6 ms·
If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source project
by betaby 1y ago
If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available.
If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality.
Neither of those is happening.
- Kerrick 1y agoOpen source projects left and right are banning contributors from using AI.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThey have no way to actually verify that so it's just marketing to luddites.
- megaloblasto 1y agoMany people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago> If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none. It might be that the gp is smart enough to code without a crutch.
- megaloblasto 1y agoI'll bet he's strong enough to push nails into wood so he never uses a hammer.
- llbbdd 1y agohttps://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- J_McQuade 1y ago> Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they? I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.
- megaloblasto 1y agoI'm speaking just to coding productivity. I think AI does very little for business development or creativity type issues. People should realize that denying that AI can boost productivity in coding makes it look like they don't know how to use it, or believe in some conspiracy that no one is actually benefitting and it's all market hype from tech bros.
- bgwalter 1y agoThis is Gavin Belson level stuff.
- jayd16 1y agoI admit that I don't know how to use it and it does seem like marketing hype and tech bros with some mild value and I'm waiting to be proven wrong and crushed, John Henry the Steel Driving Man style, and it's just not happening.
- megaloblasto 1y agoThere are a lot of different niches to software development. It could be that your specific niche isn't seeing much benefit yet. However, continuing to hold onto a view that AI is hype garbage could very possibly hurt your career in the near future.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoI believe in some conspiracy that no one is actually benefitting. I don't want to blame marketing, it's genuinely very cool that I can give Cursor a description of what I'm trying to do and get a result that's like 80% correct. But I've repeatedly found that going from 80% to 100% takes just as much time and effort as it would have to do it myself from the start. I've shadowed people who believe AI is helping them, and it seems to me that some of them don't notice how much effort they're spending while others don't bother to correct the 80% version once tests are passing.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoMaybe because it's become second nature to you, due to a long enough career spent practicing the actual skill rather than using a crutch or tangential skill?
- zkry 1y agoI don't think this line of reasoning holds. The only thing people should look at are peer reviewed studies, lots of them ideally, and with no conflict of interest. Who's getting productivity gains? What kinds of work are they doing? What doesn't work so well? All of these questions should be investigated by studies. People feeling productivity gains doesn't imply the gains exist. Otherwise it sounds like "many people have had their lives changed by {insert philosophical/religious movement}, so if you're not finding it true you should look into what's wrong with you."
- jaggederest 1y ago> The only thing people should look at are peer reviewed studies, lots of them ideally, and with no conflict of interest. "Ignore your own direct experience, only research papers matter" is certainly a take. The beautiful thing about the current generation of tools is that they are so incredibly cheap relative to historical tools intended to improve engineering productivity. You can't just run out and pick up CASE tools for less than ~$CAR to ~$HOUSE. A pro subscription to whichever AI tool you want to try is $20. Ignore research, try them, if you have success, use them. There's no dogma here. Just empiricism.
- jmkni 1y agoWhile you're looking at peer reviewed studies, I'm over here being way more productive with AI and getting shit done.
- terminatornet 1y ago> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. Maybe you just think you're being more productive ;) https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
- LtWorf 1y agoThe people I know who are experiencing these gains were never more than juniors in skills, despite the number of years they've been on the job. Makes me evaluate indeed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- verelo 1y agoThe second point is more incentive than AI capability i'd argue. Your point presumes that Open Source === Good. I'm not sure that's how all of society feels, unfortunately, so even if AI can do it at some point...it might not choose to.
- jsnell 1y agoI suspect somebody could. But why? Do you need a new XML library? I don't. And if you don't need one, why write one? If there is no specific use case in mind, how do you even determine what dimension "good" is measured on?
- betaby 1y agoXML is used extensively everywhere. Multibillion companies depend on libxml2 which historically had multitude of vulnerabilities, see https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2 https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2 Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well, Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that library is in the critical path literally everywhere.
- spyckie2 1y agoI mean listen to yourself… Let’s take a critical piece of infrastructure where if it goes down, billions of things also break. And have ai rewrite it.
- alehlopeh 1y agoYour original point would have had a bigger impact if you hadn’t married it to an idiosyncratic affection for XML. Now you’re stuck defending the usefulness of that particular technology which is entirely unrelated to AI.
- jsnell 1y agoClearly that's not the use you have for a new XML library. It's a use you're imagining somebody else would have for it. And because you're just imagining the use case, you've failed to think through what "good" would actually mean in that use case. To replace libxml2 across these ecosystems you would need it to be API-, ABI, and probably bug-compatible with a decrepit old C library. That's not something anyone or anything can write from just the XML spec.
- LtWorf 1y ago
- damon_c 1y agoOne thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoThat sounds worse than using an xml library to parse something
- LtWorf 1y agonot for hackers
- jlarocco 1y agoI don't buy this line of pro-AI reasoning. It sounds like more work with less reliable results than just writing the code myself. First of all, nobody is writing and open sourcing their own XML parser in 2025, so that's hyperbole. Second, the boilerplate to use most XML libraries can be copy/pasted out of their docs. So where is AI saving you time here? The prompting and other BS is a waste of time and just looks silly, and you still have to read and understand the code. At best it seems like breaking even.
- knoopx 1y agobullshit, open source is blooming as never before. also we already have good xml libraries, nobody is interested in that. but yeah i agree with the sentiment that ai is not the magical tool you were promised, useful nevertheless.
- LtWorf 1y agoIs it? Can you link me to a succesful product that actually has human users that does heavy use of AI for writing code? (and blooming would mean that there are hundreds of these)
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoIt is not good, it is for people who can’t write code to delude themselves mostly
- antithesizer 1y ago[dead]
- hopelite 1y agoCan I just remind everyone that GPT was released not even 3 years ago yet. It's been only 2 full years since GPT was released. I get that people are anxious, worried, and are going through the "cycles of grief", but do you really think that in another 2 years, let alone 5 it won't be able to code a good XML library? We are just going to have to see how things go, because they are clearly going to go, whether we want or not. And what does open source and the quality of projects have to do with it? There were bad open source projects before GPT's release.
- bongodongobob 1y agoWhat issues did you run into when trying to build an XML library with AI? What was your workflow? How much time did you spend on that project?
- dbattaglia 1y agoI imagine the folks in the article and others like it are not building libraries and foundational infrastructure but rather cranking out SaaS startup ideas and CRUD web apps. I find that kind of coding really can go quite fast using AI, particularly if you are building it from zero and not worrying about all the existing quirks of a large codebase or creating technical debt.