15 ms·

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are

by 63stack 9mo ago

This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make. Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.

aspenmartin 9mo ago
No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.
- jayd16 9mo ago
  When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
  - hansmayer 9mo ago
    +1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
    - aspenmartin 9mo ago
      AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
      - hansmayer 9mo ago
        I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check. If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter? Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example. Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc. Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel. It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions. What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs. So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them. The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
    - CuriouslyC 9mo ago
      I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.
      - andsoitis 9mo ago
        > The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar The point is that without mentioning specific software that readers know about, there isn’t really a way to evaluate a claim of 20x.
      - hansmayer 9mo ago
        > I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cases.
        dent9 9mo ago
        My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI
        63stack 9mo ago
        Klarna functions as a payment provider as well, not just a payday loan service (which you are implying I assume). This comment says more about you.
    - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
      Are you joking? You realize entire companies and startups are littered with ppl who only use AI.
      - hansmayer 9mo ago
        > littered with ppl who only use AI "Littered" is a great verb to use here. Also I did not ask for a deviated proxy non-measure, like how many people who are choking themselves to death in a meaningless bullshit job are now surviving by having LLMs generate their spreadsheets and presentations. I asked for solid proof of succesful, commercial products built up by dreaming them up through LLMs.
        threethirtytwo 9mo ago
        The proof is all around you. I am talking about software professionals not some bullshit spread sheet thing. What I’m saying is this: From my pov Everyone is using LLMs to write code now. The overwhelming majority of software products in existence today are now being changed with LLM code. The majority of software products being created from scratch are also mostly LLM code. This is obvious to me. It’s not speculation, where I live and where I’m from and where I work it’s the obvious status quo. When I see someone like you I’m thinking because the change happened so fast you’re one of the people living in a bubble. Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up. Wait until you have that one coworker who’s going at 10x speed as everyone else and you find out it’s because of AI. That is what will slowly happen to these bubbles. To keep pace you will have to switch to AI to see the difference. I also don’t know how to offer you proof. Do you use google? If so you’ve used products that have been changed by LLM code. Is that proof? Do you use any products built by a start up in the last year? The majority of that code will be written by an LLM.
        hansmayer 9mo ago
        > Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up. We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
    - dent9 9mo ago
      Have you had your head in the sand for the past two years? At the recent AWS conference, they were showcasing Kiro extensively with real life products that have been built with it. And the Amazon developers all allege that they've all been using Kiro and other AI tools and agents heavily for the past year+ now to build AWS's own services. Google and Microsoft have also reported similar internal efforts. The platforms you interact with on a daily basis are now all being built with the help of AI tools and agents If you think no one is building real commercial products with AI then you are either blind or an idiot or both. Why don't you just spend two seconds emailing your company AWS ProServe folks and ask them, I'm sure they'll give you a laundry list of things they're using AI for internally and sign you up for a Kiro demo as well
      - 63stack 9mo ago
        Amazon, Google and Microsoft are balls deep invested in AI, a rational person should draw 0 conclusions in them showcasing how productive they are with it. I'd say it's more about the fear of their $50billion+ investments not paying off is creeping up on them.
        aspenmartin 9mo ago
        It’s ok to have this prior but these are not speculative tools and capabilities, they exist today. If you remain unimpressed by them that’s fine, but to deny real people (not bots!) and real companies (we measure lots of stuff, I’ve seen the data at a large MAANG and have used their internal and external tools) get serious benefits _today_ and we still have about 4 more orders of magnitude to scale _existing_ paradigms, the writing on the wall is so obvious. It’s fine and reasonable to be skeptical and there are so many serious serious societal risks and issues to worry about and champion but to me if your position is akin to “this is all hype” it makes absolutely no sense to me
