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What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.
- hellisothers 6mo ago
  Same and it is working really well (I say contra to most individual reporting).
  - andriy_koval 6mo ago
    I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.
    - vbezhenar 6mo ago
      Just wait a month, Opus 4.8 will comprehend it for sure.
      - overfeed 6mo ago
        it will comprehend it well enough to complicate it further into a rats-nest that only Opus 4.9 can comprehend, and so on. Good luck if you run into a bug before the N+1 version launches.
    - Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
      honest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong. it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.
      - andriy_koval 6mo ago
        Its a bit of workspace politics, I would need to call that guy out to tell that he is not hyper-performer, but just pushed lots of low quality code which will produce lots of negative impact in a long term. Also, I am not sure if it is trivial to implement. The code is injected into many scenarios and workflows, so replacement will be painful and risky if new solution break some edge case.
        Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
        It sounds like you might have some larger process problems if someone can just inject a bunch of vibe-coded slop into critical workflows while more discerning eyes are dubious of the quality/reliability etc.
        SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
        In some sense, sure. There’s a lot of processes that weren’t previously needed, because sloppy people who couldn’t or wouldn’t think things through were mostly incapable of producing PRs that passed all the existing tests.
        andriy_koval 6mo ago
        its partially/largely management problem. One of tier1 productivity metric in the group is # of LoC created by engineers, so it creates dynamics of people exchanging favors of pushing AI slop to codebase, or be labeled as low performers.
      - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
        The problem was definitely because they didn't use enough AI fast enough. They should just try again
    - svieira 6mo ago
      I went through one the other day which was a nest of Go code which boiled down to a 10 line shell script.
- BloondAndDoom 6mo ago
  AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.
  - jdub 6mo ago
    > Security is less or no concern [waits for chickens to come home to roost]
    - connicpu 6mo ago
      Doesn't take long until someone has the bright idea to pipe customer tickets directly into the poorly written internal tool
    - LPisGood 6mo ago
      When attackers can move laterally through everything because every internal tool leaks credentials and data there will be issues.
      - therealdrag0 6mo ago
        Internal tool Doesn’t have credential. Checkmate ;)
    - overfeed 6mo ago
      > [waits for chickens to come home to roost] "We are writing down X billions over 4 years, and have cancel several ambitious programs related to our AI experiments. We were following standard practice in the industry, so [shareholders] can't blame us for these chickens coming to roost. If everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty?"
    - sumedh 6mo ago
      Anthropic seems to be doing fine :)
    - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
- se4u 6mo ago
  I'd be interested to learn what kind of internal tooling are you improving ?
  - TimTheTinker 6mo ago
    Personally, a static analysis PR check to catch some types of preventable runtime production errors in application code
  - Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
    We've had a lot of complaints about our review processes, time to submit, etc, and a lot of that boils down to tools no one has time to improve. It's now trivial to fix these problems while still doing our day jobs -- shipping a product.
  - appplication 6mo ago
    I’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues. This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.
- msy 6mo ago
  We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
  - er2d 6mo ago
    Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
    - dpark 6mo ago
      Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.
      - casey2 6mo ago
        More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?
- bakugo 6mo ago
  I guess that's one way to tout a technology as revolutionary without actually needing to provide any proof of it. Just say you're using it for "internal tooling" and "unannounced projects", that way nobody can look at them and notice they're indistinguishable from the slop that clogs up Show HN nowadays. It's better than the "here's my code, it a giant pile of spaghetti but only luddites care about code quality and maintainability anyway" method, at least.
  - Daishiman 6mo ago
    I'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists. I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.
- amluto 6mo ago
  I am, oddly, able to get really quite a lot of mileage out of $20/mo of OpenAI plan, and I have never encountered a usage limit. I have gotten warnings that I was close a couple times. I wonder what I’m doing differently. I did spend quite a bit of time, mostly manually, improving development processes such that the agent could effectively check its work. This made a difference between the agent mostly not working and mostly working. Maybe if I had instead spent gobs of money it would have worked output tooling improvements?
  - komali2 6mo ago
    I wonder if you're like me? I tried out the MCPs and sub agents and rules and bells and whistles and always just came back to a plain Codex / Claude Code / Cursor Agent terminal window, where I say what I want, @ a few files, let it rip, check the diff, ask for some adjustments, then commit and start the process over after clearing context. Haven't found a process that beats this yet and I burn very few tokens this way.
    - devmor 6mo ago
