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I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, o

I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful. So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress. The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.

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sanderjd 1y ago
What kind of proof are you looking for here, exactly? Lots of businesses are successfully using AI... There are many anecdotes of this, which you can read here, or even in the article you commented on. What else are you looking for?
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  I'd like to see any actual case studies. So far I have only heard vague hype.
  - ewild 1y ago
    i mean i can state that i built a company wihtin the last year where id say 95% of my code involved using an LLM. I am an experienced dev so yes it makes mistakes and it requires my expertise to be sure the code works and to fix subtle bugs; however, i built this company me and 2 others in about 7 months for what wouldve easily taken me 3 years without the aid of LLMs. Is that an indictment of my ability? maybe, but we are doing quite well for ourselves at 3M arr already on only 200k expense.
    - grey-area 1y ago
      That’s genuinely far more interesting and exciting to me (and I’m sure others too) than this sort of breathless provocation, esp if code and prompts etc are shared. Have you written about it?
      - sanderjd 1y ago
        Do you find that these kinds of anecdotes are hard to find?
      - ewild 1y ago
        i have not written about it due to me being a silent partner in the company and dont want my name publicly attatched to it, but the code and prompts is all more like talking to a buddy is how i use it, i ask it to build specific things then i look through and make changes. For instance a few examples i can give is there is a lot of graph traversal in my data i built, I'm not an expert on graph traversal, so I researched what would be a good algo for my type of data, and then utilized claude to implement the papers algorithm into my code and data structures. I dont have the llm in any steps that the customer interact with (there is some fuzzy stuff but nothing consistently run) but i would say an llm has touched over 90% of the code i wrote. its just an upgraded rubber ducky to me. If i wasn't experienced in computer science this would all fall apart however i do have to fix almost all the code, but spending 10 mins fixing something is better than 3 days figuring it out in the first place (again this might be more unique to my coding and learning style)
  - droidist2 1y ago
    Software engineering is always light on case studies though, for instance test driven development, or static vs. dynamic typing, people have been debating these for quite a long time.
  - soraminazuki 1y ago
    At least actual examples are underwhelming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    There are lots of concrete examples in this article: https://www.semafor.com/article/06/03/2025/how-vibe-coding-is-tipping-silicon-valleys-scales-of-power https://www.semafor.com/article/06/03/2025/how-vibe-coding-i... Do I think those rise to "case studies"? No. But to another commenters point, detailed and rigorous case studies have always been hard to come by for any productivity process or technology. I also think that article is hype, but it's not true that it's vague.
- frank_nitti 1y ago
  What do you mean by “successfully using AI”, do you just mean some employee used it and found it helpful at some stage of their dev process, e.g. in lieu of search engines or existing codegen tooling? Are there any examples of businesses deploying production-ready, nontrivial code changes without a human spending a comparable (or much greater) amount of time as they’d have needed to with the existing SOTA dev tooling outside of LLMs? That’s my interpretation of the question at hand. In my experience, LLMs have been very useful for developers who don’t know where to start on a particular task, or need to generate some trivial boilerplate code. But on nearly every occasion of the former, the code/scripts need to be heavily audited and revised by an experienced engineer before it’s ready to deploy for real.
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    Yeah, I should have posted the first version of my post, pointing out that the problem with this demand for proof (as is often the case) devolves into boring definitional questions. I don't understand why you think "the code needs to be audited and revised" is a failure. Nothing in the OP relies on it being possible for LLMs to build and deploy software unsupervised. It really seems like a non sequitur to me, to ask for proof of this.
    - frank_nitti 1y ago
      That’s fair regarding the OP, and if otherwise agree with your sentiments here. Some other threads of conversation get intertwined here with concerns about delusional management making decisions to cut staff and reduce hiring for junior positions, on the strength of the promises by AI vendors and their paid/voluntary shills For many like me who have encouraged sharp young people learn computers, we are watching their spirits crushed by this narrative and have a strong urge to push back — we still need new humans to learn how computer systems actually work, and if nobody is willing to pay them for work because an LLM outperforms them on those menial “rite-of-passage” types of software construction, we will find ourselves in a bad place
      - sanderjd 1y ago
jagged-chisel 1y ago
> … if it’s so great, stop telling us and show … If you’re selling shovels to gold miners, you don’t need to demonstrate the shovel - you just need decent marketing to convince people there’s gold in them thar hills.
- XorNot 1y ago
  This is actually a great metaphor and phrasing and I'm filing it away for later btw.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Note that it's a pretty common cliche, usually phrased something like "in a gold rush, the only people guaranteed to make money are the guys selling the shovels".
    - kwertyoowiyop 1y ago
      It’s actually an offbeat take on that common cliche.
  - pera 1y ago
    It's a bit more than a metaphor :) during the California gold rush there was this guy named Sam Brannan who sold shovels and other tools to miners, and made a fortune from it (he is often referred to as California's first millionaire). He also had a newspaper at the time, the California Star, which as you can imagine was used to promote the gold rush: > The excitement and enthusiasm of Gold Washing still continues—increases. (1848) https://sfmuseum.org/hist6/star.html https://sfmuseum.org/hist6/star.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
citizenpaul 1y ago
Yeah exactly. Whats nuts is watching all these people shill for something that we all have used to mediocre results. Obviously Fly.io benefits if people start hosting tons of slopped together AI projects on their platform. Its kinda sad to watch what I thought was a good company shill for AI. Even if they are not directly getting money from some PR contract. We must not be prompting hard enough....
- blibble 1y ago
  > Whats nuts is watching all these people shill for something that we all have used to mediocre results. this sort of post is the start of next phase in the battle for mindshare the tools are at the very best mediocre replacements for google, and the people with a vested interest in promoting them know this, so they switch to attacking critics of the approach > Its kinda sad to watch what I thought was a good company shill for AI. yeah, I was sad too, then I scrolled up and saw the author. double sadness.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    If you really think that feel free to continue with business as usual. I just hope you're not at a stack ranking company, or you are politically savvy though, because otherwise you're going to be in for a real shock in the next few years as your peers build their AI skills, tooling matures and models improve. A skilled dev with a well tuned agentic workflow can already finish non-trivial 5k LoC projects in a day, complete with copious tests and documentation, just imagine when the ecosystem has matured and the majority of your coworkers are hip to the game.
    - blibble 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - CuriouslyC 1y ago
        Not everyone else is going to be out though, just the people who don't rise with the tide. Now is the time to understand where the tools are going, what humans are likely to still be better at (probably what and why, definitely not how), how that's going to impact what it means to be a developer, and how you can expand/broaden your skillset to continue to have a niche when your technical skills are devalued. Adapt or die.
ofjcihen 1y ago
Honestly it’s really unfortunate that LLMs seem to have picked up the same hype men that attached themselves to blockchains etc. LLMs are very useful. I use them as a better way to search the web, generate some code that I know I can debug but don’t want to write and as a way to conversationally interact with data. The problem is the hype machine has set expectations so high and refused criticism to the point where LLMs can’t possibly measure up. This creates the divide we see here.
- busymom0 1y ago
  I think LLM hype is more deserved and different from that of blockchain. There's still a significant barrier to entry to get involved with blockchain and most people don't even know what it is. LLMs on the other hand have very low barrier to at least use- one can just go to google, ChatGPT etc and use it and see its effectiveness. There's a reason why in the last year, a significant portion of school students are now using LLMs to cheat. Blockchains still don't have that kind of utilization.
  - ofjcihen 1y ago
    I agree with all of these points. Honestly I think that makes the argument stronger though that it’s unfortunate they jumped on.
- vohk 1y ago
  I think I agree with the general thrust but I have to say I've yet to be impressed with LLMs for web search. I think part of that comes from most people using Google as the benchmark, which has been hot garbage for years now. It's not hard to be better than having to dig 3 sponsored results deep to get started parsing the list of SEO spam, let alone the thing you were actually searching for. But compared to using Kagi, I've found found LLMs end up wasting more of my time by returning a superficial survey with frequent oversights and mistakes. At the final tally I've still found it faster to just do it myself. I will say I do love LLMs for getting a better idea of what to search for, and for picking details out of larger blocks.
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avanai 1y ago
A "eulogy" is a speech you make at a funeral in honor of the dead person. I think you meant "apology".
- grey-area 1y ago
  Yes I think I was thinking more a paean or apology though not sure apology is used in that sense much nowadays - perhaps apologia is clearer. In praise of would be better, thanks will edit just now.
  - antithesizer 1y ago
    The Greek transliteration "apologia" is often used for that sense of "apology" to skirt any ambiguity.
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    Encomium
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  While that is the most common sense of eulogy, it's not the only one. A eulogy is also any speech that highly praises someone or something - which is most commonly done at funerals, which is how the funeral association came about (also probably by association with an elegy, which is an etymologically unrelated word that refers to a Greek poem dedicated to someone who passed away). In many romance languages, eulogy doesn't have the funeral connotation, only the high praise one - so the GP may be a native speaker of a romance language who didn't realize this meaning is less common in English.
- deleted 1y ago
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keybored 1y ago
