4 ms·

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average

by malfist 5mo ago

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

Sharlin 5mo ago
Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
- lapetitejort 5mo ago
  Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds
spaniard89277 5mo ago
Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man. It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
- rightbyte 5mo ago
  It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.
mynameisash 5mo ago
> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  My main problem putting out that many PRs per day is getting them approved and merged back into main so I can start the next one. I guess “stacked” PRs are a thing now? I haven’t figured out the process that avoids making the merges for stacked PRs a complete mess, though.
treis 5mo ago
It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers. It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.
- corywadd 5mo ago
  Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless." The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.
- rightbyte 5mo ago
  Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.
- malfist 5mo ago
  I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - s1ngular1ties 5mo ago
      100%. My engineering teams velocity (and I mean this in terms of bug free, valuable needle moving features shipped) has gone up immensely. TBF it was already a very talented senior group of people, but having that kind of group embrace the tooling for what it is has made a massive difference.
    - AlexeyBelov 5mo ago
      Is this satire?
      - 5mo ago

by malfist 5mo ago

Sharlin 5mo ago

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

lapetitejort 5mo ago
Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

spaniard89277 5mo ago

Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man. It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.

rightbyte 5mo ago
It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.

mynameisash 5mo ago

> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

jimbokun 5mo ago
My main problem putting out that many PRs per day is getting them approved and merged back into main so I can start the next one. I guess “stacked” PRs are a thing now? I haven’t figured out the process that avoids making the merges for stacked PRs a complete mess, though.

treis 5mo ago

It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers. It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.

corywadd 5mo ago
Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless." The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.
rightbyte 5mo ago
Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.
malfist 5mo ago
I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - s1ngular1ties 5mo ago
    100%. My engineering teams velocity (and I mean this in terms of bug free, valuable needle moving features shipped) has gone up immensely. TBF it was already a very talented senior group of people, but having that kind of group embrace the tooling for what it is has made a massive difference.
  - AlexeyBelov 5mo ago
    Is this satire?
    - 5mo ago