      I don’t really write code with it at all, and that’s why I burn so many tokens. I like writing code, I’m good at writing code. What I hate doing is dredging through logs, filtering out test scenarios and putting together disparate information from knowledge silos - so I have the AI doing that. It’s my research assistant. Effectively I’m using it like an automated search engine that indexes anything I want and refines the results by using the statistical near neighbors of how other people explained their searches.
xtracto 6mo ago
Haven't you seen all the layoffs? Ive been subscribed to r/layoffs for 5+ years, and since a couple of months ago, it's been crazy noisy. My hypothesis is that companies dont want to offer cheaper nor better services. Only want to cut costs and keep the revenue for investors. I other news, TQQQ is pretty high!
- adrithmetiqa 6mo ago
  Subscribers will not enable these companies to make their money back. The only way is for them to eat the economy itself
- hmaxwell 6mo ago
  I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.
  - dieortin 6mo ago
    That’s like firing someone because he uses vim instead of VSCode. Who cares about the tools someone uses if he still does his job well?
    - morserer 6mo ago
      Because the job itself has now changed, and they haven't. Their output speed might have been eclipsed by that of the engineers who efficiently adopted the new tooling. Where I work, the power dynamics have shifted wildly. There are a number of senior engineers who refuse to touch the stuff, and as a result, they can barely keep up with their peers. Some of our juniors are now running laps around them. When a stranger to your craft can now teach themselves what you know, how to do your job, and even how to automate your tasks in the span of the same workday as you, all while reliably being able to gauge the innacuracy of the output they're reading, how much longer do you really hold relevance?
      - 6mo ago
_puk 6mo ago
I keep seeing this take. And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer. That's the sea change. I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go. They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months. That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.
- er2d 6mo ago
  So... more 'busy work'. The only thing that matters is the impact on the financials. The shareholders (the people who employ you) dont care about any of this if it does not enhance value.
- uncivilized 6mo ago
  Mind sharing what industry you’re seeing this in? I’ve never talked to finance or GTM as an engineer. I’m not sure GTM exists in my industry.
- Miner49er 6mo ago
  Are they doing PRs? Putting their code in git? Is AI deploying it or do they get help with that?
psadauskas 6mo ago
I'm spending a ton of tokens because it insists on manually correcting code that fails the linter, despite the instructions in the AGENTS.md to run the linter with autocorrect. And also because the Plan agent generates a huge plan, asks me a couple yes/no questions with an obvious answer, and then regenerates the entire plan again. Then the Build agent gets confused anyway and does something else, and I have to round-trip about 5 times with that full context each time.
bgun 6mo ago
You seem to be under the impression that making services better or cheaper _for the consumer_ is the goal of any corporation. The goal is to make their own operations better and cheaper for them. They are laying off employees and adding features of questionable value as a pretext to raise prices. The playbook has not changed, it has only accelerated.
jonlucc 6mo ago
I can say in one role in my job, I'm getting a lot of use and I know my colleagues are at least trying a lot of things. One use is a first-pass review of animal care and use protocols. The Claude project was given all of the relevant policies and guidelines as well as a fairly long prompt that explains the things we look for in protocol review. It's checking some things that the software we use makes very tedious to check and raising inconsistencies between sections. Some places have a full time "protocol reader" who does this kind of first check, but we've never had that, so it's helpful. Another project I'm seeing in the same realm is taking an approved protocol and some study results and checking that the records of what was done match what they said they could do in the approved protocol. It can also make sure that surgical records have all the things they should have. This can help meet one of the requirements from the national accreditation organization to do "post approval monitoring". Another way I've used it is to have it collate and compare a particular kind of policy across many institutions who transparently put their policies online. Seeing the commonality between the policies and where some excel helped me rewrite our policy. This is work that just wasn't happening before or, more accurately, it was being spread over lots of people, and any improvement in efficiency or consistency is hard to measure.
barnabee 6mo ago
Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using Replit or any of the others) is the new Excel for non tech people. - Every time someone has any idea it's accompanied by a multi page "Clauded" memo explaining why it's a great idea and what exactly should be done (about 20% of which is useful). - 80% of what were web searches now go to Claude instead (for at least a significant minority of people, could easily be over 50%). - Nobody talks about ChatGPT any more. It's Claude or (sometimes) Gemini. - My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code (both my personal and corpo accounts) and OpenCode (also almost always Claude, via Copilot) busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities. We (~20 people) are probably using 2 orders of magnitude more inference than we were at the start of the year and it's consolidated away from cursor, ChatGPT and Claude to just be almost all Claude (plus a little Gemini as that's part of our Google Whateverspace plan and some people like it, mostly for non-engineering tasks). No idea if any of this will make things better, exactly, but I think we'd be at a severe competitive disadvantage if we dropped it all and went back how things were.
- mullingitover 6mo ago
  > - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board It's an absolute tornado of PRs these days. Everyone making the most of these tools is effectively an engineering team lead.
  - MrDarcy 6mo ago
    The CTO/VP of engineering role down is now singularly focused on keeping agents fed with a backlog of Linear issues. This is the new normal.
    - aenis 6mo ago
pizzly 6mo ago
For myself, its a massive boost when solo developing. Perhaps this is a different use case than most. It can work across multiple programming languages and frameworks that I had zero experience in. I use my existing knowledge of programming to ensure the new code written is correct. Also it really excels at translating from one language/framework to another. I can spend time getting it working well in a platform I know then just ask it to convert to another platform. It gets it 90% right in the first prompt, then its just a matter of fine-tuning, reviewing etc. This last 10% is where I supercharge my learning on those languages/framework. To lean all the new languages and frameworks would have taken me months before I would be productive. Now with a single prompt, we get 90% of the way there. That is incredible value for us.
inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
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trhway 6mo ago
>What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse. That "more expensive" is someone's revenue. May be AI is the kind of technology that allows to make more and more revenue by making things more expensive and worse than by making them better and cheaper.
rnxrx 6mo ago
It's not just code generation, either - more and more people in my own org are using Claude Code for infrastructure automation, devops, etc. Obviously some amount of code in there, but an absolute ton of tokens being consumed just dealing with Kubernetes work at scale.
johanneskanybal 6mo ago
It's a great tool, and at 1/10 or 1/100th the cost of actual developers. In the context of yc I guess watch out getting re-disrupted by a smaller team faster than before. But that's really the trend the past 40 years so nothing is new. Well maybe the velocity combined with us loosing it's footing at the same time. But yea it's not gonna make facebook 20% better tomorrow just that you need 5 people instead of 40 to build the next facebook.
- jazzyjackson 6mo ago
  And we all know what a positive impact to quality of life building facebook made.
ravenstine 6mo ago
Exactly. Software quality has become worse, online media has become even more trash than before, and life is otherwise basically the same, lack of jobs notwithstanding. The legitimately useful things regular people can use AI for would be mostly solved by locally run quantized models. This AI "revolution" may be setting several billion on fire without even 1% of that being real value added to the world. Coding velocity doesn't matter if it the net result is software that sucks massive schlong. The real world doesn't care if programmers can write code faster.
_zoltan_ 6mo ago
Claude is great. I'm never going back. There is no way back. I'm at least 5x faster, if not more. With tooling I might be able to get to 10-15x.
notTheLastMan 6mo ago
[dead]
amelius 6mo ago
Yes but help is on the way. I have asked my OpenClaw agent to build a new RAM factory.
notnullorvoid 6mo ago
This is my take away too. I see some interesting toys here and there, but not much of substance. Meanwhile all the GitHub issues I follow for open source projects have slowed to a halt, the products I use have no significant updates. Even AI products are slow to improve their interfaces.
cottoneyejoe 6mo ago
I work in a large infrastructure design consultancy. There are massive unmet needs for narrow-purpose automation in project delivery that are being developed by the users that need them for a few pennies at a time. Previously, getting any project of any size done by the in-house developers required 6-24 months of alignment-building with multiple levels of management in multiple business units. Getting anything done comes with an administrative price tag in the $10,000s. Those people spent all their time on a few outward-facing products and building dashboards for EVPs and C-level people, and the people doing real work our customers actually care about are banging rocks together and fingerpainting walls of their caves with excel and email based workflow. Now there are pockets of people who are extremely productive, and maybe 80-90% of the rest who will never adapt. When I mean extremely, I mean people producing weeks of effort of marketing teams and hundreds of unbillable hours of senior-level professionals with only a few minutes of human involvement. Paid software extensions for (awful) design software we are required by clients to use can all be duplicated in house. Technical leadership is now aware of this, and our spend on software licenses is going to drop fast. I think every project in my own portfolio has some kind of custom automation supporting it, which was unthinkable 5 years ago. It's going to take years for practical knowledge of how to use these systems to spread and even more for market discipline to expel those who cannot or will not learn. The Industrial Revolution took nearly a century, depending on how you're counting. LLMs have only been producing coherent output in the last 5 years. They've only been as good or better than people at some things you would have done on a computer for about a year or so. Be patient. These are massive changes.
rjlouv 6mo ago
Real-world counter-anecdote from mid-market finance (sub-$500M revenue, 2-3k employees). On a customer's JD Edwards data, a playbook run via MCP returns AP aging by company plus the three vendors driving the variance plus the prior-month delta plus citations to the JDE F0411 rows in roughly 30 seconds. The same in Excel takes ~45 minutes. That's not 100x, it's not transformative, and it's not autonomous. It's one analyst hour reclaimed per query. Multiply by ~80 queries a month and a $50/hour fully loaded cost and the math is mundane and positive. Value is real and unsexy. The marketing has compressed all the unsexy ROI into the same sentence as the trillion-dollar promises. (Disclosure: I co-founded eyko, the platform doing this.)