> The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own. I’m open to that happening. I mean them showing me. I’m less open to the Nth “aww shucks, the very few doubters that are left at this point are about to get a rude awakening” FOMO concern trolling. I mean I guess it’s nice for me that you are so concerned about my well-being, soon to be suffering-being? Now, AI can do a lot of things. Don’t get me wrong. It has probably written a million variations on the above sentiment.
geoduck14 1y ago
You think that the only code that is valuable is code that is written by a professional SWE. There are LOADS of people who need "a program" but aren't equipped to write code or hire an SWE that are empowered by this. And example: last week, I saw a PM vibe code several different applications to demo what might get built after it gets prioritized by SWEs
- grey-area 1y ago
  Not really I’m fine with anyone knocking stuff together but I think people should be aware of the limitations and dangers. Writing like this does nothing to inform and is overly positive IMO. It’d be like insisting llms will replace authors of novels. In some sense they could but there are serious shortcomings and things like agents etc just don’t fix them.
- bigger_cheese 1y ago
  I can share my experience I am not a software engineer. I am the "other" type of Engineer (chemical engineer). I tend to use AI in the same way I use google or Stack Overflow, mostly when I get stuck on syntax and my code editor isn't helping me, I know what I am attempting to do "should" be possible but I can't get the syntax right. For example a recent question I asked was "Python, create an xarray with two dimensions from a pandas df" It gave me a few lines of example code which was enough for me to figure out where I had messed up the syntax in my own code. I have seen one of my junior coworkers copy+paste entire chunks of code from chatbot conversations and to be honest what he has produced is underwhelming the code is poorly structured difficult to reason about I have low confidence he understands what the bot has produced (and why it did things the way it did) and I don't have high confidence we'd be able to trust the accuracy of the figures this code was outputting.
conradev 1y ago
Have you used a language model to program yet?
- grey-area 1y ago
  Yes sure, I said so in the post, and have watched others try to do so too.
mvdtnz 1y ago
> If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. I don't think this follows. Anyone can see that 10-ton excavator is hundreds or even thousands of times more efficient than a man with a shovel. That doesn't mean you can start a company up staffed only with excavators. Firstly you obviously need people operating the excavator. Secondly the excavator is incredibly efficient at moving lots of dirt around, but no crew could perform any non-trivial job without all the tasks that the excavator is not good out - planning, loading/unloading, prepping the site, fine work (shovelling dirt around pipes and wires), etc. AI is a tool. It will mean companies can run much leaner. This doesn't imply they can do everything a company needs to do.
steego 1y ago
Approximately speaking, what do you want to see put up? I ask this because it reads like you have a specific challenge in mind when it comes to generative AI and it sounds like anything short of "proof of the unlimited powers" will fall short of being deemed "useful". Here's the deal: Reasonable people aren't claiming this stuff is a silver bullet or a panacea. They're not even suggesting it should be used without supervision. It's useful when used by people who understand its limitations and leverage its strengths. If you want to see how it's been used by someone who was happy with the results, and is willing to share their results, you can scroll down a few stories on the front-page and check the commit history of this project: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits/main/ https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits... Now here's the deal: These people aren't trying to prove anything to you. They're just sharing the results of an experiment where a very talented developer used these tools to build something useful. So let me ask you this: Can we at least agree that these tools can be of some use to talented developers?
- hooverd 1y ago
  It's useful, but the promise of every AI company is very explicitly that they will burn the seed corn and choke off the pipeline that created those "very talented" developers who reviewed it!
  - grey-area 1y ago
    I’m less worried about this as the best way to learn to code is to read as well as write it IMO. If capabilities don’t improve it’s not replacing anyone, if they do improve and it can write good code, people can learn from reading that. I don’t see a pathway to improvement though given how these models work.
- grey-area 1y ago
  Yes sure I’ve checked in code generated by AI myself. I’ve not experienced the excitement this article exudes though and it seems very limited in usefulness due to the by now well-documented downsides. Frankly I haven’t bothered using it much recently, it’s just not there yet IME and I’m not sure LLMs ever will be. What I’m interested in really is just case studies with prompts and code - that’s a lot more interesting for hackers IMO than hype.
marxism 1y ago
I think we're talking past each other. There's always been a threshold: above it, code changes are worth the effort; below it, they sit in backlog purgatory. AI tools so far seem to lower implementation costs, moving the threshold down so more backlog items become viable. The "5x productivity" crowd is excited about this expanded scope, while skeptics correctly note the highest value work hasn't fundamentally changed. I think what's happening is two groups using "productivity" to mean completely different things: "I can implement 5x more code changes" vs "I generate 5x more business value." Both experiences are real, but they're not the same thing. https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/ai-productivity-paradox https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/ai-productivity-parado...
- AnnaPali 1y ago
  I agree 100%! It's amazing how few people grok this.
  - sidewndr46 1y ago
    This reminds me of places that try and measure productivity by lines of code
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > The "5x productivity" crowd is excited about this expanded scope, while skeptics correctly note the highest value work hasn't fundamentally changed. This is true, LLMs can speed up development (some asterisks are required here, but that is generally true). That said, I've seen, mainly here on HN, so many people hyping it up way beyond this. I've got into arguments here with people claiming it codes at "junior level". Which is an absurd level of bullshit.
  - sothatsit 1y ago
    Exactly. Juniors may have vastly less breadth of knowledge than an LLM, but they can learn and explore and test software in ways that LLMs cannot. However, the expansion in scope that senior developers can tackle now will take away work that would ordinarily be given to juniors.
rybosome 1y ago
Many, many people are in fact “using the code it generated on its own”. I’ve been putting LLM-assisted PRs into production for months. With no disrespect meant, if you’re unable to find utility in these tools, then you aren’t using them correctly.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > LLM-assisted PRs This does not counter what GP said. Using LLM as a code assistant is not the same as "I don't need to hire developers because LLMs code in their place"
  - detaro 1y ago
    Which one is the article talking about?
  - deleted 1y ago
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- lando2319 1y ago
  yep I've used Devon and now Google Jules, for the big stuff, it has lots of wrong code, but it still end up giving my a much better start than starting from scratch certainly. When it all comes together it give me a 6X boost. But def fixing all the wrong code and thoroughly testing it is the time consuming part.
- douglasisshiny 1y ago
  Okay, how am I supposed to use them "correctly"? Because me explaining step by step, more so than a junior developer, how to do a small task in an existing codebase for it to get it wrong not once, not twice, not three times, but more is not a productivity boost. And here's the difference between someone like me and an LLM: I can learn and retain information. If you don't understand this, you don't have a correct understanding of LLMs.
  - simonw 1y ago
    It is entirely true that current LLMs do not learn from their mistakes, and that is a difference between eg an LLM and a human intern. It is us, the users of the LLMs, that need to learn from those mistakes. If you prompt an LLM and it makes a mistake, you have to learn not to prompt it in the same way in the future. It takes a lot of time and experimentation to find the prompting patterns that work. My current favorite tactic is to dump sizable amounts of example code into the models every time I use them. I find this works extremely well. I will take code that I wrote previously that accomplishes a similar task, drop that in and describe what I want it to build next.
lelandbatey 1y ago
If you read post, the article is mostly agreeing with you. What they're pointing out is not "the AI can do everything you do", it's that "an AI coder can do a lot of the boring typing a lot faster than you, leaving you right at the point of 'real implementation'". Having something else write a lot of the boring code that you'll need and then you finish up the final touches, that's amazing and a huge accelerator (so they claim). The claim is not "AI will replace us all", the claim of the parent article is "AI is a big deal and will change how we work, the same way IDEs/copy-paste/autocomplete/online documentation have radically changed our work."
- Seb-C 1y ago
  > an AI coder can do a lot of the boring typing a lot faster than you, leaving you right at the point of 'real implementation Vim and bash solved that for me a long time ago in a more reliable and efficient way (and it's certainly not the only tool capable of that). > the same way IDEs/copy-paste/autocomplete/online documentation have radically changed our work I was there before and went in the autocomplete/lsp thing pretty late (because Vim didn't have good lsp support for a long time, and Vim without it was still making me more efficient than any other IDE with it). Those things didn't radically change our work as you claim, it just made us a bit more productive.
NotAnOtter 1y ago
The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors With that as a metric, 1 Senior + 4 juniors cannot build the company with the scope you are describing. A 50-eng company might have 1 CTO, 5 staff, 15 Seniors, and 29 juniors. So the proposition is you could cut the company in ~half but would still require the most-expensive aspects of running a company.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors This is such an outlandish claim, to the point where I call it plain bullshit. LLMs are useful in a completely different way that a Junior developer is. It is an apples and oranges comparison. LLMs does things in some way that it helps me beyong what a Junior would. It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.
  - NotAnOtter 1y ago
