8 ms·

What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?

by jdlshore 3mo ago

echelon 3mo ago
Speed.
- K0balt 3mo ago
  This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
  - cjbgkagh 3mo ago
    I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
    - dboreham 3mo ago
      Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.
      - sscaryterry 3mo ago
        Exactly, no ego (I know I'm anthropomorphizing)
    - vhantz 3mo ago
      We must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains
      - cjbgkagh 3mo ago
        Less time, not zero time. I still argue with humans for sentimental reasons.
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      So you are accomplishing a year’s worth of work in a month? If that’s been happening for a few months, you must have a few years of work to show people right?
      - cjbgkagh 3mo ago
        I actually do, I completely and elegantly solved a core problem of my niche industry that had been plaguing it for over 40 years. I was already planning on doing it and had put aside 4-6 months to do it. I did it with the help of AI in 3 days. The AI couldn't do it on it's own I had to walk it through the process piece by piece, and it kept trying to avoid doing as I asked by lying to me, so I kept chastising it. It eventually relented and it worked. There was a deep theoretical underpinning which I believe was beyond AIs ability to originate but once it understood what I was doing it was great at the mechanics of it. I've tried to explain similar ideas to humans with much less success. Now I've massively expanded my scope and I'm still worried I'll run out of work by the end of the year. It's so much fun. Previously I would have to try to convince people with money to fund such applied research and often the strings they'd attach would doom it to failure. I was worried I would never have the resources to test out my ideas in my lifetime and I would die not knowing if they were any good, and since one of the big ones has already worked I'm pretty stoked.
  - 0xy 3mo ago
    There's a small minority of people who are adamantly refusing to change, such as there are in every technological revolution. Ego prevents them from even wholeheartedly trying the tool, because it would be admission they were wrong. The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking. Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers. If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.
    - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
      I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring. I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes. I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review. I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.
      - dwaltrip 3mo ago
        Damn, that sounds quite rough.
      - llama052 3mo ago
        [dead]
    - dolebirchwood 3mo ago
      What about the 6x developers? Was there just a doubling multiplier across the board, resulting in them becoming 12x developers, or did they too become 20x developers?
  - cedws 3mo ago
    I have plenty of experience with LLMs and use them daily but definitely wouldn't call generated code "quality code." Often looks like complete vomit.
    - NortySpock 3mo ago
      Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with. I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis). And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case. So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else. Not everything has to be bulletproof.
      - csallen 3mo ago
        You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
        echelon 3mo ago
        Every bit of code written in the last 50 years is going to be meaningless. People need to get to grips with that fast. Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.
        ses1984 3mo ago
        Not every bit of code is going to be meaningless. Just 99.999%.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, and I'm painstakingly reading, reviewing, understanding and editing everything the models write. It's gotten to the point I'm trying to slow down in order to let the new knowledge crystallize. I'm manually writing articles about what I'm doing as I go. I can only imagine what people are doing at their jobs with unlimited token budgets.
    - baq 3mo ago
      You don’t have to imagine, listen to Boris’ publicly saying how he works with these things and it’s safe to assume others do it similarly or better
      - 8note 3mo ago
        if hes still doing work on claude code, im not convinced its going all that great. its a lot of features that feel half complete, with the llm pretending that the job is done rather than actually being done
    - amoss 3mo ago
      Kind of weird how LoC has become a metric for people to chase again.
      - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
        In my case it was commits, not lines of code. I wasn't chasing after it, I just asked Claude to calculate some statistics after a month or so of AI usage. It's not just statistics either. I know for a fact that I made major progress by using LLMs. Here's a summary from around a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407642 AI is world changing technology as far as I'm concerned.
    - lelanthran 3mo ago
      > I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, That's irrelevant. What's the increase in revenue?
- erikschoster 3mo ago
  Drawing debt
  - echelon 3mo ago
    We'll just rebuild stuff when we get new requirements. The models will be even faster and better for the next version, anyway.
- nmfisher 3mo ago
  From my brief window of Fable usage, speed wasn't its strong point at all. For actually building software, I'm starting to suspect a human with a dumber (but faster) model is going to get the job done quicker than Fable (and possibly even cheaper). Bug-finding and vulnerability detection is a different story.
  - baq 3mo ago
    I’d say you tried on an insufficiently complex codebase. I’ve tried on a MLOC+ and the results were excellent compared to anything else.
    - nmfisher 3mo ago
      Not saying the results were bad - quite the opposite. But it was very slow (and if I was paying API rates, hideously expensive).
  - TylerE 3mo ago
    My conclusion was the exact opposite. Maybe each individual response was slower, but it took so many fewer round trips to get what I wanted wanted. I had a project fable was progressing steadily and correctly on. Opus on the same project keeps handing me garbage it insists is working and meets the stated requirements, but isn’t and doesn’t.
- AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
  >> What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs? > Speed. Speed of what? Speed of understanding what needs to be done? I highly doubt it. Speed of LoC checked into git? Sure, I'll give you that. But one can use any number of tools to generate hundreds of thousands of lines of code. See any build tools which support specifications such as RAML, OpenAPI, CORBA, etc. So I ask again; speed of what?
  - jitl 3mo ago
    fixing minor bugs takes one slack message for us now. bugs go down, goodness go up. fixing more serious regression also easier. connect honeycomb mcp, ask agent to debug while i walk to coffee and get some pistachio rose dates. by time im back with my oat latte ive got a full report on what happened and can send the next slack message to fix. life is good
  - echelon 3mo ago
    In the time it took you to type that, your hourly market comp went down another basis point. I am appalled none of this is clicking with you anti-AI folks. This is all so exciting -- alarming even! --, and software careers are never going to be the same. I don't know how you just metaphorically stand there and act like nothing at all is happening. We've never seen anything like this in our entire lives. Some of you are standing right in front of the steam roller, yelling to all of us that steam rollers aren't real.
    - CookieCrisp 3mo ago
      Very very fast steam rollers.
    - llama052 3mo ago
      Did you use an LLM to write this for you? How odd. For all of you people who think these LLM models are “earth shattering” how the hell do you reconcile that it’s a net positive for anyone but those who want to consolidate knowledge and power. We are really looking at idiocracy in the making.
- Sammi 3mo ago
  And quality if you know what you're doing.