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

Jagerbizzle 6mo ago

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.

hellisothers 6mo ago
Same and it is working really well (I say contra to most individual reporting).
- andriy_koval 6mo ago
  I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.
  - vbezhenar 6mo ago
    Just wait a month, Opus 4.8 will comprehend it for sure.
    - overfeed 6mo ago
      it will comprehend it well enough to complicate it further into a rats-nest that only Opus 4.9 can comprehend, and so on. Good luck if you run into a bug before the N+1 version launches.
  - Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
    honest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong. it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.
    - andriy_koval 6mo ago
      Its a bit of workspace politics, I would need to call that guy out to tell that he is not hyper-performer, but just pushed lots of low quality code which will produce lots of negative impact in a long term. Also, I am not sure if it is trivial to implement. The code is injected into many scenarios and workflows, so replacement will be painful and risky if new solution break some edge case.
      - Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
        It sounds like you might have some larger process problems if someone can just inject a bunch of vibe-coded slop into critical workflows while more discerning eyes are dubious of the quality/reliability etc.
        SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
        In some sense, sure. There’s a lot of processes that weren’t previously needed, because sloppy people who couldn’t or wouldn’t think things through were mostly incapable of producing PRs that passed all the existing tests.
        andriy_koval 6mo ago
        its partially/largely management problem. One of tier1 productivity metric in the group is # of LoC created by engineers, so it creates dynamics of people exchanging favors of pushing AI slop to codebase, or be labeled as low performers.
    - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
      The problem was definitely because they didn't use enough AI fast enough. They should just try again
  - svieira 6mo ago
    I went through one the other day which was a nest of Go code which boiled down to a 10 line shell script.
BloondAndDoom 6mo ago
AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.
- jdub 6mo ago
  > Security is less or no concern [waits for chickens to come home to roost]
  - connicpu 6mo ago
    Doesn't take long until someone has the bright idea to pipe customer tickets directly into the poorly written internal tool
  - LPisGood 6mo ago
    When attackers can move laterally through everything because every internal tool leaks credentials and data there will be issues.
    - therealdrag0 6mo ago
      Internal tool Doesn’t have credential. Checkmate ;)
  - overfeed 6mo ago
    > [waits for chickens to come home to roost] "We are writing down X billions over 4 years, and have cancel several ambitious programs related to our AI experiments. We were following standard practice in the industry, so [shareholders] can't blame us for these chickens coming to roost. If everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty?"
  - sumedh 6mo ago
    Anthropic seems to be doing fine :)
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
se4u 6mo ago
I'd be interested to learn what kind of internal tooling are you improving ?
- TimTheTinker 6mo ago
  Personally, a static analysis PR check to catch some types of preventable runtime production errors in application code
- Jagerbizzle 6mo ago
  We've had a lot of complaints about our review processes, time to submit, etc, and a lot of that boils down to tools no one has time to improve. It's now trivial to fix these problems while still doing our day jobs -- shipping a product.
- appplication 6mo ago
  I’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues. This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.
msy 6mo ago
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
- er2d 6mo ago
  Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
  - dpark 6mo ago
    Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.
    - casey2 6mo ago
      More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents. Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?
bakugo 6mo ago
I guess that's one way to tout a technology as revolutionary without actually needing to provide any proof of it. Just say you're using it for "internal tooling" and "unannounced projects", that way nobody can look at them and notice they're indistinguishable from the slop that clogs up Show HN nowadays. It's better than the "here's my code, it a giant pile of spaghetti but only luddites care about code quality and maintainability anyway" method, at least.
- Daishiman 6mo ago
  I'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists. I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.
amluto 6mo ago
I am, oddly, able to get really quite a lot of mileage out of $20/mo of OpenAI plan, and I have never encountered a usage limit. I have gotten warnings that I was close a couple times. I wonder what I’m doing differently. I did spend quite a bit of time, mostly manually, improving development processes such that the agent could effectively check its work. This made a difference between the agent mostly not working and mostly working. Maybe if I had instead spent gobs of money it would have worked output tooling improvements?
- komali2 6mo ago
  I wonder if you're like me? I tried out the MCPs and sub agents and rules and bells and whistles and always just came back to a plain Codex / Claude Code / Cursor Agent terminal window, where I say what I want, @ a few files, let it rip, check the diff, ask for some adjustments, then commit and start the process over after clearing context. Haven't found a process that beats this yet and I burn very few tokens this way.
  - devmor 6mo ago
    I don’t really write code with it at all, and that’s why I burn so many tokens. I like writing code, I’m good at writing code. What I hate doing is dredging through logs, filtering out test scenarios and putting together disparate information from knowledge silos - so I have the AI doing that. It’s my research assistant. Effectively I’m using it like an automated search engine that indexes anything I want and refines the results by using the statistical near neighbors of how other people explained their searches.

xtracto 6mo ago

Haven't you seen all the layoffs? Ive been subscribed to r/layoffs for 5+ years, and since a couple of months ago, it's been crazy noisy. My hypothesis is that companies dont want to offer cheaper nor better services. Only want to cut costs and keep the revenue for investors. I other news, TQQQ is pretty high!

adrithmetiqa 6mo ago
Subscribers will not enable these companies to make their money back. The only way is for them to eat the economy itself
hmaxwell 6mo ago
I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.
- dieortin 6mo ago
  That’s like firing someone because he uses vim instead of VSCode. Who cares about the tools someone uses if he still does his job well?
  - morserer 6mo ago
    Because the job itself has now changed, and they haven't. Their output speed might have been eclipsed by that of the engineers who efficiently adopted the new tooling. Where I work, the power dynamics have shifted wildly. There are a number of senior engineers who refuse to touch the stuff, and as a result, they can barely keep up with their peers. Some of our juniors are now running laps around them. When a stranger to your craft can now teach themselves what you know, how to do your job, and even how to automate your tasks in the span of the same workday as you, all while reliably being able to gauge the innacuracy of the output they're reading, how much longer do you really hold relevance?
    - 6mo ago

_puk 6mo ago

I keep seeing this take. And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer. That's the sea change. I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go. They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months. That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.