    I disagree that they are so different you can't compare them. Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. But it still takes the same amount of time to deliver the 4 separate projects. I find the existence of LLM development deeply troubling for a long list of reasons. But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated >It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can. And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      > Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. This is not how Juniors work. I don't know what else to say. It is just not true. I don't give juniors a prompt and let them to implement code for a few hours. They work as any other developer, just generally in features and/or tickets of more limited scope. At least initially. This is not what LLMs do > But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated I sometimes get the feeling I talk to people who never worked in a real professional setting. A LLM can do things that Juniors can't. When I bounce around ideas for implementing a certain feature, when I explore libraries or frameworks I am unfamiliar with, when I ask it to review pieces of code looking for improvements, when I get it to generate boring glue code, scaffolding, unit tests. All those things are helpful, and make LLMs an excellent code assistant in a way that Juniors are not. But it is completely unable to properly do things without me giving very precise instructions of what it needs to code. The less precise I am, the worse its output. It is very happy to generate completely bullshit code that kinda looks like it does what I need but not really. I constantly need to tweak what it generates, and although it saves my time as it outputs a lot of code in little time, the results are very unreliable to meaningfully act with any sort of independence. > And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at Which completely fails to address the point I am making.
protocolture 1y ago
>I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this He spent a large tranche of the article specifically hanging a lantern on how mediocre the output is. >by creating an AI only company He specifically says that you need to review the code over and over and over.
ghostly_s 1y ago
Did you even glance at the link? The author is advocating for a human-supervised LLM agent workflow.
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
This 2 year old Goroutine pool implementation [1] is 95% GPT generated and has commit history showing what GPT did. It's an older example, but it is one. [1]: https://github.com/devchat-ai/gopool https://github.com/devchat-ai/gopool
SatvikBeri 1y ago
I don't think I would notice a 100% improvement in software productivity in most companies, from the outside. Most of the time, that would just translate to the company being able to hire fewer developers, and having slightly higher profit margins – but not enormously higher, because developers are only one part. I recently used Claude Code to develop & merge an optimization that will save about $4,000 a month. It was relatively simple but tedious, so I probably wouldn't have done it on my own. I don't even expect most of my coworkers to notice.
pj_mukh 1y ago
I think this is a misunderstanding coder productivity. A 10x engineer isn't 10x faster at popping out Unit tests, that stuff is mind-numbingly boring that turns out a next token predictor can do it with ease. In fact I would guess that really "productive" software engineers, slow down considerably when forced to do this important but slow work*. The 10x engineer is really good at deducing the next most important thing to do is and doing it quickly. This involves quickly moving past 100's of design decisions in a week to deliver something quickly. It requires you to think partly like a product manager and partly like a senior engineer but that's the game and LLM's are zero help there. Most engineering productivity is probably locked up in this. So yes, LLM's probably help a lot, just not in the way that would show on some Jira board? *One could claim that doing this slow work gives the brain a break to then be good at strategizing the higher order more important work. Not sure.
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georgemcbay 1y ago
I don't know if you are the same (S.G.) greyarea I'm familiar with but I hope so because the idea of having a couple of 90s era irc people take opposing viewpoints on LLMs in 2025 amuses me.
cube2222 1y ago
Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from? You set up a strawman (AI only companies, agents doing everything on their own) which is irrelevant to the point the article is making. One excerpt: > Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways. I think this article is very on point, I relate with basically every paragraph. It's not a panacea, it's not a 10x improvement by any means, but it's a very meaningful improvement to both productivity (less than 2x I'd say, which would already be a ton) and fun for me. As I've mentioned in the past here > I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated. which is a point the article makes too (tables), in a slightly different way. Also, to be clear, I agree that 90% of the marketing around AI is overblown BS. But that's again beside the point, and the article is making no outlandish claims of that kind. Overall, I hope this article (as intended) will make more people lose their dismissiveness and wake up their curiosity, as I expect the future of those is akin to that of people today saying they're "not really good at computers". It's a paradigm-shift, and it takes getting used to and productive in, as some imo smart people are mentioning even in this thread[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039
- mcphage 1y ago
  > Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from? Well, in this case they’re busy writing articles trying to convince us, instead of proving stuff to us.
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crazygringo 1y ago
That's a strawman. Nobody is saying it's "unlimited powers", that's your exaggeration. And what you're proposing about an "AI only company" seems to be based on your misunderstanding. What this article is saying is, you need the same number of senior developers, but now each one is essentially assisted by a few junior developers virtually for free. That's huge. But saying you want to see an "AI only company" as "proof" has nothing to do with that. And what you're describing -- "occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved" -- is exactly what the author explicitly addresses at the top: > If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. People coding with LLMs today use agents... The entire article is about how to use LLM's effectively. What kind of "proof" do you really want, when the article explains it all awfully clearly?
magarnicle 1y ago
From what I've seen, it takes a deeply original thinker to get something great out of generative AI. But if you're a deeply original thinker, you're probably exceptional regardless of whether you are using AI or not. Generative AI is too much of a blank canvas at the moment, and one that is always shifting. It's up to the user to find all the use cases, and even then in my experience it's just as likely to send me on a wild goose chase as it is to instantly solve my problem.
johnfn 1y ago
Who said "unlimited powers", other than you? That seems like an intentional distortion of the article, which says "LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write". Doing most of my tedious work is very different than "unlimited powers". I use AI to chew through tedious work all the time. In fact, I let an agent do some work just before I checked HN to read your claim that it can't do that. Everyone at my job does the same, perhaps modulo checking HN. But there's no 'unlimited power' to show you - we're just about 30% faster than we used to be.
- Retric 1y ago
  You might be 30% faster, but not everyone is doing your job specific with your exact skill set. I suspect the range is like -5% to 50%, the question nobody can answer is what the average is because things are so diverse and nobody is collecting good data. In decades of programming I’ve written very little tedious code, but that’s as much about the projects I’ve worked on as approach I use.
bberenberg 1y ago
I build tools all the time using AI tools that would have taken me 10x longer before. A couple examples below. The first example was a literal one shot of my dumping the full page html into cursor and asking it for the feature I needed. In using it today it already saved me over an hour of analysis time across the refunds I analyze. The second example includes using AI for better classifying text and having our support people better use their time to help customers. I could have probably made the second thing without LLMs but I didn’t have the skills. Here I was able to provide concrete value to our company and our customers. https://github.com/Atlas-Authority/mpac-ui-improved https://github.com/Atlas-Authority/mpac-ui-improved https://moduscreate.com/blog/forum-monitoring-is-essential-but-tedious-heres-how-ai-can-help/ https://moduscreate.com/blog/forum-monitoring-is-essential-b... (Pardon how marketing keyword stuffed the final post)
heathrow83829 1y ago
the greatest proof that it's a useful tool is how much people are using it. Almost everyone is using it. If you're using it then you probably find it useful as well.
- latentsea 1y ago
  And the greatest proof that people are using software is that people are complaining about it.
- runarberg 1y ago
  a) If “everyone is using it”, show me the numbers. Doing a developer survey to see how many are using it is not hard. Ask a random sample of developers if they ⅰ use LLMs to aid their standard coding or ⅱ completely replace their coding with LLM output. b) Even if “everyone is using it” it doesn’t mean it is useful. The usage could be adequately explained by e.g. marketing, being forced on them by management/policy, etc. Not everything with high usage is useful. I can e.g. quickly think of chewing gum (which is also used by a lot of developers), or the ANSI standard keyboard (as opposed to the ISO standard keyboard).
liveoneggs 1y ago
The first paragraph of this blog calls senior skeptical developers "unserious" but the person who wrote it has a cartoon gopher as his avatar. The next few paragraphs basically say "the tool run arbitrary programs on your machine, pull in arbitrary files, and use that to run more arbitrary commands" and then blames you for thinking that is a bad sequence of events. In the best possible light I (an AI-neutral reader) can paint this rant on a hosting-company blog (why publish this?) is that 1) allowing random textbots to execute programs on your work computer is good (disagree), 2) those chatbots do, in fact, occasionally say enough correct-ish things that they are probably worth your company paying $20+/month for your access (agree).
- sethherr 1y ago
  I think tptacek is generally worth reading. He is one of the users with the highest karma on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek) I’m happy to have read this, which is reason enough to publish it - but also it’s clearly generating debate so it seems like a very good thing to have published.
  - liveoneggs 1y ago
    co-mingling your work identity with your gopher-identity is a dangerous game; I should clarify the gopher is not UMN-related.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    I generally like tptacek, but this piece has major flaws. His dismissal of all copyright concerns on the grounds that some developers engage in piracy is horribly lazy.
  - chinchilla2020 1y ago
    High karma in an internet community is not something I respect automatically. Pewdiepie and every other little online personality have tons of followers and likes. tptacek has always come across arrogant, juvenile, opinionated, and difficult to work with.
- 1y ago
idan 1y ago
This has all the energy of people saying "ah, you take such great photos, you must have a good camera" _People_ are getting outsized value from AI in the ways they apply it. Photographs come from the photographer, not the camera.
the__alchemist 1y ago
I suspect it comes down to use case. Those you refer to use it for well-trodden areas; likely web UIs and servers using popular tools. The image they predict is extrapolated from these.
paulcole 1y ago
> The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own. Why would we do this? Wouldn’t it be better to do this silently and reap the benefits?
rukuu001 1y ago
Re put up or shut up - this is a decent example from the front page today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
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sanderjd 1y ago

