Technology

For most large projects, writing the code is the easy part anyway.

About that "net slowdown". I think it's true, but only in specific cases. If the user already knows well how to write code, an LLM might be only marginally useful or even useless.

However, there are ways to make it useful, but it requires specific circumstances. For example, you can't be bothered to write a simple loop, you can use and LLM to do it. Give the boring routine to an LLM, and you can focus on naming the variables in a fitting way or adjusting the finer details to your liking.

Can't be bothered to look up the exact syntax for a function you use only twice a year? Let and LLM handle that, and tweak the details. Now, you didn't spend 15 minutes reading stack overflow posts that don't answer the exact question you had in mind. Instead, you spent 5 minutes on the whole thing, and that includes the tweaking and troubleshooting parts.

If you have zero programming experience, you can use an LLM to write some code for you, but prepare to spend the whole day troubleshooting something that is essentially a black box to you. Alternatively, you could ask a human to write the same thing in 5-15 minutes depending on the method they choose.

Senior Management in much of Corporate America is like a kind of modern Nobility in which looking and sounding the part is more important than strong competence in the field. It's why buzzwords catch like wildfire.

I mean.. At best it's a stack overflow/google replacement.

This article sums up a Stanford study of AI and developer productivity. TL;DR - net productivity boost is a modest 15-20%, or as low as negative to 10% in complex, brownfield codebases. This tracks with my own experience as a dev.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/does-ai-actually-boost-developer-productivity-striking-%C3%A7elebi-tcp8f

Are you trying to tell me that the people want to sell me their universal panacea for all human endeavours were... lying...? Say it ain't so.

“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.

I'm so glad this was your first line in the post

AI coding is the stupidest thing I've seen since someone decided it was a good idea to measure the code by the amount of lines written.

Its great for stupid boobs like me, but only to get you going. It regurgitates old code, it cannot come up with new stuff. Lately there have been less Python errors, but again the stuff you can do is limited. At least for the free stuff that you can get without signing up.

Imagine if we did "vibe city infrastructure". Just throw up a fucking suspension bridge and we'll hire some temps to come in later to find the bad welds and missing cables.

so is the profit it was foretold to generate, but it actually costs money than its actually generating.

The most immediately understandable example I heard of this was from a senior developer who pointed out that LLM generated code will build a different code block every time it has to do the same thing. So if that function fails, you have to look at multiple incarnations of the same function, rather than saying “oh, let’s fix that function in the library we built.”

I work adjacent to software developers, and I have been hearing a lot of the same sentiments. What I don't understand, though, is the magnitude of this bubble then.

Typically, bubbles seem to form around some new market phenomenon or technology that threatens to upset the old paradigm and usher in a new boom. Those market phenomena then eventually take their place in the world based on their real value, which is nowhere near the level of the hype, but still substantial.

In this case, I am struggling to find examples of the real benefits of a lot of these AI assistant technologies. I know that there are a lot of successes in the AI realm, but not a single one I know of involves an LLM.

So, I guess my question is, "What specific LLM tools are generating profits or productivity at a substantial level well exceeding their operating costs?" If there really are none, or if the gains are only incremental, then my question becomes an incredulous, "Is this biggest in history tech bubble really composed entirely of unfounded hype?"

I code with LLMs every day as a senior developer but agents are mostly a big lie. LLMs are great for information index and rubber duck chats which already is incredible feaute of the century but agents are fundamentally bad. Even for Python they are intern-level bad. I was just trying the new Claude and instead of using Python's pathlib.Path it reinvented its own file system path utils and pathlib is not even some new Python feature - it has been de facto way to manage paths for at least 3 years now.

That being said when prompted in great detail with exact instructions agents can be useful but thats not what being sold here.

After so many iterations it seems like agents need a fundamental breakthrough in AI tech is still needed as diminishing returns is going hard now.

I have never seen an AI generated code which is correct. Not once. I've certainly seen it broadly correct and used it for the gist of something. But normally it fucks something up - imports, dependencies, logic, API calls, or a combination of all them.

I sure as hell wouldn't trust to use it without reviewing it thoroughly. And anyone stupid enough to use it blindly through "vibe" programming deserves everything they get. And most likely that will be a massive bill and code which is horribly broken in some serious and subtle way.

it's slowing you down. The solution to that is to use it in even more places!

Wtf was up with that conclusion?

Glad someone paid a bunch of worthless McKinsey consultants what I could’ve told you myself

Almost like its a desperate bid to blow another stock/asset bubble to keep 'the economy' going, from C suite, who all knew the housing bubble was going to pop when this all started, and now is.

Funniest thing in the world to me is high and mid level execs and managers who believe their own internal and external marketing.

The smarter people in the room realize their propoganda is in fact propogands, and are rolling their eyes internally that their henchmen are so stupid as to be true believers.

I have been vibe coding a whole game in JavaScript to try it out. So far I have gotten a pretty ok game out of it. It's just a simple match three bubble pop type of thing so nothing crazy but I made a design and I am trying to implement it using mostly vibe coding.

That being said the code is awful. So many bad choices and spaghetti code. It also took longer than if I had written it myself.

So now I have a game that's kind of hard to modify haha. I may try to setup some unit tests and have it refactor using those.

Might be there someday, but right now it’s basically a substitute for me googling some shit.

If I let it go ham, and code everything, it mutates into insanity in a very short period of time.

So when the AI bubble burst, will there be coding jobs available to clean up the mess?

LLMs work great to ask about tons of documentation and learn more about high-level concepts. It's a good search engine.

The code they produce have basically always disappointed me.

I use AI as an entryway to learning or for finding the name or technique that I'm thinking of but can't remember or know it's name so then i can look elsewhere for proper documentation. I would never have it just blindly writing code.

Sadly search engines getting shitter has sort of made me have to use it to replace them.

Then it's also good to quickly parse an error for anything obviously wrong.

According to Deutsche Bank the AI bubble is ~~a~~ the pillar of our economy now.

So when it pops. I guess that's kinda apocalyptic.

Edit - strikethrough

The people talking about AI coding the most at my job are architects and it drives me insane.