HN

Comments (82)

• Menu

  wewewedxfgdf
  >> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it.If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them."That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."
• Menu

  andai
  >productivityI recently experienced some cognitive decline due to chronic health issues. This is unfortunate timing because I am shipping a game with online multiplayer for the first time. So "brain works properly" is kind of a basic job requirement! But you work with what you got...Some day I have the energy to do programming "manually", but on many days, the difference between "tasks get done" and "I am just staring at the screen reading the same code over and over again" is "ask the LLM to do it."So I have had to shift my identity from "the guy who does the thing" to "the guy who ensures the thing has been done."That being said, I do check the diffs carefully. (I tried a more hands-off approach a few months ago, and that was a pretty bad idea.) And I've learned to make the diffs as small as possible: more digestible for me, and less room for the AI to go off the rails.Nice bonus to small, well defined changes is that small, fast, cheap models can handle them. (Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all.)
• Menu

  socalgal2
  > We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. Software has not improved in quality,Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. So this assertion that Software as not improved in quality is arguably if not provably false. There are 1000s of other examples. I have my own. Personal projects that were stopped because of dependency rot, having 100s of bugs fixed, nearly all dependencies removed, and lots of tests added just by asking. I know tons of others with similar experiences> I do not feel like I’m falling behind by not using themObviously you are correct about "how you feel". But, this argument to me is more like a horse owner claming they don't feel like they're failling behind to trucks that can carry 10x, 100x, 1000x more than their horse. Sure, maybe the horse can go places the truck can't. For most uses the truck is better than the horse.> The LLM-generated PRs I get are still rubbish.I can't argue with that. I haven't seed the LLM-generated PRs "you" get. I can say though the LLM-generated bug reports I've seen are 1000x better than human ones. Human bug report "your software breaks, fix it!". LLM bug report "There is a bug in this specfic part of the code for these specific reasons and here's a repo I wrote to demonstrate the bug. Here's instructions on how to run the repo. There's the code to fix the bug. And, here's a test to show the bug is fixed."Is it perfect? No, sometimes the bug isn't real because the code can only be reached in situtations that can never happen. But still, 7 of 8 times it's a real bug and the bug report are the best I've ever received.you can go through this list: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/150.0/releasenotes/ and for those very few issues not still blocked you can read the examples
• Menu

  hax0ron3
  >The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.
• Menu

  Grombobulous
  The last bullet point is the most important. The industry is most hyped about AI so that they can pay software developers $70k instead of paying them $200k.I don’t really agree that AI can’t make development faster, though. What the author describes as the negative AI outcome is blind vibecoding. There are many other ways to use it, and even the basic “enhanced autocomplete” is a net benefit, especially since that functionality is dirt cheap or free.
• Menu

  classictraffic
  To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobshttps://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...
• err4nt
  Anecdotally, I've had an iPhone for 15 years, and that whole time I've dreamed of apps - some silly, some useful, that I would tell people "Imagine if there was an app that did x…". In those 15 years I learned to program and built websites and web apps, and built very basic web apps to use on my phone but shipped zero iOS apps.Thanks to Claude, as a hobby, I've built and shipped 4 iOS apps in the last month. None of them are world-changing, but that's 4 in the last month thanks to Claude and zero in the 15 years before it. I'm clearly getting my subscription's worth out of Claude and squeezing more juice out of my own devices. It's a fun hobby! (And I'm sure if I used Android I could do more and customize my own device even more!)
• Menu

  smokedetector1
  idk. I get more stuff done, faster, that I wouldn’t have been able to. You have to use it judiciously and with supervision - I can see how letting it get out of control would negate the benefits. But with good use, its undeniable.
• thataccount
  >The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers.Especially if you replace people with robots that don't need days off and have the people train their replacements.
• Menu

  hingler36
  I have started using AI a bit, but I'm still trying to be careful in that if I ever lose access I can still perform my job at pre-AI ability. My understanding is that tokens are still heavily subsidized, and when that well runs dry I don't want it to be some nightmare to go back to the way I was doing my work in like 2022.
• Menu

  andy99
  > Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.Doesn’t really support the rest of the argument. If you’re a skeptic and think it’s all hype, there’s nothing to worry about.
• vivzkestrel
  - you forgot the biggest and most important point of all!- Everyone and their mother using an LLM is slowly and steadily destroying their brain cells and abilities in the process while creating a learned dependence- Give it about 5 yrs, mark my words. The studies ll come out saying "95% programmers cannot write a hello world without an LLM now"- Now someone smart ll hop in on my comment and bring calculators into the argument and I have answer waiting for them that those do (not able to put a direct link here for some reason)
• mrdomino-
  > The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.
• Menu

  spl757
  All AI hallucinates, and therefore is unpredictable and unreliable. 1.5 trillion dollars to prove the obvious. It has no place in production use. IMHO at least. They want so badly to get rid of all of us, and replace us with something that doesn't complain, doesn't have kids, or outside lives or want ick, vacations. Most of you are paycheck to paycheck, statistically speaking, so you have a vested interest in how this all turns out.edit: I get it, it's not a popular opinion.But am I wrong?If the problem of hallucination in AI has been solved, maybe I missed it?
• gitaarik
  I wonder how much AI was used by the human submission PRs. Maybe they also just use AI, but just in the way you should: as a tool and not a replacement. And the people that use it in the wrong way are of course much more, making it harder to see the people who are actually benefitting from it.
• Menu