What kind of proof are you looking for here, exactly? Lots of businesses are successfully using AI... There are many anecdotes of this, which you can read here, or even in the article you commented on. What else are you looking for?

Hammershaft 1y ago
I'd like to see any actual case studies. So far I have only heard vague hype.
- ewild 1y ago
  i mean i can state that i built a company wihtin the last year where id say 95% of my code involved using an LLM. I am an experienced dev so yes it makes mistakes and it requires my expertise to be sure the code works and to fix subtle bugs; however, i built this company me and 2 others in about 7 months for what wouldve easily taken me 3 years without the aid of LLMs. Is that an indictment of my ability? maybe, but we are doing quite well for ourselves at 3M arr already on only 200k expense.
  - grey-area 1y ago
    That’s genuinely far more interesting and exciting to me (and I’m sure others too) than this sort of breathless provocation, esp if code and prompts etc are shared. Have you written about it?
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      Do you find that these kinds of anecdotes are hard to find?
    - ewild 1y ago
      i have not written about it due to me being a silent partner in the company and dont want my name publicly attatched to it, but the code and prompts is all more like talking to a buddy is how i use it, i ask it to build specific things then i look through and make changes. For instance a few examples i can give is there is a lot of graph traversal in my data i built, I'm not an expert on graph traversal, so I researched what would be a good algo for my type of data, and then utilized claude to implement the papers algorithm into my code and data structures. I dont have the llm in any steps that the customer interact with (there is some fuzzy stuff but nothing consistently run) but i would say an llm has touched over 90% of the code i wrote. its just an upgraded rubber ducky to me. If i wasn't experienced in computer science this would all fall apart however i do have to fix almost all the code, but spending 10 mins fixing something is better than 3 days figuring it out in the first place (again this might be more unique to my coding and learning style)
- droidist2 1y ago
  Software engineering is always light on case studies though, for instance test driven development, or static vs. dynamic typing, people have been debating these for quite a long time.
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  At least actual examples are underwhelming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
- sanderjd 1y ago
  There are lots of concrete examples in this article: https://www.semafor.com/article/06/03/2025/how-vibe-coding-is-tipping-silicon-valleys-scales-of-power https://www.semafor.com/article/06/03/2025/how-vibe-coding-i... Do I think those rise to "case studies"? No. But to another commenters point, detailed and rigorous case studies have always been hard to come by for any productivity process or technology. I also think that article is hype, but it's not true that it's vague.
frank_nitti 1y ago
What do you mean by “successfully using AI”, do you just mean some employee used it and found it helpful at some stage of their dev process, e.g. in lieu of search engines or existing codegen tooling? Are there any examples of businesses deploying production-ready, nontrivial code changes without a human spending a comparable (or much greater) amount of time as they’d have needed to with the existing SOTA dev tooling outside of LLMs? That’s my interpretation of the question at hand. In my experience, LLMs have been very useful for developers who don’t know where to start on a particular task, or need to generate some trivial boilerplate code. But on nearly every occasion of the former, the code/scripts need to be heavily audited and revised by an experienced engineer before it’s ready to deploy for real.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  Yeah, I should have posted the first version of my post, pointing out that the problem with this demand for proof (as is often the case) devolves into boring definitional questions. I don't understand why you think "the code needs to be audited and revised" is a failure. Nothing in the OP relies on it being possible for LLMs to build and deploy software unsupervised. It really seems like a non sequitur to me, to ask for proof of this.
  - frank_nitti 1y ago
    That’s fair regarding the OP, and if otherwise agree with your sentiments here. Some other threads of conversation get intertwined here with concerns about delusional management making decisions to cut staff and reduce hiring for junior positions, on the strength of the promises by AI vendors and their paid/voluntary shills For many like me who have encouraged sharp young people learn computers, we are watching their spirits crushed by this narrative and have a strong urge to push back — we still need new humans to learn how computer systems actually work, and if nobody is willing to pay them for work because an LLM outperforms them on those menial “rite-of-passage” types of software construction, we will find ourselves in a bad place
    - sanderjd 1y ago

