3 ms·

> ... 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 sti

by 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 ago
What a load of fluff lmao. Are you Nadella?
- keeda 8mo ago
  Hah! I would say I'm flattered, but I find his style of speaking rather stilted.
applfanboysbgon 8mo ago
> Imagine instead of > Now imagine > Imagine what that would do Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. Now imagine she had an engine. She could be a motorcycle! Unfortunately for grandma, she lives in reality and is not actually a motorcycle, which would be cool as hell. Our imagination can only take us so far. To more substantively reply to your longer linked comment: your hypothesis is that people spend as little as 10% of time coding and the other 90% of time in meetings, but that if they could code more, they wouldn't need to meet other people because they could do all the work of an entire team themselves[1]. The problem with your hypothesis is that you take for granted that LLMs actually allow people to do the work of an entire team themselves, and that it is merely bureacracy holding them back. There have been absolutely zero indicators that this is true. No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%. We aren't seeing amazing software being built by individual developers using LLMs. There is still only one Fabrice Bellard in the world, even though if your premise could escape the containment zone of imagination anyone should be able to be a Bellard on their own time with the help of LLMs. [1] Also, this is basically already true without LLMs. It is the reason startups are able to disrupt corporate behemoths. If you have just a small handful of people who spend the majority of their work time writing code (by hand! No LLMs required!), they can build amazing new products that outcompete products funded by trillion-dollar entities. Your observation of more coding = less meetings required in the first place has an element of truth to it, but not because LLMs are related to it in any particular way.
- pishpash 8mo ago
  This isn't the counter you think it is. It's too much to expect existing behemoths to reshape their orgs substantially on a quick enough timeline. The gains will be first seen in new companies and new organizations, and they will be able to stay flat a longer and outcompete the behemoths.
- sgc 8mo ago
  > Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. I always took this to be a sharp jab saying the entire village is riding your grandma, giving it a very aggressive undertone. It's pretty funny nonetheless. Too early to say what AI brings to the efficiency table I think. In some major things I do it's a 1000x speed up. In others it is more a different way of approaching a problem than a speed up. In yet others, it is a bit of an impediment. It works best when you learn to quickly recognize patterns and whether it will help. I don't know how people who are raised with ai will navigate and leverage it, which is the real long-term question (just as the difference between pre- and post-smartphone generations is a thing).
  - demorro 8mo ago
    1000x is ridiculous. What are you doing where that level of improvement is measurable. That means you are doing things that would have taken you a year of full-time work in less than half a day now. EDIT: Retracted, I think the example given below is reasonably valid.
    - sgc 8mo ago
      I understand, but the improvement is actually more than that. It is not directly programming, but look at this page [1] for example. I spent years handcrafting parallel texts of English and Greek and had managed to put just under 400 books online. With AI, I managed to translate and put in parallel 1500 more books very quickly. At least 2/3 of those have never been translated into English, ever. That means I have done what the entire history of English-speaking scholars has never managed to do. And the quality is good enough that I have already had publishers contacting me to use the translations. There are a couple other areas where I am getting similar speed ups, but of course this is not the norm. [1] https://catholiclibrary.org/library/browse/ https://catholiclibrary.org/library/browse/

by keeda 8mo ago

sdf2df 8mo ago

What a load of fluff lmao. Are you Nadella?

keeda 8mo ago
Hah! I would say I'm flattered, but I find his style of speaking rather stilted.

applfanboysbgon 8mo ago

> Imagine instead of > Now imagine > Imagine what that would do Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. Now imagine she had an engine. She could be a motorcycle! Unfortunately for grandma, she lives in reality and is not actually a motorcycle, which would be cool as hell. Our imagination can only take us so far. To more substantively reply to your longer linked comment: your hypothesis is that people spend as little as 10% of time coding and the other 90% of time in meetings, but that if they could code more, they wouldn't need to meet other people because they could do all the work of an entire team themselves[1]. The problem with your hypothesis is that you take for granted that LLMs actually allow people to do the work of an entire team themselves, and that it is merely bureacracy holding them back. There have been absolutely zero indicators that this is true. No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%. We aren't seeing amazing software being built by individual developers using LLMs. There is still only one Fabrice Bellard in the world, even though if your premise could escape the containment zone of imagination anyone should be able to be a Bellard on their own time with the help of LLMs. [1] Also, this is basically already true without LLMs. It is the reason startups are able to disrupt corporate behemoths. If you have just a small handful of people who spend the majority of their work time writing code (by hand! No LLMs required!), they can build amazing new products that outcompete products funded by trillion-dollar entities. Your observation of more coding = less meetings required in the first place has an element of truth to it, but not because LLMs are related to it in any particular way.

pishpash 8mo ago
This isn't the counter you think it is. It's too much to expect existing behemoths to reshape their orgs substantially on a quick enough timeline. The gains will be first seen in new companies and new organizations, and they will be able to stay flat a longer and outcompete the behemoths.
sgc 8mo ago
> Imagine if your grandma had wheels! She'd be a bicycle. I always took this to be a sharp jab saying the entire village is riding your grandma, giving it a very aggressive undertone. It's pretty funny nonetheless. Too early to say what AI brings to the efficiency table I think. In some major things I do it's a 1000x speed up. In others it is more a different way of approaching a problem than a speed up. In yet others, it is a bit of an impediment. It works best when you learn to quickly recognize patterns and whether it will help. I don't know how people who are raised with ai will navigate and leverage it, which is the real long-term question (just as the difference between pre- and post-smartphone generations is a thing).
- demorro 8mo ago
  1000x is ridiculous. What are you doing where that level of improvement is measurable. That means you are doing things that would have taken you a year of full-time work in less than half a day now. EDIT: Retracted, I think the example given below is reasonably valid.
  - sgc 8mo ago
    I understand, but the improvement is actually more than that. It is not directly programming, but look at this page [1] for example. I spent years handcrafting parallel texts of English and Greek and had managed to put just under 400 books online. With AI, I managed to translate and put in parallel 1500 more books very quickly. At least 2/3 of those have never been translated into English, ever. That means I have done what the entire history of English-speaking scholars has never managed to do. And the quality is good enough that I have already had publishers contacting me to use the translations. There are a couple other areas where I am getting similar speed ups, but of course this is not the norm. [1] https://catholiclibrary.org/library/browse/ https://catholiclibrary.org/library/browse/