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This 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

• bandrami 7mo ago
  That'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 7mo ago
    I 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 7mo ago
      Having 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 7mo ago
        I 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
        • deleted 7mo ago
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        • Tanjreeve 7mo ago
          There's an actual working product now, albeit one which is currently loss leading. In software world at least there is definitely enough value for it to be used even if it's just better search engine. I'm not sure why it would disappear if the financial music stops as opposed to being commoditised.
          • bandrami 7mo ago
            Because there's cheaper ways to get an equally good search engine? But yes I imagine some amount of inference will continue even in an AI Winter 3.0 scenario.
    • hombre_fatal 7mo ago
      I'd claim the opposite. Better models design better software, and quickly better software than what most software developers were writing. Just yesterday I asked Opus 4.6 what I could do to make an old macOS AppKit project more testable, too lazy to even encumber the question with my own preferences like I usually do, and it pitched a refactor into Elm architecture. And then it did the refactor while I took a piss. The idea that AI writes bad software or can't improve existing software in substantial ways is really outdated. Just consider how most human-written software is untested despite everyone agreeing testing is a good idea simply because test-friendly arch takes a lot of thought and test maintenance slow you down. AI will do all of that, just mention something about 'testability' in AGENTS.md.
      • bandrami 7mo ago
        OK so this comes back to the question I started this subthread with: where is this better software? Why isn't someone selling it to me? I've been told for a year it's coming any day now (though invariably the next month I'm told last month's tools were in fact crap and useless compared to the new generation so I just have to wait for this round to kick in) and at some point I do have to actually see it if you expect me to believe it's real.
        • hombre_fatal 7mo ago
          How would you know if all software written in the last six months shipped X% faster and was Y% better? Why would you think you have your finger on the pulse of general software trends like that when you use the same, what, dozen apps every week? Just looking at my own productivity, as mere sideprojects this month, I've shipped my own terminal app (replaced iTerm2), btrfs+luks NAS system manager, overhauled my macOS gamepad mapper for the app store, and more. All fully tested and really polished, yet I didn't write any code by hand. I would have done none of that this month without AI. You'd need some real empirics to pick up productivity stories like mine across the software world, not vibes.
          • Tanjreeve 7mo ago
            It's on the people pushing AI as the panacea that has changed things to show workings. Not someone saying "I've not seen evidence of it". Otherwise it's "vibes" as you put it.
  • salawat 7mo ago
    Ironically, abstraction bloat eats away any infra gains. We trade more compute to allow people less in tune with the machine to get things done, usually at the cost of the implementation being eh... Suboptimal, shall we say.
    • bandrami 7mo ago
      I think there's a broad category error where people see that every gain has been an abstraction (true) but conclude from that that every abstraction will be a gain (dubious)
• kranner 7mo ago
  > There are many reasons for the lag in productivity gain but it certainly will come. Predictions without a deadline are unfalsifiable.
  • KellyCriterion 7mo ago
    Well the thing with predictions is that they are in genral difficult - esp. when it comes to those in future :-D
• danbolt 7mo ago
  My unfounded hunch for the computing bit is that home computers became more and more commonplace in the home as we approached the 21st century. A Commodore 64 was a cool gadget, but “the family computer” became a device that commoditized the productivity. The opportunity cost of applying a computer to try something new went to near zero. It might have been harder for someone to improve the productivity of an old factory in Shreveport, Louisiana with a computer than it was for the upstarts at id to make Doom.