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I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it. Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my
by bandrami 8mo ago
I don't write code for a living but I administer and maintain it.
Every time I say this people get really angry, but: so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Neither my dev team nor my vendors are getting me software faster than they were two years ago. Docker had a bigger impact on the pipeline to me than AI has.
Maybe this will change, but until it does I'm mostly watching bemusedly.
- bandrami 8mo agoThe dev team is committing more than they used to. A lot, in fact, judging from the logs. But it's not showing up as a faster cadence of getting me software to administer. Again, maybe that will change.
- righthand 8mo agoIn my experience it is now twice the amount of merge requests as a follow-up appears to correct any bugs no one reviewed in the first merge request.
- silentkat 8mo agoI’m at a big tech company. They proudly stated more productivity measures in commits (already nonsense). 47% more commits, 17% less time per commit. Meaning 128% more time spent coding. Burning us out and acting like the AI slop is “unlocking” productivity. There’s some neat stuff, don’t get me wrong. But every additional tool so far has started strong but then always falls over. Always. Right now there’s this “orchestrator” nonsense. Cool in principle, but as someone who made scripts to automate with all the time before it’s not impressive. Spent $200 to automate doing some bug finding and fixing. It found and fixed the easy stuff (still pretty neat), and then “partially verified” it fixed the other stuff. The “partial verification” was it justifying why it was okay it was broken. The company has mandated we use this technology. I have an “AI Native” rating. We’re being told to put out at least 28 commits a month. It’s nonsense. They’re letting me play with an expensive, super-high-level, probabilistic language. So I’m having a lot of fun. But I’m not going to lie, I’m very disappointed. Got this job a year ago. 12 years programming experience. First big tech job. Was hoping to learn a lot. Know my use of data to prioritize work could be better. Was sold on their use of data. I’m sure some teams here use data really well, but I’m just not impressed. And I’m not even getting into the people gaming the metrics to look good while actually making more work for everyone else.
- sdf2df 8mo agoLol its gonna take longer than it should for this to play out. Sunk cost fallacy is very real, for all involved. Especially the model producers and their investors. Sunk cost fallacy is also real for dev's who are now giving up how they used to work - they've made a sunk investment in learning to use LLMs etc. Hence the 'there's no going back' comments that crop up on here. As I said in this thread - anyone who can think straight - Im referring to those who adhere to fundamental economic principles - can see what's going on from a mile away.
- booleandilemma 8mo agoManagement is just stupid sometimes. We had a similar metric at my last company and my manager's response was "well how else are we supposed to measure productivity?", and that was supposed to be a legitimate answer.
- sdf2df 8mo agoThe benefits of AI either accrue toward incremental revenue-generation or cost-saving. Its not rocket science to measure actually. The issue is most people dont know how to think properly to invent the right proxies.
- whateveracct 8mo agoI think they feel more productive but aren't actually.
- thewebguyd 8mo agoSame here, more or less, in the ops world. Yeah, I use AI but I can't honestly say it's massively improved my productivity or drastically changed my job in any way other than the emails I get from the other managers at my work are now clearly written by AI. I can turn out some scripts a little bit quicker, or find an answer to something a little quicker than googling, but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist. Like you said, there has been other tech that has changed my job over time more than AI has. The move to the cloud, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, etc. have all had far more of an impact on my job. I see literally zero change in the output of others, both internally and externally. So either this is a massively overblown bubble, or I'm just missing something.
- sdf2df 8mo agoYoure not missing anything. Humans are funny. But most cant seem to understand that the tool is a mirage and they are putting false expectations on it. E.g. management of firms cutting back on hiring under the expectation that LLMs will do magic - with many cheering 'this is the worst itll be bro!!". I just hope more people realise before Anthropic and OAI can IPO. I would wager they are in the process of cleaning up their financials for it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- keeda 8mo ago> ... but I'm still waiting on others most of the time, the overall company processes haven't improved or gotten more efficient. The same blockers as always still exist. And that's the key problem, isn't it? I maintain current organizations have the "wrong shape" to fully leverage AI. Imagine instead of the scope of your current ownership, you own everything your team or your whole department owns. Consider what that would do to the meetings and dependencies and processes and tickets and blockers and other bureaucracy, something I call "Conway Overhead." Now imagine that playing out across multiple roles, i.e. you also take on product and design. Imagine what that would do to your company org chart. I added a much more detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142
- sdf2df 8mo agoI will personally say right now... its not gonna change lol. People who actually know how to think can see it a mile away.
- stevenhuang 8mo agoIt's telling you feel the need to create a throw away to voice this opinion.
- sdf2df 8mo ago1) Not a throaway, can't remember what my old account is called 2) Feel free to screen shot. Stick it on your desktop and set a reminder and check the state of the world in 12 months time. Job done fella.
