact there is no free lunch.

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computerex ◴[] No.45060469[source]
Technology has always helped people. Are you one of the people that say optimizing compilers are bad? Do you not use the intellisense? Or IDEs? Do you not use higher level languages? Why not write in assembly all the time? No free lunch right.

Yes there are trade offs, but at this point if you haven’t found a way to significantly amplify and scale yourself using llms, and your plan is to instead pretend that they are somehow not useful, that uphill battle can only last so long. The genie is out of the bag. Adapt to the times or you will be left behind. That’s just what I think.

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1. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45060527[source]
Technology does not always help people, in fact often it creates new problems that didn't exist before.

Also telling someone to "adapt to the times" is a bit silly. If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.

A LOT of parallels with crypto, which is still trying to find its killer app 16 years later.

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2. Difwif ◴[] No.45060693[source]
My parents could have said your first paragraph when I tried to teach them they could Google their questions and find answers.

Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.

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3. rolisz ◴[] No.45060706[source]
Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in economy) said in 1998 that the internet is no biggie. Many companies needed convincing to adopt the internet (heck, some still need convincing).

Would you say the same thing ("If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.") about the internet?

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4. creesch ◴[] No.45060783[source]
> Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.

It does not, technology regresses just as often and linear deterministic progress is just a myth to begin with. There is no guarantee for technology to move forward and always make things better.

There are plenty of examples to be made where technology has made certain things worse.

5. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45060859[source]
Why is productivity so important? When do regular people get to benefit from all this "progress?"
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6. brabel ◴[] No.45060869[source]
I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced at this point. Every developer is using LLM and I really can’t believe someone who has made a career out of automating things wouldn’t be immediately drawn to trying them at least. Every single company seems convinced and using it too. The comparison to crypto makes no sense.
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7. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45060928[source]
I need to be convinced.

Go ahead, convince me. Please describe clearly and concisely in one or two sentences the clear economic value/advantage of LLMs.

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8. computerex ◴[] No.45060934[source]
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
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9. computerex ◴[] No.45060959{3}[source]
The company I work for uses LLM's for digital marketing, the company has over 100M ARR selling products build on top of LLM's with real life measurable impact as measured by KPIs.
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10. lithocarpus ◴[] No.45061042[source]
I would say it as "technology tends to concentrate power to those who wield it."

That's not all it does but I think it's one of the more important fundamentals.

11. bolobo ◴[] No.45061063[source]
> Every developer is using LLM

Citation needed. In my circles, Senior engineer are not using them a lot, or in very specific use cases. My company is blocking LLMs use apart from a few pilots (which I am part of, and while claude code is cool, its effectiveness on a 10-year old distributed codebase is pretty low).

You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.

And I use claude code for my personal projects, I think it's really cool. But the code quality is still not there.

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12. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45061113{4}[source]
Digital marketing is old. What about LLMs gives an advantage to digital marketing?
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13. throwboy2047 ◴[] No.45061243{5}[source]
It’s just plain mean to make the Emperor speak of the thread count of his “clothes”.
14. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45061359[source]
It's also difficult to get a man to understand something if you stubbornly refuse to explain it.

Instead of this crypto-esque hand waving, maybe you can answer me now?

15. discreteevent ◴[] No.45061674[source]
A few examples of technology that moved 'forward' but decreased productivity for those who moved with it from my 'lived' experience:

1) CASE tools (and UML driven development)

2) Wizard driven code.

3) Distributed objects

4) Microservices

These all really were the hot thing with massive pressure to adopt them just like now. The Microsoft demos of Access wizards generating a complete solution for your business had that same wow feeling as LLM code. That's not to say that LLM code won't succeed but it is to say that this statement is definitely false:

> Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.

16. utyop22 ◴[] No.45061697{3}[source]
Careful now, you will scare them away!!!!!

People love stuff that makes them feel like they are doing less work. Cognitive biases distort reality and rational thinking, we know this already through behavioural economics.

17. balamatom ◴[] No.45062209{3}[source]
Being permitted to eat - is that not great benefit?
18. balamatom ◴[] No.45062250[source]
I would, unironically.