  - doug_durham 9mo ago
    You’ve never read Simon Willison’s blog? His repo is full of work that he’s created with LLM’s. He makes money off of them. There are plenty of examples you just need to look.
  - aspenmartin 9mo ago
    Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?
    - jayd16 9mo ago
      > work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. From the OP. If you think that's too much then we agree.
- hansmayer 9mo ago
  > I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it before you push into production. Once you apply them to any area where you have at least moderate competence, you will see all sorts of issues that you just cannot unsee. Security and performance is often an issue, not to mention the quality of code....
  - aspenmartin 9mo ago
    Seems fine, works, is fine, is better than if you had me go off and write it on my own. You realize you can check the results? You can use Claude to help you understand the changes as you read through them? I mean I just don’t get this weird “it makes mistakes and it’s horrible if you understand the domain that it is generating over” I mean yes definitely sometimes and definitely not other times. What happens if I DONT have someone more experienced to consult with or that will ignore me because they are busy or be wrong because they are also imperfect and not focused. It’s really hard to be convinced that this point of view is not just some knee jerk reaction justified post hoc
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - hansmayer 9mo ago
      Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.
      - aspenmartin 9mo ago
        Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  The paradigm shift hit the world like a wall. I know entire teams where the manager thinks AI is bullshit and the entire team is not allowed to use AI. I love coding. But reality is reality and these fools just aren’t keeping pace with how fast the world is changing.
  - goatlover 9mo ago
    Or we're in another hype cycle and billions of dollars are being pumped in to sustain the current bubble with a lot of promises about how fast the world is changing. Doesn't mean AI can't be a useful tool.
    - aspenmartin 9mo ago
      When people say “hype cycle” that can mean so many different things. That valuations are too high and many industry “promises” are wrong is maybe true but to me it’s irrelevant, this isn’t speculative, I think most posters who are positive on agents in these threads are talking about two things: current, existing tools, and the existing rate of progress. Check out e.g. Epoch.ai for great industry analyses. To compare AI to crypto is disingenuous, they are completely different and crypto is a technology that fundamentally makes no sense in a world where governments want to (and arguably should) control money supply. You may or may not agree on that take but AI is something that governments will push aggressively and see as crucial to national security/control. It means this is not going away
davnicwil 9mo ago
I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world. I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too. It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice. This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.
- jmogly 9mo ago
  I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools. One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.
  - mattmanser 9mo ago
    Ok, if you're a senior dev, have you 'caught' it yet? Ask it a question about something you know well, and it'll give you garbage code that it's obviously copied from an answer on SO from 10 years ago. When you ask it for research, it's still giving you garbage out of date information it copied from SO 10 years ago, you just don't know it's garbage.
to11mtm 9mo ago
I'd be willing to give you access to the experiment I mentioned in a separate reply (have a github repo), as far as the output that you can get for a complex app buildout. Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput despite my absolute lack of caring that much [0]. Once I get past a certain stage I am thinking of doing an A-B test where I take an earlier commit and try again while paying more attention... (But I at least want to get where there is a full suite of UOW cases before I do that, for comparison's sake.) > Those twenty engineers must not have produced much. I've been considered a 'very fast' engineer at most shops (e.x. at multiple shops, stories assigned to me would have a <1 multiplier for points[1]) 20 is a bit bloated, unless we are talking about WITCH tier. I definitely can get done in 2-3 hours what could take me a day. I say it that way because at best it's 1-2 hours but other times it's longer, some folks remember the 'best' rather than median. [0] - It started as 'prompt only', although after a certain point I did start being more aggressive with personal edits. [1] - IDK why they did it that way instead of capacity, OTOH that saved me when it came to being assigned Manual Testing stories...
- imron 9mo ago
  > Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput Throughput without being good will just lead to more work down the line to correct the badness. It's like losing money on every sale but making up for it with volume.
- notpachet 9mo ago
  > Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) You lost me here. Come back when you're proud of it.