er2d 6mo ago
So... more 'busy work'. The only thing that matters is the impact on the financials. The shareholders (the people who employ you) dont care about any of this if it does not enhance value.
uncivilized 6mo ago
Mind sharing what industry you’re seeing this in? I’ve never talked to finance or GTM as an engineer. I’m not sure GTM exists in my industry.
Miner49er 6mo ago
Are they doing PRs? Putting their code in git? Is AI deploying it or do they get help with that?

psadauskas 6mo ago

I'm spending a ton of tokens because it insists on manually correcting code that fails the linter, despite the instructions in the AGENTS.md to run the linter with autocorrect. And also because the Plan agent generates a huge plan, asks me a couple yes/no questions with an obvious answer, and then regenerates the entire plan again. Then the Build agent gets confused anyway and does something else, and I have to round-trip about 5 times with that full context each time.

bgun 6mo ago

You seem to be under the impression that making services better or cheaper _for the consumer_ is the goal of any corporation. The goal is to make their own operations better and cheaper for them. They are laying off employees and adding features of questionable value as a pretext to raise prices. The playbook has not changed, it has only accelerated.

jonlucc 6mo ago

I can say in one role in my job, I'm getting a lot of use and I know my colleagues are at least trying a lot of things. One use is a first-pass review of animal care and use protocols. The Claude project was given all of the relevant policies and guidelines as well as a fairly long prompt that explains the things we look for in protocol review. It's checking some things that the software we use makes very tedious to check and raising inconsistencies between sections. Some places have a full time "protocol reader" who does this kind of first check, but we've never had that, so it's helpful. Another project I'm seeing in the same realm is taking an approved protocol and some study results and checking that the records of what was done match what they said they could do in the approved protocol. It can also make sure that surgical records have all the things they should have. This can help meet one of the requirements from the national accreditation organization to do "post approval monitoring". Another way I've used it is to have it collate and compare a particular kind of policy across many institutions who transparently put their policies online. Seeing the commonality between the policies and where some excel helped me rewrite our policy. This is work that just wasn't happening before or, more accurately, it was being spread over lots of people, and any improvement in efficiency or consistency is hard to measure.

barnabee 6mo ago

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using Replit or any of the others) is the new Excel for non tech people. - Every time someone has any idea it's accompanied by a multi page "Clauded" memo explaining why it's a great idea and what exactly should be done (about 20% of which is useful). - 80% of what were web searches now go to Claude instead (for at least a significant minority of people, could easily be over 50%). - Nobody talks about ChatGPT any more. It's Claude or (sometimes) Gemini. - My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code (both my personal and corpo accounts) and OpenCode (also almost always Claude, via Copilot) busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities. We (~20 people) are probably using 2 orders of magnitude more inference than we were at the start of the year and it's consolidated away from cursor, ChatGPT and Claude to just be almost all Claude (plus a little Gemini as that's part of our Google Whateverspace plan and some people like it, mostly for non-engineering tasks). No idea if any of this will make things better, exactly, but I think we'd be at a severe competitive disadvantage if we dropped it all and went back how things were.

mullingitover 6mo ago
> - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board It's an absolute tornado of PRs these days. Everyone making the most of these tools is effectively an engineering team lead.
- MrDarcy 6mo ago
  The CTO/VP of engineering role down is now singularly focused on keeping agents fed with a backlog of Linear issues. This is the new normal.
  - aenis 6mo ago

pizzly 6mo ago

For myself, its a massive boost when solo developing. Perhaps this is a different use case than most. It can work across multiple programming languages and frameworks that I had zero experience in. I use my existing knowledge of programming to ensure the new code written is correct. Also it really excels at translating from one language/framework to another. I can spend time getting it working well in a platform I know then just ask it to convert to another platform. It gets it 90% right in the first prompt, then its just a matter of fine-tuning, reviewing etc. This last 10% is where I supercharge my learning on those languages/framework. To lean all the new languages and frameworks would have taken me months before I would be productive. Now with a single prompt, we get 90% of the way there. That is incredible value for us.