Thing's called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Next level to a MLM scheme: total bootstrap. Throwing shit at things in innate primate activity, use money to shift people's attention to a given thing for long enough and eventually they'll throw enough shit at the wall for something to stick. At which point it becomes something able to roll along with the market cycles.

19. brabel ◴[] No.45062275{3}[source]
Stack overflow published recently a survey in which something like 80% of developers were using AI and the rest “wants to soon”. By now I have trouble believing a competent developer is still convinced they shouldn’t use it at all , though a few ludites perhaps might hold on for a bit longer.
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20. balamatom ◴[] No.45062345[source]
"But with Google is easier!" When you were trying to teach your folks about Google, were you taking into consideration dependence, enshittification, or the surveillance economy? No, you were retelling them the marketing.

Just by having lived longer, they might've had the chance to develop some intuition about the true cost of disruption, and about how whatever Google's doing is not a free lunch. Of course, neither them, nor you (nor I for that matter) had been taught the conceptual tools to analyze some workings of some Ivy League whiz kinds that have been assigned to be "eating the world" this generation.

Instead we've been incentivized to teach ourselves how to be motivated by post-hoc rationalizations. And ones we have to produce at our own expense too. Yummy.

Didn't Saint Google end up enshittifying people's very idea of how much "all of the world's knowledge" is; gatekeeping it in terms of breadth, depth and availability to however much of it makes AdSense. Which is already a whole lot of new useful stuff at your fingertips, sure. But when they said "organizing all of the world's knowledge" were they making any claims to the representativeness of the selection? No, they made the sure bet that it's not something the user would measure.

In fact, with this overwhelming amount of convincing non-experientially-backed knowledge being made available to everyone - not to mention the whole mass surveillance thing lol (smile, their AI will remember you forever) - what happens first and foremost is the individual becomes eminently marketable-to, way more deeply than over Teletext. Thinking they're able to independently make sense of all the available information, but instead falling prey to the most appealing narrative, not unlike a day trader getting a haircut on market day. And then one has to deal with even more people whose life is something someone sold to them, a race to the bottom in the commoditized activity (in the case of AI: language-based meaning-making).

But you didn't warn your parents about any of that or sit down and have a conversation about where it means things are headed. (For that matter, neither did they, even though presumably they've had their lives altered by the technological revolutions of their own day.) Instead, here you find yourself stepping in for that conversation to not happen among the public, either! "B-but it's obvious! G-get with it or get left behind!" So kind of you to advise me. Thankfully it's just what someone's paid for you to think. And that someone probably felt very productive paying big money for making people think the correct things, too, but opinions don't actually produce things do they? Even the ones that don't cost money to hold.

So if it's not about the productivity but about the obtaining of money to live, why not go extract that value from where it is, instead of breathing its informational exhaust? Oh, just because, figuratively speaking, it's always the banks have AIs that don't balk at "how to rob the bank"; and it's always we that don't. Figures, no? But they don't let you in the vault for being part of the firewall.

21. skydhash ◴[] No.45062598{4}[source]
Stack overflow published a report about text editors and Emacs wasn’t part of the list. So I’m very sceptical about SO surveys.
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22. sarchertech ◴[] No.45062630{4}[source]
“Using AI” is a very broad term. Using AI to generate lurem ipsum is still “using AI”.
23. diegolas ◴[] No.45063300{3}[source]
> You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.

that goes both ways

24. kaosoaksh ◴[] No.45064586{4}[source]
> real life measurable impact as measured by KPIs

This is making me even more skeptical of your claims. Individual metrics are often very poor at tracking reality.

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25. brabel ◴[] No.45065127{5}[source]
I was also offended by that :D.
26. johnnienaked ◴[] No.45066635{5}[source]
Individual metrics are often very good at distorting reality, which is why corporate executives love them so much.
27. computerex ◴[] No.45079912{5}[source]
Review responses for example. Responding to reviews has shown to have positive impact on brands. Traditionally it’s been hard to respond to all the reviews for high volume locations. Not anymore.

That’s one example, there are dozens of processes that are now relatively easy to automate due to LLMs.