5 ms·

If you are producing real results at 10x then you should be able to show that you are a year ahead of schedule in 5 weeks. Waiting to see anyone show even a mo

If you are producing real results at 10x then you should be able to show that you are a year ahead of schedule in 5 weeks. Waiting to see anyone show even a month ahead of schedule after 6 months.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I've never worked anywhere that knew where they were going well enough that it was even possible to be a month ahead of schedule. By the time a month has elapsed the plan is entirely different. AI can't keep up because its context window is full of yesteryear's wrong ideas about what next month will look like.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  Yeah, this is the main problem. Writing of code just isn't the bottle neck. It's the discovery of the business case that is the hard part. And if you don't know what it is, you can't prompt your way out of it. We've been having a go around with corporate leadership at my company about "AI is going to solve our problems". Dude, you don't even know what our problems are. How are you going to prompt the AI to analyze a 300 page PDF on budget policy when you can't even tell me how you read a 300 page PDF with your eyes to analyze the budget policy. I'm tempted to give them what they want: just a chatter box they can ask, "analyze this budget policy for me", just so I can see the looks on their faces when it spits out five poorly written paragraphs full of niceties that talk its way around ever doing any analysis. I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I've got my own gripes about leadership, but I'm finding that even when its a goal I've set for myself, watching an AI fail at it represents a refinement of what I thought I wanted: I'm not much better than they are. That, or its a discovery of why what I wanted is impossible and it's back to the drawing board. It's nice to not be throwing away code that I'd otherwise have been a perfectionist about (and still thrown away).
  - int_19h 1y ago
    > I'm tempted to give them what they want: just a chatter box they can ask, "analyze this budget policy for me", just so I can see the looks on their faces when it spits out five poorly written paragraphs full of niceties that talk its way around ever doing any analysis. Ah, but they'll love it. > I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it? We're already doing all the same stuff, except today it's not the AI that's doing that, it's people. One overworked and stressed person somewhere makes for a poorly designed, buggy library, and then millions of other overworked and stressed people spend most of their time at work finding out how to cobble dozens of such poorly designed and buggy pieces of code together into something that kinda sorta works. This is why the top management is so bullshit on AI. It's because it's a perfect fit for a model that they have already established.
ned_roberts 1y ago
Looking at the “metrics” they shared, going from committing just about zero code over the last two years to more than zero in the past two months may be a 10x improvement. I haven’t seen any evidence more experienced developers see anywhere near that speedup.
- chotmat 1y ago
  The "metrics" is hilarious. The "before AI" graph looks like those meme about FAANG engineers who sit around and basically do nothing.
journal 1y ago
when copilot auto-completes 10 lines with 99% accuracy with a press of tab, does that not save you time typing those lines?
- kellyjprice 1y ago
  Is typing 10 lines of code your bottleneck?
- rescripting 1y ago
  What if I told you the hard part is not the typing.
- Macha 1y ago
  Sure, but probably your pre-copilot IDE was autocompleting 7-8 of those lines anyway, just by playing type tetris, and typing the code out was never the slow part?
  - what 1y ago
    These are the kind of people that create two letter aliases to avoid typing “git pull” or whatever. Congrats, very efficient, saving 10 seconds per day. So, yeah, they probably think typing is a huge bottle neck and it’s a huge time saver.
    - nake89 1y ago
      I don't have that alias myself. But it seems like reasonable alias to have.
    - kasey_junk 1y ago
      Do you level the same criticism at people who write blogs expressing their enthusiasm for vi keyboard movements or emacs lisp incantations? How about shell improvements and language server based refactor tools? How about learning to touch type? Clearly code manipulation is not the hard part of writing software so all the people finding efficiency improvements in that tooling and skill set would be better served doing something else with their time? I find it instructive that the evergreen dismissal of one persons enthusiasm as unimportant rarely says what exactly they should be investing in instead.
aitchnyu 1y ago
In 2015, I promoted React as lightweight and bug-free, no plumbing 25 paths and callbacks between events, APIs, DOM for a page using jQuery. No late nights and angry clients like other projects. Everything went neatly for two weeks, till the induced demand of features brought us to the old late nights and angry clients baseline. For many, LLMs are yet another "you are now 10x better" blessing like Moore's law, SQL over binary files, Python over C, NPM/Pip over header files, React over jQuery etc.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  Imagine you worked as a framer and someone released a new kind of pneumatic nail gun that fired a random scattering of nails into all the boards and ”all” you had to do was remove all the "wrong" ones. 100x framing productivity, right?

