5 ms·

Is AI a Bubble? I Didn't Think So Until I Heard of SDD

26 points by foobarian 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 1y ago
> McKinsey stated AI could “automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today” across all occupations, not specifically software development. I would wager a large portion of that would be both generating and then triaging a certain level of institutional "bullshit communications". For example, the employee must give daily status updates, and they have a three-item list for the day. They use an LLM to pad out their three-item bullet list into prose that sounds smart and active and impressive. Then their manager says "TLDR" and uses an LLM to "summarize" it back into almost the original three-item bullet list. Each employee believes they've "saved time" using the tool, but it's a kind of broken-window fallacy [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- _wire_ 1y ago
  Without a definition of thought as work, the entire argument of AI productivity is noise. The value of AI to work is utterly unquantifiable. But command of human attention is another matter: it can be quantified and it is command of attention that defines the value of FAANG+ The AI boosters hype it in such terms, both intra-model and extra-model: we track the attention and sell seats in the musical chairs of "investment", leaving it to users to explain the productivity gains to themselves. It's a circus.
  - BlackjackCF 1y ago
    I always find the X% of developers use AI tools for their work suspect because I know many people who are being pressured by their company to adopt AI tools for their day to day workflows.
    - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
      As they should be. It’s a necessary tool to learn. If your entire dev team circa 2010 was writing code in notepad++ and sharing code versions in a zip file, you would push them to use an IDE and source control. It’s the same concept.
      - Terr_ 1y ago
        That's true insofar as there is friction to adoption. But whether $THING should be adopted and whether it does increase long-term productivity is nowhere near as clear-cut.
        Our_Benefactors 1y ago
        Have you used it? It should be, and does.
        bandrami 1y ago
        Did you read the article? It cites the METR study[1] which showed that while people using AI tools to program report feeling like they are producing more, they are in fact producing about 20% less than without the tools. Ironically you could get the same effect and save compute fees by simply having programmers stay home one day a week. [1] 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...
        Our_Benefactors 1y ago
        Did you read the article? > We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers
        bandrami 1y ago
        Correct, it only shows that AI slows down experienced developers, which is who the thread is about.
- csomar 1y ago
  LLM biggest productivity boost might uncovering that most of the work we do is B.S. anyway and mostly made up of pushing papers around.
  - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
    Haha, in my workplace, I feel it's making me come up with BS. I do use it occasionally in my job, and it can be helpful. But there's a very strong push from my C-suite to make everyone in the company use more AI. Doesn't really matter how, we're just supposed to be rubbing AI on stuff. So a few times a day I boop our AI tools and find excuses to mention to my boss that I did an AI thing.
- taude 1y ago
  I'm telling people that if AI can make the process easy or go away, maybe it's time to rethink we need the process.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cwmoore 1y ago
SDD: “Specification Driven Development”
- bitbasher 1y ago
  Mm, actually, it's Stochasticly Driven Development.
CamperBob2 1y ago
In this week's episode: AI-written article containing AI-generated artwork argues that AI is a bubble
bitbasher 1y ago
yawn
swamiji 1y ago
Specification driven design has been around for a long time. Lets see if AI can make it come true. Dr. David Parnas wrore about Parnas Tables https://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/cisc323/2006w/slides/BillKelly.pdf https://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/cisc323/2006w/slides/Bil... ; and then there was Eiffel with Design-By-Contract; and the Type System in F-Sharp seems like magic.
username223 1y ago
It's a wall of text sprinkled with Halloween-colored AI slop images (look for the text artifacts). Which parts, if any, were produced by a human?
SubiculumCode 1y ago
Look, maybe AI for professional programming is overhyped, but for the huge number of professionals who need to program as a part of their job, but programming is decidedly NOT their job, but who do not have programmers available to them, LLM's are.monunmental. For these people, these LLMs are huge productivity enhancers. We shouldn't be measuring productivity gain by professional programmers, but by the larger population of professionals who are required to wear many different hats.
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  The thing is, the main reason the hype for software engineers is because they're the main cost of extremely lucrative SAAS companies. If you could do software without the engineers, that's basically just a VC's wet dream of extremely low cost of revenue. On top of very low marginal costs, typically 0 delivery costs (compared to shipping), often unencumbered by things like tariffs. So like, 2-10xing the productivity of someone who gets paid <<< a software engineer? And who is more 1:1 with the profit from each widget? They don't care that much. But juicing an already extremely juicy fruit? Now that's worth 70x ARR.
  - unsnap_biceps 1y ago
    What's the end game? Why pay that SAAS paycheck if the AI can do it directly for the clients?
    - techblueberry 1y ago
      It can’t.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Maybe they think the LLMs will never be able to do sales or… I don’t know… make vision boards (or whatever it is CEOs do).
  - flashgordon 1y ago
    Except now you have over supply (assuming it is really that fullfiling). Even with steady demand basic economics says it will just prices down. So where are thr vcs making their returns?
nojs 1y ago
The “X% AI coded” metric needs to die. It is completely meaningless. The nature of development work is changing. A project can be 100% written by AI but guided so closely by humans that the process wasn’t much faster. Alternatively, AI can make a project faster by helping with architecture and other things beyond writing code. When people quote “70% AI coded”, it implies that 100% is some mythical goal that means AI is writing all code unsupervised. But most production AI code at the moment is still developed in lockstep with humans.
- pols45 1y ago
  Everyone knows this including the Companies that say these things and their customers. They leverage/exploit the fact that it takes time to Verify anything. [Hype-verification gap] Their theory goes if you use that time delay to beat the drum louder than the next guy you have a shot at attracting more customers, investors, employee, govt support than if you dont. Those who don't do it appear less Ambitious or Capable. Exploit and amplify that also. Chimps have 3 inch brains. And this is all easier to do than solving quantum field equations. So they do it happily, cluelessly, patting each other on the head about how fascinating they are. As soon as one chimp troupe (corp) does it well, everyone else does the same, and that's when the entire system experiences a phase transition. It's no more about what individual chimps or companies say or think, a super structure has emerged, which traps everyone Inside the super structure, into patterns they can't escape. Stories emerge about what the super structure is then doing. Outsider and Insider stories start diverging. And we get a bifurcation point a moment in chaos theory where one neat line splits into 2, 4, 1000, until you can’t tell what’s signal and what’s noise[1] It’s all feedback where every claim feeds on every other claim, a forest of branches growing out of thin air and verification moves too slowly to prune it. So what's the message to the kids watching it all and getting absorbed by it? Recognize when you have jumped into the chaos stream between bifurcation and verification. When everything starts to sound urgent, revolutionary, world-changing but no one can show you how or why youre standing dead center in chaos. Stories multiply faster than facts can catch up, where everyone’s pretending to see patterns that arent there yet. The louder it gets, the less meaning there is.That’s your cue to walk sideways. Dont let it drain your attention, time and energy. There are better things to do in life. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Logistic_Map_Bifurcation_Diagram%2C_Matplotlib.svg/1024px-Logistic_Map_Bifurcation_Diagram%2C_Matplotlib.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Lo...
rvasa 1y ago
Revenue does exist .. showing demand/value. Also, valuation multiple of 25-70x ARR is in that "captn .. the engine is gonna blow up anything sir". Also, given their current design surface, rapid changes to the "core intelligence layer/substrate" & good usage workflow patterns that are still being discovered ... we are probably creating tech debt faster than value. Specs are great .. but we also discover the [stable/actual/valid] spec as we build (and often at the end of the build).