- stevenhuang 8mo ago12 months I won't be surprised if there's not much change. But in 5 years? 10? Anything can happen. It is presumptuous to think you can project the future capabilities of this technology and confidently state that labour markets will never be affected.
- sdf2df 8mo agoYou prove my point. Guys like you dont get it. You think OAI, Amazon etc can freely put large amounts of money into this for 5-10 years? Lmao - delusional. Investors are impatient. Show huge jumps in revenue this year or you no longer have permission to put monumental amounts of money into this anymore. Short of that they'll just destroy the stock price by selling off; leaving employees who get paid via SBC very unhappy.
- greyw 8mo agoSuch are reductive and superficial way of thinking on how investments works. Makes me confident you dont really are able to make a good prediction
- Kye 8mo agoI've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor. The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.
- willmadden 8mo agoBuild a new feature. If you aren't bogged down in bureaucracy it will happen much faster.
- bandrami 8mo agoMost of these are new features, but then they have to integrate with the existing software so it's not really greenfield. (Not to mention that our clients aren't getting any faster at approving new features, either.)
- willmadden 8mo agoDid you train a self-hosted/open source LLM on your existing software and documentation? That should make it far more useful. It's not claude code, but some of those models are 80% there. In 6 months they'll be today's claude code.
- bandrami 8mo agoWhat would that help us with?
- willmadden 8mo agoThe LLM needs to understand your existing codebase if it's going to be useful building features that integrate with said codebase seamlessly without breaking things or assuming things that don't exist. That's not something you want to give away to a private AI company, so self-host an open source model.
- bandrami 8mo agoI understood how that would help the LLM, I asked how that would help us. What decision would that inform for us that we're currently having trouble with?
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- lovich 8mo ago> so far AI has had almost no impact on my job. Are you hiring?
- kdheiwns 8mo agoYep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly. I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gamedev. It's about as useful as a guy who read some documentation for an engine a couple years ago and kind of remembers it but not quite and makes lots of mistakes. The best it can do is point me in the general direction I need to go, but it'll hallucinate basic functions and mess up any sort of logic.
- bee_rider 8mo agoThinking of it, I haven’t seen as many “copy paste from StackOverflow” memes lately. Maybe LLMs have given people the ability to 1) Do that inside their IDEs, which is less funny 2) Generate blog post about it instead of memes
- Izkata 8mo agoPython one-upped that a long time ago: from stackoverflow import quick_sort https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import
- bandrami 8mo ago30 years ago (well, 28 years ago) we had the Perl Cookbook which was basically Stack Overflow but printed and without annoying moderators closing your questions. That and the camel book never even made it back to my bookshelf because they just always sat open on my desk.
- kranner 8mo agoMy experience is the same. There are modest gains compensating for lack of good documentation and the like, but the human bottlenecks in the process aren't useless bureaucracy. Whether or not a feature or a particular UX implementation of it makes sense, these things can't be skipped, sped up or handed off to any AI.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- httpz 8mo agoThis is a classic case of Productivity Paradox when personal computers were first introduced into workplaces in the 80s. A famous economist once said, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
- bandrami 8mo agoThat's only certain if investments in tech infrastructure always led to productivity increases. But sometimes they just don't. Lots of firms spent a lot of money on blockchain five years ago, for instance, and that money is just gone now.
- 20k 8mo agoI find it odd the universal assumption that AI is going to be good for productivity The loss of skills, complete loss of visibility and experience with the codebase, and the complete lack of software architecture design, seems like a massive killer in the long term I have a feeling that we're going to see productivity with AI drop through the floor
- nikkwong 8mo agoHaving the productivity "drop through the floor" is a bit hyperbolic, no? Humans are still reviewing the PRs before code merge at least at my company (for the most part, for now).
- bandrami 8mo agoI don't know that it's likely but it's certainly a plausible outcome. If tooling keeps getting built for this and the financial music stops it's going to take a while for everybody to get back up to speed Remember this famously happened before, in the 1970s
- fnordpiglet 8mo agoMy employer is pretty advanced in its use of these tools for development and it’s absolutely accelerated everything we do to the point we are exhausting roadmaps for six months in a few weeks. However I think very few companies are operating like this yet. It takes time for tools and techniques to make it out and Claude code alone isn’t enough. They are basically planning to let go of most of the product managers and Eng managers, and I expect they’re measuring who is using the AI tools most effectively and everyone else will be let go, likely before years end. Unlike prior iterations I saw at Salesforce this time I am convinced they’re actually going to do it and pull it off. This is the biggest change I’ve seen in my 35 year career, and I have to say I’m pretty excited to be going through it even though the collateral damage will be immense to peoples lives. I plan to retire after this as well, I think this part is sort of interesting but I can see clearly what comes next is not.
