6 ms·

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 rea

by jayd16 10mo 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 10mo ago
+1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.
- aspenmartin 10mo 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 10mo 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.
    - satisfice 10mo ago
      Hear hear!
    - llmslave2 10mo ago
      This is such a fantastic response. And outsiders should very well be made aware what kind of plane they are stepping into. No offence to the aviation enthusiasts in your example but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane, in the same way I will do everything in my power to avoid using AI coded software that does anything important or critical...
      - andrekandre 10mo ago
        > but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane speaking of airplanes... considering how much llm usage is being pushed top-down in many places, i wonder how long until some news drops of some catastrophic one-liner got through via llm generated code...
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.
      - leptons 10mo ago
        This is a typical no-proof "AI"-boosting response, and from an account created only 35 days ago.
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
        threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        Right I’m a bot made to promote AI like half the people on this thread. I don’t know if you noticed a difference from other hype cycles but other ones were speculative. This one is also speculative but the greater divide is that the literal on the ground usefulness of AI is ALREADY going to change the world. The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
- CuriouslyC 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
  Are you joking? You realize entire companies and startups are littered with ppl who only use AI.
  - hansmayer 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?
- jayd16 10mo 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.

by jayd16 10mo ago

hansmayer 10mo ago

+1 - I wish at least one of these AI boosters had shown us a real commercialised product they've built.

aspenmartin 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - satisfice 10mo ago
    Hear hear!
  - llmslave2 10mo ago
    This is such a fantastic response. And outsiders should very well be made aware what kind of plane they are stepping into. No offence to the aviation enthusiasts in your example but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane, in the same way I will do everything in my power to avoid using AI coded software that does anything important or critical...
    - andrekandre 10mo ago
      > but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane speaking of airplanes... considering how much llm usage is being pushed top-down in many places, i wonder how long until some news drops of some catastrophic one-liner got through via llm generated code...
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.
    - leptons 10mo ago
      This is a typical no-proof "AI"-boosting response, and from an account created only 35 days ago.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
        Right I’m a bot made to promote AI like half the people on this thread. I don’t know if you noticed a difference from other hype cycles but other ones were speculative. This one is also speculative but the greater divide is that the literal on the ground usefulness of AI is ALREADY going to change the world. The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
CuriouslyC 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
Are you joking? You realize entire companies and startups are littered with ppl who only use AI.
- hansmayer 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago

Who is saying anything about 20x? Sorry did I miss something here?

jayd16 10mo 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.