jagged-chisel 1y ago

> … if it’s so great, stop telling us and show … If you’re selling shovels to gold miners, you don’t need to demonstrate the shovel - you just need decent marketing to convince people there’s gold in them thar hills.

XorNot 1y ago
This is actually a great metaphor and phrasing and I'm filing it away for later btw.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Note that it's a pretty common cliche, usually phrased something like "in a gold rush, the only people guaranteed to make money are the guys selling the shovels".
  - kwertyoowiyop 1y ago
    It’s actually an offbeat take on that common cliche.
- pera 1y ago
  It's a bit more than a metaphor :) during the California gold rush there was this guy named Sam Brannan who sold shovels and other tools to miners, and made a fortune from it (he is often referred to as California's first millionaire). He also had a newspaper at the time, the California Star, which as you can imagine was used to promote the gold rush: > The excitement and enthusiasm of Gold Washing still continues—increases. (1848) https://sfmuseum.org/hist6/star.html https://sfmuseum.org/hist6/star.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan

citizenpaul 1y ago

Yeah exactly. Whats nuts is watching all these people shill for something that we all have used to mediocre results. Obviously Fly.io benefits if people start hosting tons of slopped together AI projects on their platform. Its kinda sad to watch what I thought was a good company shill for AI. Even if they are not directly getting money from some PR contract. We must not be prompting hard enough....

blibble 1y ago
> Whats nuts is watching all these people shill for something that we all have used to mediocre results. this sort of post is the start of next phase in the battle for mindshare the tools are at the very best mediocre replacements for google, and the people with a vested interest in promoting them know this, so they switch to attacking critics of the approach > Its kinda sad to watch what I thought was a good company shill for AI. yeah, I was sad too, then I scrolled up and saw the author. double sadness.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  If you really think that feel free to continue with business as usual. I just hope you're not at a stack ranking company, or you are politically savvy though, because otherwise you're going to be in for a real shock in the next few years as your peers build their AI skills, tooling matures and models improve. A skilled dev with a well tuned agentic workflow can already finish non-trivial 5k LoC projects in a day, complete with copious tests and documentation, just imagine when the ecosystem has matured and the majority of your coworkers are hip to the game.
  - blibble 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      Not everyone else is going to be out though, just the people who don't rise with the tide. Now is the time to understand where the tools are going, what humans are likely to still be better at (probably what and why, definitely not how), how that's going to impact what it means to be a developer, and how you can expand/broaden your skillset to continue to have a niche when your technical skills are devalued. Adapt or die.

ofjcihen 1y ago

Honestly it’s really unfortunate that LLMs seem to have picked up the same hype men that attached themselves to blockchains etc. LLMs are very useful. I use them as a better way to search the web, generate some code that I know I can debug but don’t want to write and as a way to conversationally interact with data. The problem is the hype machine has set expectations so high and refused criticism to the point where LLMs can’t possibly measure up. This creates the divide we see here.