- p1esk 8mo agoI’m observing very similar trends at a startup I’m at. Unfortunately I’m not ready to retire yet.
- blackcatsec 8mo agoWhy are you excited for this? They’re not going to give YOU those peoples’ salaries. You will get none of it. In fact, it will drag your salary through the floor because of all the available talent.
- Karrot_Kream 8mo agoI'm very confused about this. Salary is only one portion of your total compensation. The vast majority of tech companies offer equity in a company. The two ways to increase the FMV of your equity is: increase your equity stake or increase the value of the total equity available. Hitting the same goals with fewer people means your run rate is lower, which increases the value of your equity (the FMV prices in lower COGS for the same revenue.) Also, keeping on staff often means you want to offer them increased equity stakes as an employment package. Letting staff go means more of that available equity pool is available to distribute to remaining employees. We aren't fungible workers in a low skill industry. And if you find yourself working in a tech company without equity: just don't, leave. Either find a new tech company or do something else altogether.
- eucyclos 8mo agoA tool with a mediocre level of skill in everything looks mediocre when the backdrop is our own area of expertise and game changing when the backdrop is an unfamiliar one. But I suspect the real game changer will be that everyone is suddenly a polymath.
- sibeliuss 8mo agoThis ^ Exactly it. This will be the change.
- redhale 8mo agoI don't doubt your sincerity. But this represents an absolutely bonkers disparity compared to the reality I'm experiencing. I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them. Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.
- tasuki 8mo ago> It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. I prefer walking or cycling and often walk about 8km a day around town, for both mobility and exercise. (Other people's) automobiles make my experience worse, not better. I'm sure there's an analogy somewhere. (Sure, automobiles improve the speed of mobility, if that's the only thing you care about...)
- bandrami 8mo agoI don't think I'm asking for something unreasonable: I'll believe this actually speeds up software creation when one of my vendors starts getting me software faster. That's not some crazy ludditism on my part, I don't think?
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoThis is not a good thing. If you’re not being exposed and skilling up already, you’re likely to be in the camp that is washed away. If you can’t be exposed to it in your day job, start using Claude opus in the evening so you know what’s coming.
- matkoniecz 8mo agoSo far I have not seen much skill gain from using LLM extensively. Maybe I will be replaced by matrix multiplication in my job, but if I need to use LLM at some point I expect little benefit from starting now. Yes, I tried to use Claude Code two months ago. It was scary, but not useful.
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago“Not useful” —- one of those moments where you have to be able to adjust your views in the face of new evidence. Humans are so wedded to their beliefs that it can be agonising to let go. I have nothing but respect for people who admit they were wrong, though. I remained a skeptic for a long time, but 4.5 was enough to convince me to adopt for production code.
- matkoniecz 8mo agoSo far I updated from "meh, not useful" to "scary, not useful". If it would be useful I would continue to use it, but at this point I would not use even if it would be free, not proprietary and not funding replacing me.
- bandrami 8mo agoEh, people have been warning me "you'll be left behind!" about the flavor of the week for decades now and it hasn't happened yet. If it happens it happens.
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoI fear you have not yet fully appreciated the magnitude of this particular change.
- ygouzerh 8mo agoI feel that it differs a lot between companies. It seems like corporate are having less an impact for now, as external innovation needs tailoring to adapt to its needs (e.g a security solution that needs 3 month projects to be tailored to the company tech stack), whereas startups and smaller firms see the most of the impact so far.
- steve_adams_86 8mo agoIn my org I get far more done than ever, but I also find it more exhausting. Because I can get so much done, I've lost my sense for what's enough. And if I can squeeze out a bit more relatively easily, why wouldn't I? When do I hit the brakes? There are some tasks where LLMs are not all that helpful, and I find myself kind of savoring those tasks. I'm surprised you don't notice a difference. Where I work it has been transformative. Perhaps it's because we're relatively small and scrappy, so the change in pace is easier with less organizational inertia. We've dramatically changed processes and increased outputs without a loss in quality. For less experienced programmers who are more interested in simple scripts for processing data, their outputs are actually far better, and they're learning faster because the Claude Code UI exposes them to so many techniques in the shell. I now see people using bash pipes for basic operations who wouldn't have known a thing about bash a couple years ago. The other day a couple less-technical people came to me to learn about what tests are. They never would have been motivated to learn this before. It's really cool. It doesn't reduce work at all, though. We're an under-funded NGO with high ambition. These changes allow us to do more with the same funding. Hopefully it allows us to get more funding, too. I can't see it leading to anyone being let go; we need every brain we can get.