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People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in f

by asdev 5mo ago

People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs

asdfman123 5mo ago
40% boost for smart engineers, for now. People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.
- legohead 5mo ago
  the new bottleneck for development at work is code reviews. devs are creating whole features that would take months in only a couple weeks, but code reviewing that is a slow, painful process
  - Marsymars 5mo ago
    The bottleneck at my work for development was already code review before LLMs.
  - asdfman123 5mo ago
    This is why I'm not that excited about vibe coding. The bottleneck has always been understanding what the heck is going on. In my view you should 1) use AI as a tool to help you learn and 2) write boilerplate you could have easily written yourself. Getting it to think for you is counterproductive (at least until it replaces us entirely).
- suzzer99 5mo ago
  Yesterday, I had my first experience of a mid-level dev stuck on a problem, coming to me with Codex and Copilot summaries of what those tools thought the problem was, which turned out to be completely off-base. Codex was pretty sure something was wrong with the response object being returned by the endpoint in question. It turned out there was a conversion method applied to the endpoint response, which mutated its input. This method had been running w/o problems for a while, until the dev put it in a useEffect. At this point, React dev mode's policy of rendering everything twice kicked in, which caused the second pass through the conversion method to fail on the now-mutated input object. Codex never even hinted that the conversion method mutating the input could be a problem, nor anything about React dev mode rendering everything twice (specifically to catch problems like this). Apparently, neither of those came up much in its training data. My point is that this dev seems to have lost, in a few short months of writing everything with Codex, the ability to trace an error from its source (the error trace was being swallowed in a Codex-written catch block that spit out a generic error message). He was completely stuck and just kept doubling down on trying to get Codex to solve the problem, even checking with Copilot as a backup. I'm not optimistic about where this is headed.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    Are you sure he was capable of debugging it before?
    - suzzer99 5mo ago
      Yes, eventually. Largely because he would have written all the code that got to that point and had a mental model of the entire flow instead of it being a gray box.
retinaros 5mo ago
Its not really a 60%. It accelerates a lot code creation. Save some time on admin tasks. That is it.
oytis 5mo ago
> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon
- traderj0e 5mo ago
  Any typical web backend or frontend kind of thing. So like, not systems code.
- birdsongs 5mo ago
  Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering. It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart. Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for parameters) and it's just done. I do in a day what would probably take me 2. It doesn't help me with reviewing others' work, or planning (I maintain that these are manual tasks). So yeah, I agree with the 40-60%. The parts of my job it helps, it really helps.
  - consp 5mo ago
    > I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature My experience is it will attempt read from the wrong memory block resulting in garbadge. But that's a while ago so maybe LLMs have gotten better.
    - HDThoreaun 5mo ago
      The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.
      - shimman 5mo ago
        Yeah, the industry has no issues selling $5 bills for $1. Why is this a good thing for society again? That the public subsidizes VC to no shared gains?
01100011 5mo ago
What's funny to me is the seeming lack of AI usage among management despite so much of their work being amenable to AI acceleration. At my company(big name, AI beneficiary), middle management seems to mostly be concerned with shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic while they wait for their stock to fully vest. There is very little interest in improving anything, just an obsession with risk avoidance and performative sideshows whenever upper management wonders why execution is so poor.
- mrhottakes 5mo ago
  At my company middle management is using Gemini to churn out reams of useless documents in lieu of anything approaching "program management" or similar

by asdev 5mo ago

People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs

asdfman123 5mo ago

40% boost for smart engineers, for now. People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.

legohead 5mo ago
the new bottleneck for development at work is code reviews. devs are creating whole features that would take months in only a couple weeks, but code reviewing that is a slow, painful process
- Marsymars 5mo ago
  The bottleneck at my work for development was already code review before LLMs.
- asdfman123 5mo ago
  This is why I'm not that excited about vibe coding. The bottleneck has always been understanding what the heck is going on. In my view you should 1) use AI as a tool to help you learn and 2) write boilerplate you could have easily written yourself. Getting it to think for you is counterproductive (at least until it replaces us entirely).
suzzer99 5mo ago
Yesterday, I had my first experience of a mid-level dev stuck on a problem, coming to me with Codex and Copilot summaries of what those tools thought the problem was, which turned out to be completely off-base. Codex was pretty sure something was wrong with the response object being returned by the endpoint in question. It turned out there was a conversion method applied to the endpoint response, which mutated its input. This method had been running w/o problems for a while, until the dev put it in a useEffect. At this point, React dev mode's policy of rendering everything twice kicked in, which caused the second pass through the conversion method to fail on the now-mutated input object. Codex never even hinted that the conversion method mutating the input could be a problem, nor anything about React dev mode rendering everything twice (specifically to catch problems like this). Apparently, neither of those came up much in its training data. My point is that this dev seems to have lost, in a few short months of writing everything with Codex, the ability to trace an error from its source (the error trace was being swallowed in a Codex-written catch block that spit out a generic error message). He was completely stuck and just kept doubling down on trying to get Codex to solve the problem, even checking with Copilot as a backup. I'm not optimistic about where this is headed.
- esafak 5mo ago
  Are you sure he was capable of debugging it before?
  - suzzer99 5mo ago
    Yes, eventually. Largely because he would have written all the code that got to that point and had a mental model of the entire flow instead of it being a gray box.

retinaros 5mo ago

Its not really a 60%. It accelerates a lot code creation. Save some time on admin tasks. That is it.

oytis 5mo ago

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon

traderj0e 5mo ago
Any typical web backend or frontend kind of thing. So like, not systems code.
birdsongs 5mo ago
Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering. It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart. Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for parameters) and it's just done. I do in a day what would probably take me 2. It doesn't help me with reviewing others' work, or planning (I maintain that these are manual tasks). So yeah, I agree with the 40-60%. The parts of my job it helps, it really helps.
- consp 5mo ago
  > I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature My experience is it will attempt read from the wrong memory block resulting in garbadge. But that's a while ago so maybe LLMs have gotten better.
  - HDThoreaun 5mo ago
    The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.
    - shimman 5mo ago
      Yeah, the industry has no issues selling $5 bills for $1. Why is this a good thing for society again? That the public subsidizes VC to no shared gains?

01100011 5mo ago

What's funny to me is the seeming lack of AI usage among management despite so much of their work being amenable to AI acceleration. At my company(big name, AI beneficiary), middle management seems to mostly be concerned with shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic while they wait for their stock to fully vest. There is very little interest in improving anything, just an obsession with risk avoidance and performative sideshows whenever upper management wonders why execution is so poor.

mrhottakes 5mo ago
At my company middle management is using Gemini to churn out reams of useless documents in lieu of anything approaching "program management" or similar