busymom0 1y ago
I think LLM hype is more deserved and different from that of blockchain. There's still a significant barrier to entry to get involved with blockchain and most people don't even know what it is. LLMs on the other hand have very low barrier to at least use- one can just go to google, ChatGPT etc and use it and see its effectiveness. There's a reason why in the last year, a significant portion of school students are now using LLMs to cheat. Blockchains still don't have that kind of utilization.
- ofjcihen 1y ago
  I agree with all of these points. Honestly I think that makes the argument stronger though that it’s unfortunate they jumped on.
vohk 1y ago
I think I agree with the general thrust but I have to say I've yet to be impressed with LLMs for web search. I think part of that comes from most people using Google as the benchmark, which has been hot garbage for years now. It's not hard to be better than having to dig 3 sponsored results deep to get started parsing the list of SEO spam, let alone the thing you were actually searching for. But compared to using Kagi, I've found found LLMs end up wasting more of my time by returning a superficial survey with frequent oversights and mistakes. At the final tally I've still found it faster to just do it myself. I will say I do love LLMs for getting a better idea of what to search for, and for picking details out of larger blocks.
- 1y ago

avanai 1y ago

A "eulogy" is a speech you make at a funeral in honor of the dead person. I think you meant "apology".

grey-area 1y ago
Yes I think I was thinking more a paean or apology though not sure apology is used in that sense much nowadays - perhaps apologia is clearer. In praise of would be better, thanks will edit just now.
- antithesizer 1y ago
  The Greek transliteration "apologia" is often used for that sense of "apology" to skirt any ambiguity.
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Encomium
tsimionescu 1y ago
While that is the most common sense of eulogy, it's not the only one. A eulogy is also any speech that highly praises someone or something - which is most commonly done at funerals, which is how the funeral association came about (also probably by association with an elegy, which is an etymologically unrelated word that refers to a Greek poem dedicated to someone who passed away). In many romance languages, eulogy doesn't have the funeral connotation, only the high praise one - so the GP may be a native speaker of a romance language who didn't realize this meaning is less common in English.
deleted 1y ago
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keybored 1y ago

> The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own. I’m open to that happening. I mean them showing me. I’m less open to the Nth “aww shucks, the very few doubters that are left at this point are about to get a rude awakening” FOMO concern trolling. I mean I guess it’s nice for me that you are so concerned about my well-being, soon to be suffering-being? Now, AI can do a lot of things. Don’t get me wrong. It has probably written a million variations on the above sentiment.

geoduck14 1y ago

You think that the only code that is valuable is code that is written by a professional SWE. There are LOADS of people who need "a program" but aren't equipped to write code or hire an SWE that are empowered by this. And example: last week, I saw a PM vibe code several different applications to demo what might get built after it gets prioritized by SWEs

grey-area 1y ago
Not really I’m fine with anyone knocking stuff together but I think people should be aware of the limitations and dangers. Writing like this does nothing to inform and is overly positive IMO. It’d be like insisting llms will replace authors of novels. In some sense they could but there are serious shortcomings and things like agents etc just don’t fix them.
bigger_cheese 1y ago
I can share my experience I am not a software engineer. I am the "other" type of Engineer (chemical engineer). I tend to use AI in the same way I use google or Stack Overflow, mostly when I get stuck on syntax and my code editor isn't helping me, I know what I am attempting to do "should" be possible but I can't get the syntax right. For example a recent question I asked was "Python, create an xarray with two dimensions from a pandas df" It gave me a few lines of example code which was enough for me to figure out where I had messed up the syntax in my own code. I have seen one of my junior coworkers copy+paste entire chunks of code from chatbot conversations and to be honest what he has produced is underwhelming the code is poorly structured difficult to reason about I have low confidence he understands what the bot has produced (and why it did things the way it did) and I don't have high confidence we'd be able to trust the accuracy of the figures this code was outputting.

conradev 1y ago

Have you used a language model to program yet?

grey-area 1y ago
Yes sure, I said so in the post, and have watched others try to do so too.

mvdtnz 1y ago

> If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. I don't think this follows. Anyone can see that 10-ton excavator is hundreds or even thousands of times more efficient than a man with a shovel. That doesn't mean you can start a company up staffed only with excavators. Firstly you obviously need people operating the excavator. Secondly the excavator is incredibly efficient at moving lots of dirt around, but no crew could perform any non-trivial job without all the tasks that the excavator is not good out - planning, loading/unloading, prepping the site, fine work (shovelling dirt around pipes and wires), etc. AI is a tool. It will mean companies can run much leaner. This doesn't imply they can do everything a company needs to do.

steego 1y ago

Approximately speaking, what do you want to see put up? I ask this because it reads like you have a specific challenge in mind when it comes to generative AI and it sounds like anything short of "proof of the unlimited powers" will fall short of being deemed "useful". Here's the deal: Reasonable people aren't claiming this stuff is a silver bullet or a panacea. They're not even suggesting it should be used without supervision. It's useful when used by people who understand its limitations and leverage its strengths. If you want to see how it's been used by someone who was happy with the results, and is willing to share their results, you can scroll down a few stories on the front-page and check the commit history of this project: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits/main/ https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits... Now here's the deal: These people aren't trying to prove anything to you. They're just sharing the results of an experiment where a very talented developer used these tools to build something useful. So let me ask you this: Can we at least agree that these tools can be of some use to talented developers?

hooverd 1y ago
It's useful, but the promise of every AI company is very explicitly that they will burn the seed corn and choke off the pipeline that created those "very talented" developers who reviewed it!
- grey-area 1y ago
  I’m less worried about this as the best way to learn to code is to read as well as write it IMO. If capabilities don’t improve it’s not replacing anyone, if they do improve and it can write good code, people can learn from reading that. I don’t see a pathway to improvement though given how these models work.
grey-area 1y ago
Yes sure I’ve checked in code generated by AI myself. I’ve not experienced the excitement this article exudes though and it seems very limited in usefulness due to the by now well-documented downsides. Frankly I haven’t bothered using it much recently, it’s just not there yet IME and I’m not sure LLMs ever will be. What I’m interested in really is just case studies with prompts and code - that’s a lot more interesting for hackers IMO than hype.

marxism 1y ago

I think we're talking past each other. There's always been a threshold: above it, code changes are worth the effort; below it, they sit in backlog purgatory. AI tools so far seem to lower implementation costs, moving the threshold down so more backlog items become viable. The "5x productivity" crowd is excited about this expanded scope, while skeptics correctly note the highest value work hasn't fundamentally changed. I think what's happening is two groups using "productivity" to mean completely different things: "I can implement 5x more code changes" vs "I generate 5x more business value." Both experiences are real, but they're not the same thing. https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/ai-productivity-paradox https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/ai-productivity-parado...