coderenegade 9mo ago
My experience is that you get out what you put in. If you have a well-defined foundation, AI can populate the stubs and get it 95% correct. Getting to that point can take a bit of thought, and AI can help with that, too, but if you lean on it too much, you'll get a mess. And of course, getting to the point where you can write a good foundation has always been the bulk of the work. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
pfannkuchen 9mo ago
I think part of what is happening here is that different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again to do the same sort of things, then LLMs probably could take your job. A lot of people have joined the industry over time, and it seems like the intelligence bar moved lower and lower over time, particularly for people churning out large volumes of boilerplate code. If you are doing relatively novel stuff, at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist in tutorials etc online, then the LLM will probably not work well with your style. So some people are panicking and they are probably right, and some other people are rolling their eyes and they are probably right too. I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed. I am skeptical this will happen though, as there doesn’t seem to be a way around the problem of the giant indigestible hairball (I.e as you have more and more boilerplate it becomes harder to remain coherent).
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  > different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. Definitely this. When I use AIs for web development they do an ok job most of the time. Definitely on par with a junior dev. For anything outside of that they're still pretty bad. Not useless by any stretch, but it's still a fantasy to think you could replace even a good junior dev with AI in most domains. I am slightly worried for my job... but only because AI will keep improving and there is a chance it will be as good as me one day. Today it's not a threat at all.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    Yea, LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer. They take direction, their models act as the “do the research” part, and they output lots of code: code that has to be carefully scrutinized and refined. They are like very ambitious interns who never get tired and want to please, but often just produce crap that has to be totally redone or refactored heavily in order to go into production. If you think LLMs are “better programmers than you,” well, I have some disappointing news for you that might take you a while to accept.
photios 9mo ago
Ok, let's say the 20 devs claim is false [1]. What if it's 2? I'd still learn and use the tech. Wouldn't you? [1] I actually think it might be true for certain kinds of jobs.
- BirdieNZ 9mo ago
  Jevon's Paradox: more software will be produced, rather than fewer software engineers being employed.
- bloppe 9mo ago
  It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.
  - andrekandre 9mo ago
    > but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet i'd like to think if it was really good, we would see product quality improve over time; iow less reported bugs, less support incidents, increased sign-ups etc, that could easily be quantified no?
sh4rks 9mo ago
Post model
dent9 9mo ago
This is completely wrong. Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 don't have any of these issues. They will regularly tell you that you're wrong if you bother to ask them and they will explain why and what a better solution is. They don't make up anything. The code they produce is noticeably more efficient in LoC than previous models. And yes they really will do research, they will search the Internet for docs and articles as needed and cite their references inline with their answers. You talk as if you haven't used a LLM since 2024. It's now almost 2026 and things have changed a lot.
- claytongulick 9mo ago
  With apologies, and not GP, but this has been the same feedback I've personally seen on every single model release. Whenever I discuss the problems that my peers and I have using these things, it's always something along the lines of "but model X.Y solves all that!", so I obediently try again, waste a huge amount of time, and come back to the conclusion that these things aren't great at generation, but they are fantastic at summarization and classification. When I use them for those tasks, they have real value. For creation? Not so much. I've stopped getting excited about the "but model X.Y!!" thing. Maybe they are improving? I just personally haven't seen it. But according to the AI hypers, just like with every other tech hype that's died over the past 30 years, "I must just be doing it wrong".
  - dent9 9mo ago
    A lot of people are consistently getting their low expectations disproven when it comes to progress in AI tooling. If you read back in my comment history, six months ago I was posting about how AI is over hyped BS. But I kept using it and eventually new releases of models and tools solved most of the problems I had with them. If it has not happened for you yet then I expect it will eventually. Keep up with using the tools and models and follow their advancements and I think you'll eventually get to the point where your needs are met
- 63stack 9mo ago
  The same response (you are using model X instead of Y) have been perpetuated since 2024, and will still be perpetuated in 2026.

