Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Devs are famously bad at estimating how long a software project will take.
No, highly complex creative work is inherently extremely difficult to estimate.
Anyway, not shocked at all by the results. This is a great start that begs for larger and more rigorous studies.
You're absolutely correct that the angle approach that statement is bullshit. There is also that they want to think making software is not highly complex creative work but somehow is just working an assembly line and the software devs are gatekeepers that don't deserve respect.
Megacorp LLM death spiral:
I've been through the hellscape where managers used missed metrics as evidence for why we didn't need increased headcount on an internal IT helpdesk.
That sort of fuckery is common when management gets the idea in their head that they can save money on people somehow without sacrificing output/quality.
I'm pretty certain they were trying to find an excuse to outsource us, as this was long before the LLM bubble we're in now.
oh, absolutely. I mean you could sub out "LLM" with any bullshit that management can easily spring on their understaff. Agile, standups, return to office, the list goes on. Management can get fucked
I wish I could make more people both know about, and understand, Goodhart’s law
As someone that has had to double check peoples code before, especially those that don't comment appropriately, I'd rather just write it all again myself than try and decipher what the fuck they were even doing.
ahahaha holy shit. I knew METR smelled a bit like AI doomsday cultists and took money from OpenPhil, but those "open source" projects and engineers? One of them was LessWrong.
Here's a LW site dev whining about the study, he was in it and i think he thinks it was unfair to AI
I think if people are citing in another 3 months time, they'll be making a mistake
dude $NEXT_VERSION will be so cool
so anyway, this study has gone mainstream! It was on CNBC! I urge you not to watch that unless you have a yearning need to know what the normies are hearing about this shit. In summary, they are hearing that AI coding isn't all that actually and may not do what the captains of industry want.
around 2:30 the two talking heads ran out of information and just started incorrecting each other on the fabulous AI future, like the worst work lunchroom debate ever but it's about AI becoming superhuman
the key takeaway for the non techie businessmen and investors who take CNBC seriously ever: the bubble starts not going so great
Yeah, METR was the group that made the infamous AI IS DOUBLING EVERY 4-7 MONTHS GRAPH where the measurement was 50% success at SWE tasks based on the time it took a human to complete it. Extremely arbitrary success rate, very suspicious imo. They are fanatics trying to pinpoint when the robo god recursive self improvement loop starts.
I think if people are citing in another 3 months time, they’ll be making a mistake
In 3 months they'll think they're 40% faster while being 38% slower. And sometime in 2026 they will be exactly 100% slower - the moment referred to as "technological singularity".
Here’s a LW site dev whining about the study, he was in it and i think he thinks it was unfair to AI
There a complete lack of introspection. It seems like the obvious conclusion to draw from a study showing people's subjective estimates of their productivity with LLMs were the exact opposite of right would inspire him to question his subjectively felt intuitions and experience but instead he doubles down and insists the study must be wrong and surely with the latest model and best use of it it would be a big improvement.
5% "coding"
95% cleanup
I have an LLM usage mandate in my performance review now. I can’t trust it to do anything important, so I’ll get it to do incredibly noddy things like deleting a clause (that I literally always have highlighted) or generate documentation that’s more long-winded than just reading the code and then go to the bathroom while it happens.
Are you fucking serious?
this sort of bloody stupid metric is widespread, i've heard about it widely
goodhart's law's zombie era
Gotta justify all that money that they have just spent without any trials, testing or end user input.
Anyone who has had to unfuck someone else’s work knows it would have been faster to do the work correctly from scratch the first time.
I just want to point out that every single heavily downvoted, idiotic pro-AI reply on this post is from a .ml user (with one programming.dev thrown in).
I wonder which way the causation flows.
Software and computers are a joke at this point.
Computers no longer solve real problems and are now just used to solve the problems that overly complex software running on monstrous cheap hardware create.
"Hey I'd like to run a simple electronics schematic program like we had in the DOS days, it ran in 640K and responded instantly!"
"OK sure first you'll need the latest Windows 11 with 64G of RAM and 2TB of storage, running on at least 24 cores, then you need to install a container for the Docker for the VM for the flatpak for the library for the framework because the programmer liked the blue icon, then make sure you are always connected to the internet for updates or it won't run, and somehow the program will still just look like a 16 bit VB app from 1995."
"Well that sounds complicated, where's the support webpage for installing the program in Windows 7?"
"Do you have the latest AI agents installed in your web browser?"
"It's asking me to click OK but I didn't install the 1GB mouse driver that sends my porn browsing habits to Amazon..."
"Just click OK on all the EULAs so you lose the right to the work you'll create with this software, then install a few more dependencies, languages, entire VMs written in byte code compiled to HTML to run on JAVA, then make sure you have a PON from your ISP otherwise how can you expect to have a few kilobytes of data be processed on your computer? This is all in the cloud, baby!"
@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they're more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?
Here's a random guess. They are thinking less, so time seems to go by quicker. Think about how long 2 hours of calculus homework seems vs 2 hours sitting on the beach.
This is such a wild example to me because sitting at beach is extremely boring and takes forever whereas doing calculus is at least engaging so time flies reasonably quick.
Like when I think what takes the longest in my life I don't think "those times when I'm actively solving problems", I think "those times I sit in a waiting room at the doctors with nothing to do" or "commuting, ditto".
What fascinates me is why coders who use LLMs think they’re more productive.
As @dgerard@awful.systems wrote, LLM usage has been compared to gambling addiction: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
I wonder to what extent this might explain this phenomenon. Many gambling addicts aren't fully aware of their losses, either, I guess.
From the blog post referenced:
We do not provide evidence that:
AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers
Seems the article should be titled “16 AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower” - though I guess making us think it was intended to be a statistically relevant finding was the point.
That all said, this was genuinely interesting and is in-line with my understanding of the human psychology that’s at play. It would be nice to see this at a wider scale, broken down across different methodologies / toolsets and models.
@dgerard@awful.systems who is your illustrator? These are consistently great.
these are stock images! Which are surprisingly cheap. By Valeriy Kachaev, who puts stuff up as Studiostoks on a pile of stock image sites. His pics are bizarre and keep being the perfect thing.
I'm not sure how much this observation can be generalized, but I've also wondered how much the people who overestimate the usefulness of AI image generators underestimate the chances of licensing decent artwork from real creatives with just a few clicks and at low cost. For example, if I'm looking for an illustration for a PowerPoint presentation, I'll usually find something suitable fairly quickly in Canva's library. That's why I don't understand why so many people believe they absolutely need AI-generated slop for this. Of course, however, Canva is participating in the AI hype now as well. I guess they have to keep their investors happy.
all the stock sites are. use case: an image that's almost perfect but you wanna tweak it
LEARN PAINT YOU GHOULS
And generate shit code
For each time saved, you're having that one kink that will slow you down by a fuck ton, something that AI just can't get right, something that takes ai 5 hours to fix but would've taken you 10-20 to write from scratch