AnnaPali 1y ago
I agree 100%! It's amazing how few people grok this.
- sidewndr46 1y ago
  This reminds me of places that try and measure productivity by lines of code
surgical_fire 1y ago
> The "5x productivity" crowd is excited about this expanded scope, while skeptics correctly note the highest value work hasn't fundamentally changed. This is true, LLMs can speed up development (some asterisks are required here, but that is generally true). That said, I've seen, mainly here on HN, so many people hyping it up way beyond this. I've got into arguments here with people claiming it codes at "junior level". Which is an absurd level of bullshit.
- sothatsit 1y ago
  Exactly. Juniors may have vastly less breadth of knowledge than an LLM, but they can learn and explore and test software in ways that LLMs cannot. However, the expansion in scope that senior developers can tackle now will take away work that would ordinarily be given to juniors.

rybosome 1y ago

Many, many people are in fact “using the code it generated on its own”. I’ve been putting LLM-assisted PRs into production for months. With no disrespect meant, if you’re unable to find utility in these tools, then you aren’t using them correctly.

surgical_fire 1y ago
> LLM-assisted PRs This does not counter what GP said. Using LLM as a code assistant is not the same as "I don't need to hire developers because LLMs code in their place"
- detaro 1y ago
  Which one is the article talking about?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lando2319 1y ago
yep I've used Devon and now Google Jules, for the big stuff, it has lots of wrong code, but it still end up giving my a much better start than starting from scratch certainly. When it all comes together it give me a 6X boost. But def fixing all the wrong code and thoroughly testing it is the time consuming part.
douglasisshiny 1y ago
Okay, how am I supposed to use them "correctly"? Because me explaining step by step, more so than a junior developer, how to do a small task in an existing codebase for it to get it wrong not once, not twice, not three times, but more is not a productivity boost. And here's the difference between someone like me and an LLM: I can learn and retain information. If you don't understand this, you don't have a correct understanding of LLMs.
- simonw 1y ago
  It is entirely true that current LLMs do not learn from their mistakes, and that is a difference between eg an LLM and a human intern. It is us, the users of the LLMs, that need to learn from those mistakes. If you prompt an LLM and it makes a mistake, you have to learn not to prompt it in the same way in the future. It takes a lot of time and experimentation to find the prompting patterns that work. My current favorite tactic is to dump sizable amounts of example code into the models every time I use them. I find this works extremely well. I will take code that I wrote previously that accomplishes a similar task, drop that in and describe what I want it to build next.

lelandbatey 1y ago

If you read post, the article is mostly agreeing with you. What they're pointing out is not "the AI can do everything you do", it's that "an AI coder can do a lot of the boring typing a lot faster than you, leaving you right at the point of 'real implementation'". Having something else write a lot of the boring code that you'll need and then you finish up the final touches, that's amazing and a huge accelerator (so they claim). The claim is not "AI will replace us all", the claim of the parent article is "AI is a big deal and will change how we work, the same way IDEs/copy-paste/autocomplete/online documentation have radically changed our work."

Seb-C 1y ago
> an AI coder can do a lot of the boring typing a lot faster than you, leaving you right at the point of 'real implementation Vim and bash solved that for me a long time ago in a more reliable and efficient way (and it's certainly not the only tool capable of that). > the same way IDEs/copy-paste/autocomplete/online documentation have radically changed our work I was there before and went in the autocomplete/lsp thing pretty late (because Vim didn't have good lsp support for a long time, and Vim without it was still making me more efficient than any other IDE with it). Those things didn't radically change our work as you claim, it just made us a bit more productive.

NotAnOtter 1y ago

The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors With that as a metric, 1 Senior + 4 juniors cannot build the company with the scope you are describing. A 50-eng company might have 1 CTO, 5 staff, 15 Seniors, and 29 juniors. So the proposition is you could cut the company in ~half but would still require the most-expensive aspects of running a company.

surgical_fire 1y ago
> The author's central argument seems to be that the current state of LLM development is such that 1 Senior + LLM === 1 Senior + 4 juniors This is such an outlandish claim, to the point where I call it plain bullshit. LLMs are useful in a completely different way that a Junior developer is. It is an apples and oranges comparison. LLMs does things in some way that it helps me beyong what a Junior would. It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can.
- NotAnOtter 1y ago
  I disagree that they are so different you can't compare them. Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. But it still takes the same amount of time to deliver the 4 separate projects. I find the existence of LLM development deeply troubling for a long list of reasons. But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated >It also is completely useless to perform many tasks that a Junior developer can. And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    > Imagine a senior IC staffed with 4 juniors, and they spend 2 hours with each every day. Then the junior is left with 6 hours to think through what they were taught/told. This is very similar to LLM development except instead of context switching 3 times each day, the senior can skip over the 6 hours of independent time the junior required to absorb the changes. This is not how Juniors work. I don't know what else to say. It is just not true. I don't give juniors a prompt and let them to implement code for a few hours. They work as any other developer, just generally in features and/or tickets of more limited scope. At least initially. This is not what LLMs do > But refuting the claim that an LLM is similar in many ways to a junior dev is unsubstantiated I sometimes get the feeling I talk to people who never worked in a real professional setting. A LLM can do things that Juniors can't. When I bounce around ideas for implementing a certain feature, when I explore libraries or frameworks I am unfamiliar with, when I ask it to review pieces of code looking for improvements, when I get it to generate boring glue code, scaffolding, unit tests. All those things are helpful, and make LLMs an excellent code assistant in a way that Juniors are not. But it is completely unable to properly do things without me giving very precise instructions of what it needs to code. The less precise I am, the worse its output. It is very happy to generate completely bullshit code that kinda looks like it does what I need but not really. I constantly need to tweak what it generates, and although it saves my time as it outputs a lot of code in little time, the results are very unreliable to meaningfully act with any sort of independence. > And there are many things one junior could be helpful with that a different junior would be useless at Which completely fails to address the point I am making.

protocolture 1y ago

>I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this He spent a large tranche of the article specifically hanging a lantern on how mediocre the output is. >by creating an AI only company He specifically says that you need to review the code over and over and over.

ghostly_s 1y ago

Did you even glance at the link? The author is advocating for a human-supervised LLM agent workflow.

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

This 2 year old Goroutine pool implementation [1] is 95% GPT generated and has commit history showing what GPT did. It's an older example, but it is one. [1]: https://github.com/devchat-ai/gopool https://github.com/devchat-ai/gopool

SatvikBeri 1y ago

I don't think I would notice a 100% improvement in software productivity in most companies, from the outside. Most of the time, that would just translate to the company being able to hire fewer developers, and having slightly higher profit margins – but not enormously higher, because developers are only one part. I recently used Claude Code to develop & merge an optimization that will save about $4,000 a month. It was relatively simple but tedious, so I probably wouldn't have done it on my own. I don't even expect most of my coworkers to notice.

pj_mukh 1y ago

I think this is a misunderstanding coder productivity. A 10x engineer isn't 10x faster at popping out Unit tests, that stuff is mind-numbingly boring that turns out a next token predictor can do it with ease. In fact I would guess that really "productive" software engineers, slow down considerably when forced to do this important but slow work*. The 10x engineer is really good at deducing the next most important thing to do is and doing it quickly. This involves quickly moving past 100's of design decisions in a week to deliver something quickly. It requires you to think partly like a product manager and partly like a senior engineer but that's the game and LLM's are zero help there. Most engineering productivity is probably locked up in this. So yes, LLM's probably help a lot, just not in the way that would show on some Jira board? *One could claim that doing this slow work gives the brain a break to then be good at strategizing the higher order more important work. Not sure.