  E-Reverance
  I think the fundamental rebuttal to this is merely that, we’re still so early, the $1.5 trillion number is irrelevant for developing technologies in the same way two women can’t birth a baby in 4.5 months
• Menu

  andai
  >We should all know by now that code is an input to the software development process and not an output: yet even the most forward-looking organisations still tactitly treat lines of code as a productivity metricWhat exactly is this referring to? My thinking here is "code is a hypothesis", and you don't know if it's solid or not until it contacts the real world. (And ideally tests, and maybe a proof or two.) And what we're seeing lately is that the hypotheses often get disproven decades later (longstanding kernel bugs etc.)
• iammrpayments
  I have a similar experience that I expected several competitors to popup in my app niche, and so far only one has come up, and after some digging, they already had 8+ apps in another niche that had some overlap, so they would be able to complete the competing one without AI.My apps are also not super complicated.
• Menu

  rushabh
  I agreed right upto the last quote. That made the post political, similar to the ones being written by the AI evangelists.The thing about complex systems is that they are not predictable. Right now the answer is whatever you think is right, and a lot of scenarios seem plausible.It is a fun intellectual moment trying to make sense, but maybe only time will tell how the dynamics work out.
• youre-wrong3
  Seems like a lot of people who aren’t very good remain skeptical.
• qarl2
  The author claims that software has become no more secure - despite the avalanche of security fixes appearing for all software everywhere.Never mind the more subtle issues.
• wolttam
  I think an argument can be made that some software has gotten more secure.I don’t think it can be denied that the models do show an ability to find security vulnerabilities that may have otherwise been missed
• wbkang
  This is equally as biased as those who claim AI can just code all night autonomously for you. You don't have to use it to generate "fully LLM-generated PRs". It's true GitHub is flooded with poor-quality LLM slop, but that is not the only way to use it.It's ironic the author links to Naur's paper because I use LLMs to dig through code faster, question my assumptions, review my drafts, or generate drafts for my review. It's not because I am bad at it, I used to be very proud of being able to do this better than others. Anyway, this does not lead to more "lines of code" as the author suggests and instead it can lead to higher quality code.FWIW, I also don't believe you can let LLMs make critical judgement by somehow stringing together more LLMs. And I am also not making a claim on whether the $1.5T investment is proportional to its benefits. But to say "industry has nothing to show for it", or to bring up strawmen like "LLM-generated PRs" and "lines of code", makes me question whether the author has tried studying the applications of LLMs.
• 8note
  are open ai, anthropic, zai, deepseek, cursor etc not new players? that benchmark seems like one defined to never be good enough
• jansport123
  the way i see, LLM's in their current shape are neither good enough to replace software engineers but they have become a necessary part of everyone tool kit. ergo, actual companies themselves aren't getting much benefit because their competitors are using the same tools and they can't fire their human labor either just it's just an extra cost. At my org, i see good engineers use LLM's in wise ways and bad engineers just let it write slop for them. What gets to me is the verbosity and noise though, i consider brevity, and curation to be hallmarks of intelligence but most people at work just spit out so many words in their design docs or code comment these days.
• j45
  The reality is new technology that works, will get used for what it best works for.There are things that LLMs remain uniquely suited for, while the echo chambers go for everything.There's no requirement to use new technology. Maybe what you do, or how you do it is just fine, and that's OK.Skepticism today can remind me of someone who went into a cave for 3-4 years with a dated take of LLMs on day 1 and not remember software improves, and LLMs are software.There are no shortage of uniquely working solutions with LLMs if sone seeks to find them, and also the self-validating echo chamber that says that it doesn't if that's desired. Which parts of software development, or how software development may better happen differently with the involvement of AI remains to be seen.
• hexasquid
  "Well, actually, vim doesn't make you faster"
• Menu

  rhelz
  AI skeptics hate him. Here's how he doubled his productivity using AI with one simple trick.You have to stop thinking like an employee or a worker bee, and start thinking like a boss.Guess what, the work you give your boss isn't 100% gold either. And sometimes you are preoccupied, or tired, so what you deliver isn't the best of all possible deliverables. Sometimes you hallucinate, i.e. you are dead wrong when you think you are dead right.This is the job of a boss: take fallible employees and turn what they produce into something actually valuable. The boss lets the grunts do the grunt work, and then they combine the output together, and do the due diligence, etc etc.It's an entirely new skillset. But learning the new skillset isn't the real blocker--the real blocker is that you've got to stop thinking like a grunt and start thinking like an executive.WHAT is it that you really want to do? Frame that question as clearly and as concretely as you can. Then farm out thee work to human or AI grunts, and be prepared to do your due diligence on the result.
• honeybadger1
  it's not as good as the hype, but it's definitely revolutionary. i am still blown away at what I can achieve in 20 minutes with a couple of agents
• aaron695
  [dead]