Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

If they were, where are their products and open source projects? Let's circle back.

One thing I've noticed about the super-AI enthusiasts on HN is that not a single one ever have a single comment linking to a repo of work they've made with it.

I check. I actually always do because I'm really keen to learn how to use these magical super-AI workflows. I've watched streams, replicated clause MD files, tried all the context tricks.

I'm not even saying AI doesn't help, it's great for getting me over the blank page writer's block. It's just not great at much else.

So I've just checked your comments and not only do you not have any examples of your super-duper AI skills, but it looks like you've been in the industry less than a year, graduating from a PhD last year?

You also admit it took you a week trying to debug a problem before an AI fixed it for you. Because you'd missed some parentheses in an algo.

I'm not trying to shame you, but that does signal your inexperience. If you'd have made the code well and easy to test, you should have spotted your bad algo quickly.

So is it that we're all bad at using AI? Or is it that AI benefits inexperienced programmers more?

Damn bro. Deep dive into the comments.

The bad algo was a scaling problem for one equation. That particular equation wasn't some y = mx + b thing, it was the result of a discontinuous galerkin finite element scheme that I wrote from scratch. The actual equation was one that I found after about 2 pages of hand written derivations with high level math. Not really a coding issue, just an algebra issue after really intense manipulations of partial differential equations.

The fact that AI found that problem, a problem that could only be found by someone able to do complex manipulations of PDEs is incredible to me. Perhaps I didn't tell the story well in the past comment, but it isn't like I didn't know python syntax and AI held my hand.

I don't post repos because I keep my hacker news life separate from my personal life, and my repos are tied to my name.

Most major software companies are demanding that their employees use AI, so you should be able to look at any open repo from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc for examples of AI use in code.

I, on the other hand, tried to vibe-code BDF-like ODE solver. Not some rough prototype, because I can do the rough prototype easily myself, but something robust and fast, with event handling etc. AI couldn't do it. Actually it couldn't do correctly anything more complex than out-of-the-textbook explicit RK4, but this is something undergrad students do while learning numerical methods for the first time.

And solvers are actually a simpler aspect of the project I am working on. It also includes (or rather aims to include) optimizing compiler with DAE to ODE reduction, advanced numerical debugging etc.

This is why these discussions are pointless - AI works well for some people in some contexts, for others not so much, yet both sides extrapolate their experience as universal.

I see what your saying but I would argue that vibe coding an ODE solver is an incorrect use of the tool. For something like and ODE solver you need to have a really solid understanding of what data structures you will use,and solid general knowledge of the numerical methods you want to implement. Then, you can use AI as an assistant when you get stuck, or to deepen your understanding, look over your implementation, etc.

It seems like developers used to always joke about how much they used stack exchange (even senior devs). Now it seems like there are suddenly so many people who claim to never need any help and can just smoothly bust out beautiful code all day long.

> I see what your saying but I would argue that vibe coding an ODE solver is an incorrect use of the tool.

Agreed. No true Scotsman would use the tool this way.

But that is the case - I know how to implement production-ready ODE solver. My issue with AI was that it was able to help with basics, but not with those really important bits, so it couldn't really deepen much.

> For something like and ODE solver you need to have a really solid understanding of what data structures you will use,and solid general knowledge of the numerical methods you want to implement.

For basically every thing you program, you need to have a really solid understanding of what data structures you will use, and solid general knowledge of the methods you want to implement.

I claim that as a conservative estimate at least 90 % (likely more than 95 %) of what I code at work (and even more for what I code privately) is of this kind.