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A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out,

A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m My experience has been similar to yours, and I think a lot of the hype is from people like this Google engineer who play into the hype and leave out the context. This sets expectations way out of line from reality and leads to frustration and disappointment.

srcport56445 10mo ago
Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.
edanm 10mo ago
You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post). While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).
- NoPicklez 10mo ago
  Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.
  - edanm 10mo ago
    Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point? Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course. In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.
    - akoboldfrying 10mo ago
      Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/ Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)
      - edanm 10mo ago
        Aaarg I was typing quickly and mistyped. :face-palm: Thanks for the correction.
      - neomantra 10mo ago
        That is hilarious.... and to prove the point of this whole comment thread, I created reddit-kv for us. It seems to work against a mock, I did not test it against Reddit itself as I think it violates ToS. My prompts are in the repo. https://github.com/ConAcademy/reddit-kv/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/ConAcademy/reddit-kv/blob/main/README.md
        akoboldfrying 10mo ago
        Typo-Driven Development!
    - margorczynski 10mo ago
      I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?". The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.
      - menaerus 10mo ago
        I agree it's about the ego .. about the other part I am also trying to project few scenarios in my head. Wild guess nr.1: large majority of software jobs will be complemented (mostly replaced) with the AI agents, reducing the need for as many people doing the same job. Wild guess nr.2: demand for creating software will increase but the demand for software engineers creating that software will not follow the same multiplier. Wild guess nr.3: we will have the smallest teams ever with only few people on board leading perhaps to instantiating the largest amount of companies than ever. Wild guess nr.4: in near future, the pool of software engineers as we know them today, will be drastically downsized, and only the ones who can demonstrate they can bring the substantial value over using the AI models will remain relevant. Wild guess nr.5: getting the job in software engineering will be harder than ever.
- NBJack 10mo ago
  Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.
dysleixc 10mo ago
[flagged]
- cocoto 10mo ago
  From the very beginning everyone tells us “you are using the wrong model”. Fast forward a year, the free models become as good as last year premium models and the result is still bad but you still hear the same message “you are not using the last model”… I just stopped caring to try the new shiny model each month and simply reevaluate the state of the art once a year for my sanity. Or maybe my expectation is clearly too high for these tools.
  - coryrc 10mo ago
    Are you sure you haven't moved the goalposts? The context here is "agentic coding" i.e. it does it all, while in the past the context was, to me anyway, "you describe the code you want and it writes it and you check it's what you asked for". The latter does work on free models now.
    - laserlight 10mo ago
      When one is not happy with LLM output, agentic workflow rarely improves quality --- even though it may improve functionality. Now, instead of making sure that LLM is on track at each step, it goes down a rabbit hole, at which point it's impossible to review the work, let alone make it do it your way.
- consp 10mo ago
  > would call out the AI hype bubble Which is what it is by describing it as a tool needing thousands of dollars and years of time in learning fees while being described as "replaces devs" in an instant. It is a tool and when used sparingly by well trained people, works. To the extend that any large statistical text predictor would.
- amoss 10mo ago
  This discussion is a request for positive examples to demonstrate any of the recent grandiose claims about ai assisted development. Attempting to switch instead to attacking the credentials of posters only seems to supply evidence that there are no positive examples, only hype. It doesn't seem to add to the conversation.
hahahahhaah 10mo ago
Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.
keybored 10mo ago
> A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. I’ll bring the tar if you bring the feathers. That sounds hyperbolic but how can someone say something so outrageoulsy false.
- thornewolf 10mo ago
  as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet
  - keybored 10mo ago
    A principal engineer at Google made a public post on the World Wide Web and assumed some shared Google/Claude-context. Do you hear yourself?
    - tokioyoyo 10mo ago
      Working in a large scale org gets you accustomed to general problems in decision making that aren’t that obvious. Like I totally understood what she means and in my head nodded with “yeah that tracks”.
      - keybored 10mo ago
        Maybe it helps them sleep at night.
    - grayhatter 10mo ago
      People make mistakes, it's not that deep. The correct incentive to encourage is admitting, and understand and forgiving when necessary because you don't want to encourage people to hide mistakes out of shame. That only makes things worse. Especially considering forgetting the delta between yours and someone else's shared context is extremely common. And the least egregious mistake you can make when writing an untargeted promo post.
tw061023 10mo ago
That, uh, says a lot about Google, doesn't it?
another_twist 10mo ago
Thats because getting promoted requires thought leadership and fulfilling AI mandates. Hence the tweet from this PE at Google, another from one at Microsoft wanting to rewrite the entire c++ base to Rust, few other projects also from MS all about getting the right Markdown files etc etc
tech_tuna 10mo ago
Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same. The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.

srcport56445 10mo ago

Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.

edanm 10mo ago

You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post). While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).