26 points by foobarian 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

> McKinsey stated AI could “automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today” across all occupations, not specifically software development. I would wager a large portion of that would be both generating and then triaging a certain level of institutional "bullshit communications". For example, the employee must give daily status updates, and they have a three-item list for the day. They use an LLM to pad out their three-item bullet list into prose that sounds smart and active and impressive. Then their manager says "TLDR" and uses an LLM to "summarize" it back into almost the original three-item bullet list. Each employee believes they've "saved time" using the tool, but it's a kind of broken-window fallacy [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_wire_ 1y ago
Without a definition of thought as work, the entire argument of AI productivity is noise. The value of AI to work is utterly unquantifiable. But command of human attention is another matter: it can be quantified and it is command of attention that defines the value of FAANG+ The AI boosters hype it in such terms, both intra-model and extra-model: we track the attention and sell seats in the musical chairs of "investment", leaving it to users to explain the productivity gains to themselves. It's a circus.
- BlackjackCF 1y ago
  I always find the X% of developers use AI tools for their work suspect because I know many people who are being pressured by their company to adopt AI tools for their day to day workflows.
  - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
    As they should be. It’s a necessary tool to learn. If your entire dev team circa 2010 was writing code in notepad++ and sharing code versions in a zip file, you would push them to use an IDE and source control. It’s the same concept.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      That's true insofar as there is friction to adoption. But whether $THING should be adopted and whether it does increase long-term productivity is nowhere near as clear-cut.
      - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
        Have you used it? It should be, and does.
        bandrami 1y ago
        Did you read the article? It cites the METR study[1] which showed that while people using AI tools to program report feeling like they are producing more, they are in fact producing about 20% less than without the tools. Ironically you could get the same effect and save compute fees by simply having programmers stay home one day a week. [1] 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...
        Our_Benefactors 1y ago
        Did you read the article? > We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers
        bandrami 1y ago
        Correct, it only shows that AI slows down experienced developers, which is who the thread is about.
csomar 1y ago
LLM biggest productivity boost might uncovering that most of the work we do is B.S. anyway and mostly made up of pushing papers around.
- UtopiaPunk 1y ago
  Haha, in my workplace, I feel it's making me come up with BS. I do use it occasionally in my job, and it can be helpful. But there's a very strong push from my C-suite to make everyone in the company use more AI. Doesn't really matter how, we're just supposed to be rubbing AI on stuff. So a few times a day I boop our AI tools and find excuses to mention to my boss that I did an AI thing.
taude 1y ago
I'm telling people that if AI can make the process easy or go away, maybe it's time to rethink we need the process.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

cwmoore 1y ago

SDD: “Specification Driven Development”

bitbasher 1y ago
Mm, actually, it's Stochasticly Driven Development.