inquirerGeneral 6mo ago

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trhway 6mo ago

>What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse. That "more expensive" is someone's revenue. May be AI is the kind of technology that allows to make more and more revenue by making things more expensive and worse than by making them better and cheaper.

rnxrx 6mo ago

It's not just code generation, either - more and more people in my own org are using Claude Code for infrastructure automation, devops, etc. Obviously some amount of code in there, but an absolute ton of tokens being consumed just dealing with Kubernetes work at scale.

johanneskanybal 6mo ago

It's a great tool, and at 1/10 or 1/100th the cost of actual developers. In the context of yc I guess watch out getting re-disrupted by a smaller team faster than before. But that's really the trend the past 40 years so nothing is new. Well maybe the velocity combined with us loosing it's footing at the same time. But yea it's not gonna make facebook 20% better tomorrow just that you need 5 people instead of 40 to build the next facebook.

jazzyjackson 6mo ago
And we all know what a positive impact to quality of life building facebook made.

ravenstine 6mo ago

Exactly. Software quality has become worse, online media has become even more trash than before, and life is otherwise basically the same, lack of jobs notwithstanding. The legitimately useful things regular people can use AI for would be mostly solved by locally run quantized models. This AI "revolution" may be setting several billion on fire without even 1% of that being real value added to the world. Coding velocity doesn't matter if it the net result is software that sucks massive schlong. The real world doesn't care if programmers can write code faster.

_zoltan_ 6mo ago

Claude is great. I'm never going back. There is no way back. I'm at least 5x faster, if not more. With tooling I might be able to get to 10-15x.

notTheLastMan 6mo ago

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amelius 6mo ago

Yes but help is on the way. I have asked my OpenClaw agent to build a new RAM factory.

notnullorvoid 6mo ago

This is my take away too. I see some interesting toys here and there, but not much of substance. Meanwhile all the GitHub issues I follow for open source projects have slowed to a halt, the products I use have no significant updates. Even AI products are slow to improve their interfaces.

cottoneyejoe 6mo ago

I work in a large infrastructure design consultancy. There are massive unmet needs for narrow-purpose automation in project delivery that are being developed by the users that need them for a few pennies at a time. Previously, getting any project of any size done by the in-house developers required 6-24 months of alignment-building with multiple levels of management in multiple business units. Getting anything done comes with an administrative price tag in the $10,000s. Those people spent all their time on a few outward-facing products and building dashboards for EVPs and C-level people, and the people doing real work our customers actually care about are banging rocks together and fingerpainting walls of their caves with excel and email based workflow. Now there are pockets of people who are extremely productive, and maybe 80-90% of the rest who will never adapt. When I mean extremely, I mean people producing weeks of effort of marketing teams and hundreds of unbillable hours of senior-level professionals with only a few minutes of human involvement. Paid software extensions for (awful) design software we are required by clients to use can all be duplicated in house. Technical leadership is now aware of this, and our spend on software licenses is going to drop fast. I think every project in my own portfolio has some kind of custom automation supporting it, which was unthinkable 5 years ago. It's going to take years for practical knowledge of how to use these systems to spread and even more for market discipline to expel those who cannot or will not learn. The Industrial Revolution took nearly a century, depending on how you're counting. LLMs have only been producing coherent output in the last 5 years. They've only been as good or better than people at some things you would have done on a computer for about a year or so. Be patient. These are massive changes.

rjlouv 6mo ago

Real-world counter-anecdote from mid-market finance (sub-$500M revenue, 2-3k employees). On a customer's JD Edwards data, a playbook run via MCP returns AP aging by company plus the three vendors driving the variance plus the prior-month delta plus citations to the JDE F0411 rows in roughly 30 seconds. The same in Excel takes ~45 minutes. That's not 100x, it's not transformative, and it's not autonomous. It's one analyst hour reclaimed per query. Multiply by ~80 queries a month and a $50/hour fully loaded cost and the math is mundane and positive. Value is real and unsexy. The marketing has compressed all the unsexy ROI into the same sentence as the trillion-dollar promises. (Disclosure: I co-founded eyko, the platform doing this.)