by 63stack 9mo ago

aspenmartin 9mo ago

No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.

jayd16 9mo ago
When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction. You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
- hansmayer 9mo ago
  +1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
  - aspenmartin 9mo ago
    AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right! In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
    - hansmayer 9mo ago
      I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check. If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter? Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example. Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc. Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel. It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions. What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs. So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them. The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
  - CuriouslyC 9mo ago
    I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.
    - andsoitis 9mo ago
      > The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar The point is that without mentioning specific software that readers know about, there isn’t really a way to evaluate a claim of 20x.
    - hansmayer 9mo ago
      > I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cases.
      - dent9 9mo ago
        My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI
        63stack 9mo ago
        Klarna functions as a payment provider as well, not just a payday loan service (which you are implying I assume). This comment says more about you.
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    Are you joking? You realize entire companies and startups are littered with ppl who only use AI.
    - hansmayer 9mo ago
      > littered with ppl who only use AI "Littered" is a great verb to use here. Also I did not ask for a deviated proxy non-measure, like how many people who are choking themselves to death in a meaningless bullshit job are now surviving by having LLMs generate their spreadsheets and presentations. I asked for solid proof of succesful, commercial products built up by dreaming them up through LLMs.
      - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
        The proof is all around you. I am talking about software professionals not some bullshit spread sheet thing. What I’m saying is this: From my pov Everyone is using LLMs to write code now. The overwhelming majority of software products in existence today are now being changed with LLM code. The majority of software products being created from scratch are also mostly LLM code. This is obvious to me. It’s not speculation, where I live and where I’m from and where I work it’s the obvious status quo. When I see someone like you I’m thinking because the change happened so fast you’re one of the people living in a bubble. Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up. Wait until you have that one coworker who’s going at 10x speed as everyone else and you find out it’s because of AI. That is what will slowly happen to these bubbles. To keep pace you will have to switch to AI to see the difference. I also don’t know how to offer you proof. Do you use google? If so you’ve used products that have been changed by LLM code. Is that proof? Do you use any products built by a start up in the last year? The majority of that code will be written by an LLM.
        hansmayer 9mo ago
        > Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up. We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
  - dent9 9mo ago
    Have you had your head in the sand for the past two years? At the recent AWS conference, they were showcasing Kiro extensively with real life products that have been built with it. And the Amazon developers all allege that they've all been using Kiro and other AI tools and agents heavily for the past year+ now to build AWS's own services. Google and Microsoft have also reported similar internal efforts. The platforms you interact with on a daily basis are now all being built with the help of AI tools and agents If you think no one is building real commercial products with AI then you are either blind or an idiot or both. Why don't you just spend two seconds emailing your company AWS ProServe folks and ask them, I'm sure they'll give you a laundry list of things they're using AI for internally and sign you up for a Kiro demo as well
    - 63stack 9mo ago
      Amazon, Google and Microsoft are balls deep invested in AI, a rational person should draw 0 conclusions in them showcasing how productive they are with it. I'd say it's more about the fear of their $50billion+ investments not paying off is creeping up on them.
      - aspenmartin 9mo ago
        It’s ok to have this prior but these are not speculative tools and capabilities, they exist today. If you remain unimpressed by them that’s fine, but to deny real people (not bots!) and real companies (we measure lots of stuff, I’ve seen the data at a large MAANG and have used their internal and external tools) get serious benefits _today_ and we still have about 4 more orders of magnitude to scale _existing_ paradigms, the writing on the wall is so obvious. It’s fine and reasonable to be skeptical and there are so many serious serious societal risks and issues to worry about and champion but to me if your position is akin to “this is all hype” it makes absolutely no sense to me
- doug_durham 9mo ago
  You’ve never read Simon Willison’s blog? His repo is full of work that he’s created with LLM’s. He makes money off of them. There are plenty of examples you just need to look.
- aspenmartin 9mo ago
  Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?
  - jayd16 9mo ago
    > work of an entire org that used to need twenty engineers. From the OP. If you think that's too much then we agree.
hansmayer 9mo ago
> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it before you push into production. Once you apply them to any area where you have at least moderate competence, you will see all sorts of issues that you just cannot unsee. Security and performance is often an issue, not to mention the quality of code....
- aspenmartin 9mo ago
  Seems fine, works, is fine, is better than if you had me go off and write it on my own. You realize you can check the results? You can use Claude to help you understand the changes as you read through them? I mean I just don’t get this weird “it makes mistakes and it’s horrible if you understand the domain that it is generating over” I mean yes definitely sometimes and definitely not other times. What happens if I DONT have someone more experienced to consult with or that will ignore me because they are busy or be wrong because they are also imperfect and not focused. It’s really hard to be convinced that this point of view is not just some knee jerk reaction justified post hoc
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hansmayer 9mo ago
    Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.
    - aspenmartin 9mo ago
      Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.
threethirtytwo 9mo ago
The paradigm shift hit the world like a wall. I know entire teams where the manager thinks AI is bullshit and the entire team is not allowed to use AI. I love coding. But reality is reality and these fools just aren’t keeping pace with how fast the world is changing.
- goatlover 9mo ago
  Or we're in another hype cycle and billions of dollars are being pumped in to sustain the current bubble with a lot of promises about how fast the world is changing. Doesn't mean AI can't be a useful tool.
  - aspenmartin 9mo ago
    When people say “hype cycle” that can mean so many different things. That valuations are too high and many industry “promises” are wrong is maybe true but to me it’s irrelevant, this isn’t speculative, I think most posters who are positive on agents in these threads are talking about two things: current, existing tools, and the existing rate of progress. Check out e.g. Epoch.ai for great industry analyses. To compare AI to crypto is disingenuous, they are completely different and crypto is a technology that fundamentally makes no sense in a world where governments want to (and arguably should) control money supply. You may or may not agree on that take but AI is something that governments will push aggressively and see as crucial to national security/control. It means this is not going away

davnicwil 9mo ago

I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least. I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world. I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too. It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice. This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.

jmogly 9mo ago
I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools. One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.
- mattmanser 9mo ago
  Ok, if you're a senior dev, have you 'caught' it yet? Ask it a question about something you know well, and it'll give you garbage code that it's obviously copied from an answer on SO from 10 years ago. When you ask it for research, it's still giving you garbage out of date information it copied from SO 10 years ago, you just don't know it's garbage.