What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs?

echelon 3mo ago

Speed.

K0balt 3mo ago
This x 10 . I don’t understand how people are saying you can’t use LLMs to get crazy productivity gains. If you can’t write quality code with LLMs at ludicrous speed, you’re holding it wrong. You will have occasional bad days and regressions. But overall you’re still going to be able to 4x your progress.
- cjbgkagh 3mo ago
  I wonder if the people getting 10x productivity gains are spending less time on HN and more time tending to their agents. Personally I now spend so much time productively arguing with agents that it feels like an utter waste of effort arguing with humans, if people can't see the value in LLMs by now I'm not sure what I could say to change their minds.
  - dboreham 3mo ago
    Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.
    - sscaryterry 3mo ago
      Exactly, no ego (I know I'm anthropomorphizing)
  - vhantz 3mo ago
    We must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains
    - cjbgkagh 3mo ago
      Less time, not zero time. I still argue with humans for sentimental reasons.
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    So you are accomplishing a year’s worth of work in a month? If that’s been happening for a few months, you must have a few years of work to show people right?
    - cjbgkagh 3mo ago
      I actually do, I completely and elegantly solved a core problem of my niche industry that had been plaguing it for over 40 years. I was already planning on doing it and had put aside 4-6 months to do it. I did it with the help of AI in 3 days. The AI couldn't do it on it's own I had to walk it through the process piece by piece, and it kept trying to avoid doing as I asked by lying to me, so I kept chastising it. It eventually relented and it worked. There was a deep theoretical underpinning which I believe was beyond AIs ability to originate but once it understood what I was doing it was great at the mechanics of it. I've tried to explain similar ideas to humans with much less success. Now I've massively expanded my scope and I'm still worried I'll run out of work by the end of the year. It's so much fun. Previously I would have to try to convince people with money to fund such applied research and often the strings they'd attach would doom it to failure. I was worried I would never have the resources to test out my ideas in my lifetime and I would die not knowing if they were any good, and since one of the big ones has already worked I'm pretty stoked.
- 0xy 3mo ago
  There's a small minority of people who are adamantly refusing to change, such as there are in every technological revolution. Ego prevents them from even wholeheartedly trying the tool, because it would be admission they were wrong. The opportunities available for these people are rapidly, rapidly shrinking. I believe it's possible to be a developer today who's EXCEPTIONAL and never uses AI. Most opponents are not exceptional, though, and even these opportunities are shrinking. Most exceptional developers in my org adopted AI in their workflows and went from 10x developers to 20x developers. If you refuse to adapt, you're going to be out of a job complaining about the kids and their newfangled technology REAL quick. You have a few years remaining, maybe less.
  - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
    I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring. I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes. I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review. I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.
    - dwaltrip 3mo ago
      Damn, that sounds quite rough.
    - llama052 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - dolebirchwood 3mo ago
    What about the 6x developers? Was there just a doubling multiplier across the board, resulting in them becoming 12x developers, or did they too become 20x developers?
- cedws 3mo ago
  I have plenty of experience with LLMs and use them daily but definitely wouldn't call generated code "quality code." Often looks like complete vomit.
  - NortySpock 3mo ago
    Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with. I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis). And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case. So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else. Not everything has to be bulletproof.
    - csallen 3mo ago
      You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
      - echelon 3mo ago
        Every bit of code written in the last 50 years is going to be meaningless. People need to get to grips with that fast. Distribution, relationships, processes, mindshare, marketing, and politics matter. Code is just ephemeral glue and implementation detail.
