5 ms·

If you think AI helps speed up development…

wizzwizz4 2y ago
AI does help speed up development! It lets you completely skip the "begin to understand the requirements" and "work out what's sensible to build" steps, and you can get through the "type out some code" parts even faster than copy-pasting from Stack Overflow (at only 10× the resource expenditure, if we ignore training costs!). It does make the last step ("have a piece of software that's fit-for-purpose") a bit harder; but that's a price you should be willing to pay for velocity.
- water-your-self 2y ago
  Velocity is good for impact, typically.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jeffreygoesto 2y ago
  Poor code monkeys. I am in a industry where software bugs can severely harm people since over 20 years and the fastest code never survived. It always only solved some cheap and easy 70% of the job and the remaining errors almost killed the project and everything had to be reworked peoperly. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. "Fast" code costs you four times: write it, discuss why it is broken, remove it, rewrite it.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
I don't have to think, people have done research.
- grugagag 2y ago
  Only time will tell. Right now this sounds like everything that was once claimed, each technological cycle, only to be forgotten about after some time. Only after some time we come to our senses, some things simply stick while other ‘evolve’ in other directions (for the lack of a better word). Maybe this time it’s different, maybe it’s not. Time will tell.
  - saghm 2y ago
    While I don't disagree with you (and tend to be more of an AI skeptic than enthusiast, especially when it comes to being used for programming), this does weaken the earlier assertion that AI was brought up in response to; "things that have changed in architecture since 2010" is a lot more narrow if you rule out anything that's only come about in the past couple of years by definition due to not having been around long enough to prove longevity.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  It is sad, and confusing, to read comments like this on HN. I mean, you're not even wrong.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Please tell me about how you once asked ChatGPT to write something for you, saw a mistake in its output, and immediately made your mind up. I’ve been writing code professionally for a decade. I’ve led the development of production-grade systems. I understand architecture. I’m no idiot. I use Copilot. It’s regularly helpful. and saves time. Do you have a counter-argument that doesn’t involve some sort of thinly veiled “but you’re an idiot and I’m just a better developer than you”? I don’t by any means think that a current generation LLM can do everything that a software developer can. Far from it. But that’s not what we are talking about.
- viraptor 2y ago
  We'll need some well researched study on how much LLMs actually help vs not. I know they can be useful in some situations, but it also sometimes takes a few days away from it to realise the negative impacts. Like the "copilot pause" coined by Primogen - you know the completion is coming, so you pause when writing the trivial thing you knew how to do anyway and wait for the completion (which may or may not be correct, wasting both time and opportunity to practice on your own). Self-reported improvement will be biased by impression and facts other than the actual outcome. It's not that I don't believe your experience specifically. I don't believe either side in this case knows the real industry-wide average improvement until someone really measures it.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Unfortunately, we still don't have great metrics for developer productivity, other than the hilari-bad lines of code metric. Jira tickets, sprints, points, t-shirt sizes; all of that is to try and bring something measurable to the table, but everyone knows it's really fuzzy. What I do know though, is that ChatGPT can finish a leetcode problem before I've even fully parsed the question. There are definitely ratholes to get stuck and lose time in when trying to get the LLM to give the right answer, but LLM-unassisted programming has the same problem. When using an LLM to help, there's a bunch of different contexts I don't have to load in because the LLM is handling it giving me more head space to think about the bigger problems at hand. No matter what a study says, as soon as it comes out, it's going to get picked apart because people aren't going to believe the results, no matter what the results say. This shit's not properly measurable like in a hard science so you're going to have to settle for subjective opinions. If you want to make it a competition, how would you rank John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Grace Hopper, and Fabrice Bellard? How do you even try and make that comparison? How do you measure and compare something you don't have a ruler for?

AI does help speed up development! It lets you completely skip the "begin to understand the requirements" and "work out what's sensible to build" steps, and you can get through the "type out some code" parts even faster than copy-pasting from Stack Overflow (at only 10× the resource expenditure, if we ignore training costs!). It does make the last step ("have a piece of software that's fit-for-purpose") a bit harder; but that's a price you should be willing to pay for velocity.

water-your-self 2y ago
Velocity is good for impact, typically.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jeffreygoesto 2y ago
Poor code monkeys. I am in a industry where software bugs can severely harm people since over 20 years and the fastest code never survived. It always only solved some cheap and easy 70% of the job and the remaining errors almost killed the project and everything had to be reworked peoperly. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. "Fast" code costs you four times: write it, discuss why it is broken, remove it, rewrite it.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

I don't have to think, people have done research.

grugagag 2y ago
Only time will tell. Right now this sounds like everything that was once claimed, each technological cycle, only to be forgotten about after some time. Only after some time we come to our senses, some things simply stick while other ‘evolve’ in other directions (for the lack of a better word). Maybe this time it’s different, maybe it’s not. Time will tell.
- saghm 2y ago
  While I don't disagree with you (and tend to be more of an AI skeptic than enthusiast, especially when it comes to being used for programming), this does weaken the earlier assertion that AI was brought up in response to; "things that have changed in architecture since 2010" is a lot more narrow if you rule out anything that's only come about in the past couple of years by definition due to not having been around long enough to prove longevity.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
It is sad, and confusing, to read comments like this on HN. I mean, you're not even wrong.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

Please tell me about how you once asked ChatGPT to write something for you, saw a mistake in its output, and immediately made your mind up. I’ve been writing code professionally for a decade. I’ve led the development of production-grade systems. I understand architecture. I’m no idiot. I use Copilot. It’s regularly helpful. and saves time. Do you have a counter-argument that doesn’t involve some sort of thinly veiled “but you’re an idiot and I’m just a better developer than you”? I don’t by any means think that a current generation LLM can do everything that a software developer can. Far from it. But that’s not what we are talking about.

viraptor 2y ago
We'll need some well researched study on how much LLMs actually help vs not. I know they can be useful in some situations, but it also sometimes takes a few days away from it to realise the negative impacts. Like the "copilot pause" coined by Primogen - you know the completion is coming, so you pause when writing the trivial thing you knew how to do anyway and wait for the completion (which may or may not be correct, wasting both time and opportunity to practice on your own). Self-reported improvement will be biased by impression and facts other than the actual outcome. It's not that I don't believe your experience specifically. I don't believe either side in this case knows the real industry-wide average improvement until someone really measures it.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Unfortunately, we still don't have great metrics for developer productivity, other than the hilari-bad lines of code metric. Jira tickets, sprints, points, t-shirt sizes; all of that is to try and bring something measurable to the table, but everyone knows it's really fuzzy. What I do know though, is that ChatGPT can finish a leetcode problem before I've even fully parsed the question. There are definitely ratholes to get stuck and lose time in when trying to get the LLM to give the right answer, but LLM-unassisted programming has the same problem. When using an LLM to help, there's a bunch of different contexts I don't have to load in because the LLM is handling it giving me more head space to think about the bigger problems at hand. No matter what a study says, as soon as it comes out, it's going to get picked apart because people aren't going to believe the results, no matter what the results say. This shit's not properly measurable like in a hard science so you're going to have to settle for subjective opinions. If you want to make it a competition, how would you rank John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Grace Hopper, and Fabrice Bellard? How do you even try and make that comparison? How do you measure and compare something you don't have a ruler for?