NoPicklez 10mo ago
Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.
- edanm 10mo ago
  Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point? Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course. In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.
  - akoboldfrying 10mo ago
    Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/ Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)
    - edanm 10mo ago
      Aaarg I was typing quickly and mistyped. :face-palm: Thanks for the correction.
    - neomantra 10mo ago
      That is hilarious.... and to prove the point of this whole comment thread, I created reddit-kv for us. It seems to work against a mock, I did not test it against Reddit itself as I think it violates ToS. My prompts are in the repo. https://github.com/ConAcademy/reddit-kv/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/ConAcademy/reddit-kv/blob/main/README.md
      - akoboldfrying 10mo ago
        Typo-Driven Development!
  - margorczynski 10mo ago
    I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?". The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.
    - menaerus 10mo ago
      I agree it's about the ego .. about the other part I am also trying to project few scenarios in my head. Wild guess nr.1: large majority of software jobs will be complemented (mostly replaced) with the AI agents, reducing the need for as many people doing the same job. Wild guess nr.2: demand for creating software will increase but the demand for software engineers creating that software will not follow the same multiplier. Wild guess nr.3: we will have the smallest teams ever with only few people on board leading perhaps to instantiating the largest amount of companies than ever. Wild guess nr.4: in near future, the pool of software engineers as we know them today, will be drastically downsized, and only the ones who can demonstrate they can bring the substantial value over using the AI models will remain relevant. Wild guess nr.5: getting the job in software engineering will be harder than ever.
NBJack 10mo ago
Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.

dysleixc 10mo ago

[flagged]

cocoto 10mo ago
From the very beginning everyone tells us “you are using the wrong model”. Fast forward a year, the free models become as good as last year premium models and the result is still bad but you still hear the same message “you are not using the last model”… I just stopped caring to try the new shiny model each month and simply reevaluate the state of the art once a year for my sanity. Or maybe my expectation is clearly too high for these tools.
- coryrc 10mo ago
  Are you sure you haven't moved the goalposts? The context here is "agentic coding" i.e. it does it all, while in the past the context was, to me anyway, "you describe the code you want and it writes it and you check it's what you asked for". The latter does work on free models now.
  - laserlight 10mo ago
    When one is not happy with LLM output, agentic workflow rarely improves quality --- even though it may improve functionality. Now, instead of making sure that LLM is on track at each step, it goes down a rabbit hole, at which point it's impossible to review the work, let alone make it do it your way.
consp 10mo ago
> would call out the AI hype bubble Which is what it is by describing it as a tool needing thousands of dollars and years of time in learning fees while being described as "replaces devs" in an instant. It is a tool and when used sparingly by well trained people, works. To the extend that any large statistical text predictor would.
amoss 10mo ago
This discussion is a request for positive examples to demonstrate any of the recent grandiose claims about ai assisted development. Attempting to switch instead to attacking the credentials of posters only seems to supply evidence that there are no positive examples, only hype. It doesn't seem to add to the conversation.

hahahahhaah 10mo ago

Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.

keybored 10mo ago

> A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. I’ll bring the tar if you bring the feathers. That sounds hyperbolic but how can someone say something so outrageoulsy false.

thornewolf 10mo ago
as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet
- keybored 10mo ago
  A principal engineer at Google made a public post on the World Wide Web and assumed some shared Google/Claude-context. Do you hear yourself?
  - tokioyoyo 10mo ago
    Working in a large scale org gets you accustomed to general problems in decision making that aren’t that obvious. Like I totally understood what she means and in my head nodded with “yeah that tracks”.
    - keybored 10mo ago
      Maybe it helps them sleep at night.
  - grayhatter 10mo ago
    People make mistakes, it's not that deep. The correct incentive to encourage is admitting, and understand and forgiving when necessary because you don't want to encourage people to hide mistakes out of shame. That only makes things worse. Especially considering forgetting the delta between yours and someone else's shared context is extremely common. And the least egregious mistake you can make when writing an untargeted promo post.

tw061023 10mo ago

That, uh, says a lot about Google, doesn't it?

another_twist 10mo ago

Thats because getting promoted requires thought leadership and fulfilling AI mandates. Hence the tweet from this PE at Google, another from one at Microsoft wanting to rewrite the entire c++ base to Rust, few other projects also from MS all about getting the right Markdown files etc etc

tech_tuna 10mo ago

Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same. The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.