4 ms·

I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week

I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week take a day or less. It’s also a no true Scotsman as nothing we could show would be “good enough” because it’s just the same software engineering as before but faster. But for instance I used to work in 1-2 client projects at a time and they take months now I can do 4-5 at once and they take a month. That’s a huge improvement

kbrannigan 1mo ago
I wonder if the project you build are more one off Disposable(sorry for my choice of words) software. Do you have project that needs to be maintained. I am also interested in your workflow. Do you Vibe code , never look at the code or do you hold the LLM agent's hand. I feel like it's a spectrum
- edgyquant 1mo ago
  I work on real projects with paying customers with the occasional mvp here, but I tend to select for people who have distribution so mvps become apps that need maintenance almost every time. If anything maintenance is where it gets easier the mvp stage is where more focus is required
nananana9 1mo ago
The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way. I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe. What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.
nonameiguess 1mo ago
Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world. My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok. It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read. Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered? If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?

kbrannigan 1mo ago

I wonder if the project you build are more one off Disposable(sorry for my choice of words) software. Do you have project that needs to be maintained. I am also interested in your workflow. Do you Vibe code , never look at the code or do you hold the LLM agent's hand. I feel like it's a spectrum

edgyquant 1mo ago
I work on real projects with paying customers with the occasional mvp here, but I tend to select for people who have distribution so mvps become apps that need maintenance almost every time. If anything maintenance is where it gets easier the mvp stage is where more focus is required

nananana9 1mo ago

The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way. I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe. What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.

nonameiguess 1mo ago

Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world. My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok. It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read. Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered? If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?