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georgemcbay 1y ago

I don't know if you are the same (S.G.) greyarea I'm familiar with but I hope so because the idea of having a couple of 90s era irc people take opposing viewpoints on LLMs in 2025 amuses me.

cube2222 1y ago

Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from? You set up a strawman (AI only companies, agents doing everything on their own) which is irrelevant to the point the article is making. One excerpt: > Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways. I think this article is very on point, I relate with basically every paragraph. It's not a panacea, it's not a 10x improvement by any means, but it's a very meaningful improvement to both productivity (less than 2x I'd say, which would already be a ton) and fun for me. As I've mentioned in the past here > I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated. which is a point the article makes too (tables), in a slightly different way. Also, to be clear, I agree that 90% of the marketing around AI is overblown BS. But that's again beside the point, and the article is making no outlandish claims of that kind. Overall, I hope this article (as intended) will make more people lose their dismissiveness and wake up their curiosity, as I expect the future of those is akin to that of people today saying they're "not really good at computers". It's a paradigm-shift, and it takes getting used to and productive in, as some imo smart people are mentioning even in this thread[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164039

mcphage 1y ago
> Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from? Well, in this case they’re busy writing articles trying to convince us, instead of proving stuff to us.
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crazygringo 1y ago

That's a strawman. Nobody is saying it's "unlimited powers", that's your exaggeration. And what you're proposing about an "AI only company" seems to be based on your misunderstanding. What this article is saying is, you need the same number of senior developers, but now each one is essentially assisted by a few junior developers virtually for free. That's huge. But saying you want to see an "AI only company" as "proof" has nothing to do with that. And what you're describing -- "occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved" -- is exactly what the author explicitly addresses at the top: > If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. People coding with LLMs today use agents... The entire article is about how to use LLM's effectively. What kind of "proof" do you really want, when the article explains it all awfully clearly?

magarnicle 1y ago

From what I've seen, it takes a deeply original thinker to get something great out of generative AI. But if you're a deeply original thinker, you're probably exceptional regardless of whether you are using AI or not. Generative AI is too much of a blank canvas at the moment, and one that is always shifting. It's up to the user to find all the use cases, and even then in my experience it's just as likely to send me on a wild goose chase as it is to instantly solve my problem.

johnfn 1y ago

Who said "unlimited powers", other than you? That seems like an intentional distortion of the article, which says "LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write". Doing most of my tedious work is very different than "unlimited powers". I use AI to chew through tedious work all the time. In fact, I let an agent do some work just before I checked HN to read your claim that it can't do that. Everyone at my job does the same, perhaps modulo checking HN. But there's no 'unlimited power' to show you - we're just about 30% faster than we used to be.

Retric 1y ago
You might be 30% faster, but not everyone is doing your job specific with your exact skill set. I suspect the range is like -5% to 50%, the question nobody can answer is what the average is because things are so diverse and nobody is collecting good data. In decades of programming I’ve written very little tedious code, but that’s as much about the projects I’ve worked on as approach I use.

bberenberg 1y ago

I build tools all the time using AI tools that would have taken me 10x longer before. A couple examples below. The first example was a literal one shot of my dumping the full page html into cursor and asking it for the feature I needed. In using it today it already saved me over an hour of analysis time across the refunds I analyze. The second example includes using AI for better classifying text and having our support people better use their time to help customers. I could have probably made the second thing without LLMs but I didn’t have the skills. Here I was able to provide concrete value to our company and our customers. https://github.com/Atlas-Authority/mpac-ui-improved https://github.com/Atlas-Authority/mpac-ui-improved https://moduscreate.com/blog/forum-monitoring-is-essential-but-tedious-heres-how-ai-can-help/ https://moduscreate.com/blog/forum-monitoring-is-essential-b... (Pardon how marketing keyword stuffed the final post)

heathrow83829 1y ago

the greatest proof that it's a useful tool is how much people are using it. Almost everyone is using it. If you're using it then you probably find it useful as well.

latentsea 1y ago
And the greatest proof that people are using software is that people are complaining about it.
runarberg 1y ago
a) If “everyone is using it”, show me the numbers. Doing a developer survey to see how many are using it is not hard. Ask a random sample of developers if they ⅰ use LLMs to aid their standard coding or ⅱ completely replace their coding with LLM output. b) Even if “everyone is using it” it doesn’t mean it is useful. The usage could be adequately explained by e.g. marketing, being forced on them by management/policy, etc. Not everything with high usage is useful. I can e.g. quickly think of chewing gum (which is also used by a lot of developers), or the ANSI standard keyboard (as opposed to the ISO standard keyboard).

liveoneggs 1y ago

The first paragraph of this blog calls senior skeptical developers "unserious" but the person who wrote it has a cartoon gopher as his avatar. The next few paragraphs basically say "the tool run arbitrary programs on your machine, pull in arbitrary files, and use that to run more arbitrary commands" and then blames you for thinking that is a bad sequence of events. In the best possible light I (an AI-neutral reader) can paint this rant on a hosting-company blog (why publish this?) is that 1) allowing random textbots to execute programs on your work computer is good (disagree), 2) those chatbots do, in fact, occasionally say enough correct-ish things that they are probably worth your company paying $20+/month for your access (agree).

sethherr 1y ago
I think tptacek is generally worth reading. He is one of the users with the highest karma on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek) I’m happy to have read this, which is reason enough to publish it - but also it’s clearly generating debate so it seems like a very good thing to have published.
- liveoneggs 1y ago
  co-mingling your work identity with your gopher-identity is a dangerous game; I should clarify the gopher is not UMN-related.
- lolinder 1y ago
  I generally like tptacek, but this piece has major flaws. His dismissal of all copyright concerns on the grounds that some developers engage in piracy is horribly lazy.
- chinchilla2020 1y ago
  High karma in an internet community is not something I respect automatically. Pewdiepie and every other little online personality have tons of followers and likes. tptacek has always come across arrogant, juvenile, opinionated, and difficult to work with.
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idan 1y ago

This has all the energy of people saying "ah, you take such great photos, you must have a good camera" _People_ are getting outsized value from AI in the ways they apply it. Photographs come from the photographer, not the camera.

the__alchemist 1y ago

I suspect it comes down to use case. Those you refer to use it for well-trodden areas; likely web UIs and servers using popular tools. The image they predict is extrapolated from these.

paulcole 1y ago

> The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own. Why would we do this? Wouldn’t it be better to do this silently and reap the benefits?

rukuu001 1y ago

Re put up or shut up - this is a decent example from the front page today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166

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