CamperBob2 1y ago

In this week's episode: AI-written article containing AI-generated artwork argues that AI is a bubble

bitbasher 1y ago

yawn

swamiji 1y ago

Specification driven design has been around for a long time. Lets see if AI can make it come true. Dr. David Parnas wrore about Parnas Tables https://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/cisc323/2006w/slides/BillKelly.pdf https://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/cisc323/2006w/slides/Bil... ; and then there was Eiffel with Design-By-Contract; and the Type System in F-Sharp seems like magic.

username223 1y ago

It's a wall of text sprinkled with Halloween-colored AI slop images (look for the text artifacts). Which parts, if any, were produced by a human?

SubiculumCode 1y ago

Look, maybe AI for professional programming is overhyped, but for the huge number of professionals who need to program as a part of their job, but programming is decidedly NOT their job, but who do not have programmers available to them, LLM's are.monunmental. For these people, these LLMs are huge productivity enhancers. We shouldn't be measuring productivity gain by professional programmers, but by the larger population of professionals who are required to wear many different hats.

atomicnumber3 1y ago
The thing is, the main reason the hype for software engineers is because they're the main cost of extremely lucrative SAAS companies. If you could do software without the engineers, that's basically just a VC's wet dream of extremely low cost of revenue. On top of very low marginal costs, typically 0 delivery costs (compared to shipping), often unencumbered by things like tariffs. So like, 2-10xing the productivity of someone who gets paid <<< a software engineer? And who is more 1:1 with the profit from each widget? They don't care that much. But juicing an already extremely juicy fruit? Now that's worth 70x ARR.
- unsnap_biceps 1y ago
  What's the end game? Why pay that SAAS paycheck if the AI can do it directly for the clients?
  - techblueberry 1y ago
    It can’t.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Maybe they think the LLMs will never be able to do sales or… I don’t know… make vision boards (or whatever it is CEOs do).
- flashgordon 1y ago
  Except now you have over supply (assuming it is really that fullfiling). Even with steady demand basic economics says it will just prices down. So where are thr vcs making their returns?

nojs 1y ago

The “X% AI coded” metric needs to die. It is completely meaningless. The nature of development work is changing. A project can be 100% written by AI but guided so closely by humans that the process wasn’t much faster. Alternatively, AI can make a project faster by helping with architecture and other things beyond writing code. When people quote “70% AI coded”, it implies that 100% is some mythical goal that means AI is writing all code unsupervised. But most production AI code at the moment is still developed in lockstep with humans.

pols45 1y ago
Everyone knows this including the Companies that say these things and their customers. They leverage/exploit the fact that it takes time to Verify anything. [Hype-verification gap] Their theory goes if you use that time delay to beat the drum louder than the next guy you have a shot at attracting more customers, investors, employee, govt support than if you dont. Those who don't do it appear less Ambitious or Capable. Exploit and amplify that also. Chimps have 3 inch brains. And this is all easier to do than solving quantum field equations. So they do it happily, cluelessly, patting each other on the head about how fascinating they are. As soon as one chimp troupe (corp) does it well, everyone else does the same, and that's when the entire system experiences a phase transition. It's no more about what individual chimps or companies say or think, a super structure has emerged, which traps everyone Inside the super structure, into patterns they can't escape. Stories emerge about what the super structure is then doing. Outsider and Insider stories start diverging. And we get a bifurcation point a moment in chaos theory where one neat line splits into 2, 4, 1000, until you can’t tell what’s signal and what’s noise[1] It’s all feedback where every claim feeds on every other claim, a forest of branches growing out of thin air and verification moves too slowly to prune it. So what's the message to the kids watching it all and getting absorbed by it? Recognize when you have jumped into the chaos stream between bifurcation and verification. When everything starts to sound urgent, revolutionary, world-changing but no one can show you how or why youre standing dead center in chaos. Stories multiply faster than facts can catch up, where everyone’s pretending to see patterns that arent there yet. The louder it gets, the less meaning there is.That’s your cue to walk sideways. Dont let it drain your attention, time and energy. There are better things to do in life. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Logistic_Map_Bifurcation_Diagram%2C_Matplotlib.svg/1024px-Logistic_Map_Bifurcation_Diagram%2C_Matplotlib.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Lo...

rvasa 1y ago

Revenue does exist .. showing demand/value. Also, valuation multiple of 25-70x ARR is in that "captn .. the engine is gonna blow up anything sir". Also, given their current design surface, rapid changes to the "core intelligence layer/substrate" & good usage workflow patterns that are still being discovered ... we are probably creating tech debt faster than value. Specs are great .. but we also discover the [stable/actual/valid] spec as we build (and often at the end of the build).