        ses1984 3mo ago
        Not every bit of code is going to be meaningless. Just 99.999%.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, and I'm painstakingly reading, reviewing, understanding and editing everything the models write. It's gotten to the point I'm trying to slow down in order to let the new knowledge crystallize. I'm manually writing articles about what I'm doing as I go. I can only imagine what people are doing at their jobs with unlimited token budgets.
  - baq 3mo ago
    You don’t have to imagine, listen to Boris’ publicly saying how he works with these things and it’s safe to assume others do it similarly or better
    - 8note 3mo ago
      if hes still doing work on claude code, im not convinced its going all that great. its a lot of features that feel half complete, with the llm pretending that the job is done rather than actually being done
  - amoss 3mo ago
    Kind of weird how LoC has become a metric for people to chase again.
    - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      In my case it was commits, not lines of code. I wasn't chasing after it, I just asked Claude to calculate some statistics after a month or so of AI usage. It's not just statistics either. I know for a fact that I made major progress by using LLMs. Here's a summary from around a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407642 AI is world changing technology as far as I'm concerned.
  - lelanthran 3mo ago
    > I measured an ~8x increase in my project's commit count after AI, That's irrelevant. What's the increase in revenue?
erikschoster 3mo ago
Drawing debt
- echelon 3mo ago
  We'll just rebuild stuff when we get new requirements. The models will be even faster and better for the next version, anyway.
nmfisher 3mo ago
From my brief window of Fable usage, speed wasn't its strong point at all. For actually building software, I'm starting to suspect a human with a dumber (but faster) model is going to get the job done quicker than Fable (and possibly even cheaper). Bug-finding and vulnerability detection is a different story.
- baq 3mo ago
  I’d say you tried on an insufficiently complex codebase. I’ve tried on a MLOC+ and the results were excellent compared to anything else.
  - nmfisher 3mo ago
    Not saying the results were bad - quite the opposite. But it was very slow (and if I was paying API rates, hideously expensive).
- TylerE 3mo ago
  My conclusion was the exact opposite. Maybe each individual response was slower, but it took so many fewer round trips to get what I wanted wanted. I had a project fable was progressing steadily and correctly on. Opus on the same project keeps handing me garbage it insists is working and meets the stated requirements, but isn’t and doesn’t.
AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
>> What concrete business advantage are you getting from LLMs? > Speed. Speed of what? Speed of understanding what needs to be done? I highly doubt it. Speed of LoC checked into git? Sure, I'll give you that. But one can use any number of tools to generate hundreds of thousands of lines of code. See any build tools which support specifications such as RAML, OpenAPI, CORBA, etc. So I ask again; speed of what?
- jitl 3mo ago
  fixing minor bugs takes one slack message for us now. bugs go down, goodness go up. fixing more serious regression also easier. connect honeycomb mcp, ask agent to debug while i walk to coffee and get some pistachio rose dates. by time im back with my oat latte ive got a full report on what happened and can send the next slack message to fix. life is good
- echelon 3mo ago
  In the time it took you to type that, your hourly market comp went down another basis point. I am appalled none of this is clicking with you anti-AI folks. This is all so exciting -- alarming even! --, and software careers are never going to be the same. I don't know how you just metaphorically stand there and act like nothing at all is happening. We've never seen anything like this in our entire lives. Some of you are standing right in front of the steam roller, yelling to all of us that steam rollers aren't real.
  - CookieCrisp 3mo ago
    Very very fast steam rollers.
  - llama052 3mo ago
    Did you use an LLM to write this for you? How odd. For all of you people who think these LLM models are “earth shattering” how the hell do you reconcile that it’s a net positive for anyone but those who want to consolidate knowledge and power. We are really looking at idiocracy in the making.
Sammi 3mo ago
And quality if you know what you're doing.