to11mtm 9mo ago

I'd be willing to give you access to the experiment I mentioned in a separate reply (have a github repo), as far as the output that you can get for a complex app buildout. Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput despite my absolute lack of caring that much [0]. Once I get past a certain stage I am thinking of doing an A-B test where I take an earlier commit and try again while paying more attention... (But I at least want to get where there is a full suite of UOW cases before I do that, for comparison's sake.) > Those twenty engineers must not have produced much. I've been considered a 'very fast' engineer at most shops (e.x. at multiple shops, stories assigned to me would have a <1 multiplier for points[1]) 20 is a bit bloated, unless we are talking about WITCH tier. I definitely can get done in 2-3 hours what could take me a day. I say it that way because at best it's 1-2 hours but other times it's longer, some folks remember the 'best' rather than median. [0] - It started as 'prompt only', although after a certain point I did start being more aggressive with personal edits. [1] - IDK why they did it that way instead of capacity, OTOH that saved me when it came to being assigned Manual Testing stories...

imron 9mo ago
> Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput Throughput without being good will just lead to more work down the line to correct the badness. It's like losing money on every sale but making up for it with volume.
notpachet 9mo ago
> Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) You lost me here. Come back when you're proud of it.

coderenegade 9mo ago

My experience is that you get out what you put in. If you have a well-defined foundation, AI can populate the stubs and get it 95% correct. Getting to that point can take a bit of thought, and AI can help with that, too, but if you lean on it too much, you'll get a mess. And of course, getting to the point where you can write a good foundation has always been the bulk of the work. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

pfannkuchen 9mo ago

I think part of what is happening here is that different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again to do the same sort of things, then LLMs probably could take your job. A lot of people have joined the industry over time, and it seems like the intelligence bar moved lower and lower over time, particularly for people churning out large volumes of boilerplate code. If you are doing relatively novel stuff, at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist in tutorials etc online, then the LLM will probably not work well with your style. So some people are panicking and they are probably right, and some other people are rolling their eyes and they are probably right too. I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed. I am skeptical this will happen though, as there doesn’t seem to be a way around the problem of the giant indigestible hairball (I.e as you have more and more boilerplate it becomes harder to remain coherent).

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 9mo ago
> different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. Definitely this. When I use AIs for web development they do an ok job most of the time. Definitely on par with a junior dev. For anything outside of that they're still pretty bad. Not useless by any stretch, but it's still a fantasy to think you could replace even a good junior dev with AI in most domains. I am slightly worried for my job... but only because AI will keep improving and there is a chance it will be as good as me one day. Today it's not a threat at all.
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  Yea, LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer. They take direction, their models act as the “do the research” part, and they output lots of code: code that has to be carefully scrutinized and refined. They are like very ambitious interns who never get tired and want to please, but often just produce crap that has to be totally redone or refactored heavily in order to go into production. If you think LLMs are “better programmers than you,” well, I have some disappointing news for you that might take you a while to accept.

photios 9mo ago

Ok, let's say the 20 devs claim is false [1]. What if it's 2? I'd still learn and use the tech. Wouldn't you? [1] I actually think it might be true for certain kinds of jobs.

BirdieNZ 9mo ago
Jevon's Paradox: more software will be produced, rather than fewer software engineers being employed.
bloppe 9mo ago
It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet i'd like to think if it was really good, we would see product quality improve over time; iow less reported bugs, less support incidents, increased sign-ups etc, that could easily be quantified no?

sh4rks 9mo ago

Post model

dent9 9mo ago

This is completely wrong. Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 don't have any of these issues. They will regularly tell you that you're wrong if you bother to ask them and they will explain why and what a better solution is. They don't make up anything. The code they produce is noticeably more efficient in LoC than previous models. And yes they really will do research, they will search the Internet for docs and articles as needed and cite their references inline with their answers. You talk as if you haven't used a LLM since 2024. It's now almost 2026 and things have changed a lot.

claytongulick 9mo ago
With apologies, and not GP, but this has been the same feedback I've personally seen on every single model release. Whenever I discuss the problems that my peers and I have using these things, it's always something along the lines of "but model X.Y solves all that!", so I obediently try again, waste a huge amount of time, and come back to the conclusion that these things aren't great at generation, but they are fantastic at summarization and classification. When I use them for those tasks, they have real value. For creation? Not so much. I've stopped getting excited about the "but model X.Y!!" thing. Maybe they are improving? I just personally haven't seen it. But according to the AI hypers, just like with every other tech hype that's died over the past 30 years, "I must just be doing it wrong".
- dent9 9mo ago
  A lot of people are consistently getting their low expectations disproven when it comes to progress in AI tooling. If you read back in my comment history, six months ago I was posting about how AI is over hyped BS. But I kept using it and eventually new releases of models and tools solved most of the problems I had with them. If it has not happened for you yet then I expect it will eventually. Keep up with using the tools and models and follow their advancements and I think you'll eventually get to the point where your needs are met
63stack 9mo ago
The same response (you are using model X instead of Y) have been perpetuated since 2024, and will still be perpetuated in 2026.