If you are producing real results at 10x then you should be able to show that you are a year ahead of schedule in 5 weeks. Waiting to see anyone show even a month ahead of schedule after 6 months.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

I've never worked anywhere that knew where they were going well enough that it was even possible to be a month ahead of schedule. By the time a month has elapsed the plan is entirely different. AI can't keep up because its context window is full of yesteryear's wrong ideas about what next month will look like.

moron4hire 1y ago
Yeah, this is the main problem. Writing of code just isn't the bottle neck. It's the discovery of the business case that is the hard part. And if you don't know what it is, you can't prompt your way out of it. We've been having a go around with corporate leadership at my company about "AI is going to solve our problems". Dude, you don't even know what our problems are. How are you going to prompt the AI to analyze a 300 page PDF on budget policy when you can't even tell me how you read a 300 page PDF with your eyes to analyze the budget policy. I'm tempted to give them what they want: just a chatter box they can ask, "analyze this budget policy for me", just so I can see the looks on their faces when it spits out five poorly written paragraphs full of niceties that talk its way around ever doing any analysis. I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  I've got my own gripes about leadership, but I'm finding that even when its a goal I've set for myself, watching an AI fail at it represents a refinement of what I thought I wanted: I'm not much better than they are. That, or its a discovery of why what I wanted is impossible and it's back to the drawing board. It's nice to not be throwing away code that I'd otherwise have been a perfectionist about (and still thrown away).
- int_19h 1y ago
  > I'm tempted to give them what they want: just a chatter box they can ask, "analyze this budget policy for me", just so I can see the looks on their faces when it spits out five poorly written paragraphs full of niceties that talk its way around ever doing any analysis. Ah, but they'll love it. > I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I'm the problem because I value getting the right answer rather than just spitting out reams of text nobody is ever going to read anyway. Maybe it's better to send the client a bill and hope they are using their own AIs to evaluate the work rather than reading it themselves? Who would ever think we were intentionally engaging in Fraud, Waste, and Abuse if it was the AI that did it? We're already doing all the same stuff, except today it's not the AI that's doing that, it's people. One overworked and stressed person somewhere makes for a poorly designed, buggy library, and then millions of other overworked and stressed people spend most of their time at work finding out how to cobble dozens of such poorly designed and buggy pieces of code together into something that kinda sorta works. This is why the top management is so bullshit on AI. It's because it's a perfect fit for a model that they have already established.

ned_roberts 1y ago

Looking at the “metrics” they shared, going from committing just about zero code over the last two years to more than zero in the past two months may be a 10x improvement. I haven’t seen any evidence more experienced developers see anywhere near that speedup.

chotmat 1y ago
The "metrics" is hilarious. The "before AI" graph looks like those meme about FAANG engineers who sit around and basically do nothing.

journal 1y ago

when copilot auto-completes 10 lines with 99% accuracy with a press of tab, does that not save you time typing those lines?

kellyjprice 1y ago
Is typing 10 lines of code your bottleneck?
rescripting 1y ago
What if I told you the hard part is not the typing.
Macha 1y ago
Sure, but probably your pre-copilot IDE was autocompleting 7-8 of those lines anyway, just by playing type tetris, and typing the code out was never the slow part?
- what 1y ago
  These are the kind of people that create two letter aliases to avoid typing “git pull” or whatever. Congrats, very efficient, saving 10 seconds per day. So, yeah, they probably think typing is a huge bottle neck and it’s a huge time saver.
  - nake89 1y ago
    I don't have that alias myself. But it seems like reasonable alias to have.
  - kasey_junk 1y ago
    Do you level the same criticism at people who write blogs expressing their enthusiasm for vi keyboard movements or emacs lisp incantations? How about shell improvements and language server based refactor tools? How about learning to touch type? Clearly code manipulation is not the hard part of writing software so all the people finding efficiency improvements in that tooling and skill set would be better served doing something else with their time? I find it instructive that the evergreen dismissal of one persons enthusiasm as unimportant rarely says what exactly they should be investing in instead.

aitchnyu 1y ago

In 2015, I promoted React as lightweight and bug-free, no plumbing 25 paths and callbacks between events, APIs, DOM for a page using jQuery. No late nights and angry clients like other projects. Everything went neatly for two weeks, till the induced demand of features brought us to the old late nights and angry clients baseline. For many, LLMs are yet another "you are now 10x better" blessing like Moore's law, SQL over binary files, Python over C, NPM/Pip over header files, React over jQuery etc.

moron4hire 1y ago
Imagine you worked as a framer and someone released a new kind of pneumatic nail gun that fired a random scattering of nails into all the boards and ”all” you had to do was remove all the "wrong" ones. 100x framing productivity, right?