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> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.
by skrebbel 21d ago
> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite
Wow that resonated by a scary amount.
- philjackson 21d agoCan you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?
- N_Lens 21d agoAI amplifies existing process. For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seems’ to be productive (producing slop). At the end of the day, LLMs are still tools.
- skydhash 21d ago> For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seem’ to be productive Convenient way of saying "you're holding it wrong".
- owebmaster 21d agoThen when asked for examples of what they built using AI, what they have to show is boring slop worse than "git cloning" a mature project.
- Daishiman 20d agoPeople who build good software with AI don't gloat about it being built with AI because it's not the most relevant part of it.
- N_Lens 21d agoYes, that's what I'm saying.
- mohamedkoubaa 21d agoI get flamed here whenever I say it's a skill issue, but it absolutely is. Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful CTO but that's the role you play if have 20 agents working on something you designed. I see you got downvoted too.
- skydhash 21d agoIt would be a skill issue if someone would show they’re able to use it to produce good software while showcasing that it’s due to their mastery. Till this day, I don’t think there’s any such demonstration. Any defects of the technology is always blamed on skill issue.
- Daishiman 20d agoThere's a ton of people out there in various unknown companies grinding away and managing a reasonable number of well-prompted, parallel agents with decent CI and deployment strategy making judicious use of human review. But that's boring and you can't build a YouTube audience around it.
- mohamedkoubaa 20d agoPeople who produce good software don't feel the need to show off how modern and agentic they are.
- owebmaster 20d agoWe don't want them to show off, just make public software we can pay and use. What's yours?
- anonzzzies 21d agoYeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with salespeople who now send me presentations that just have a bucket loads of hallucinations in them: turns out they never read them but had interns write most of them: now they still cannot read and AI generated stuff looks plausible. I only have anecdotal experiences but this sure seems to resonate for the AI negativity around here. I could be wrong but it's so far removed from our experiences. LLMs are just tools indeed.
- shjshshshs 21d agoYou don’t value “talk”? I understand. I have a lot of those around me and they are super productive, all day, alone, in their little cubicles. Oblivious to everything around them. I don’t know what to say to those types anymore. Live and let live I guess.. or in this case, not live I suppose.
- anonzzzies 21d agoIt usually is more like; I send an email or so which contains enough details to understand whatever we are doing. A person in that list sends it to 20 people. The next email is a zoom invite with 30 people of 1.5 hours to ‘go over the email together’. If these people have no influence, good or bad over the outcome, why would I waste this time while it usually just says they were too lazy or incompetent to read the email? Useful talk and meetings all day is fine, but these are just to write busy/billable hours for all these useless folk with no value for the project. And socially I like listening and talking, just not for this.
- Yoric 21d agoNot GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (we also have mutation testing, strongly-typed code, standard and custom linters, etc.) Then you look at the code. Code that has passed review, generally. You realize that the database schema has been broken silently, and that the agent has rewritten the tests or the golden fixtures to match. You realize that it has made assumptions that contradict the specifications and the product is going to break once it's in the hand of users. You realize that the 100% code coverage is essentially a convenient lie, because the code and tests have been written to make passing easy. You realize that none of the security golden rules have been followed, and that has managed to happen because the agent has somehow deactivated linting. Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you? On the upside, bugfixing becomes so fast! Just add a new test, wait a few dozen minutes, and a new Merge Request appears. With equally convincing/misleading explanations, and something else broken. After ~4 months, we had a bare bones deliverable, which we're now steadily expanding. If we had had to write the product manually, I suspect that it would have taken us at least one year, possibly two. So, that's the productivity increase. The productivity decrease is that what we have is not a product but a glorified demo, something that will work very nicely on the happy path, but on any other path, all bets are off.
- 0xEF 21d agoThis is the interesting bit > "Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you?" I have come to realize that AI is so "successful" because the system in which it is being deployed was designed to push product as fast and cheaply as possible from the start. Humans are usually overworked and stretched to their breaking point, which I originally saw as the source of our broken software woes, which, like our streets in the US, just get a new layer of asphalt to cover up the crumbling bits each year instead of rebuilding the infrastructure with reliability and longevity in mind. My former employer was using both Claude and Codex for firmware that was driving an over-burdened power circuit that itself was partially designed with ChatGPT. All of the individuals involved approach LLMs with god-fearing reverance because they do not understand _how_ the LLM works, just that it _does_ in a "good enough" way and they can offload their thinking, which is something we all wish we could do because thinking is hard, time-consuming and costly. I get it. But like you mentioned, tests were being passed, not because the code was sound, but because the tests were altered to match the results. This is not necessarily the fault of the agent, either; it's just interpretting the prompt(s) - written by a flawed human, btw - with stochastic mechinations that seem to make a great deal of sense on the surface, but remain unable to be followed or repeated by the brains of (most of) its users. As a rresult, I had to deal with product that work great in the field...at least at first, before it start literally catching fire, ruining its own powertrain because everything the agents touched became too complex with too many subtle cracks in the veneer to review properly. The system (read; capitalism) demanded viable product quickly to please investors, and the burnt-out humans who decided to try this AI thing ended up trusting it nearly completely, so any ideas of repeatable and complete testing, diagnostics and root cause failure analysis morphed into a sloppy "it works on the bench" checklist before being sold to a customer who had come to trust that their deceptively simple product would just work as advertised. I'm going to die on the hill that AI as a replacement for our brains is precisely how we will make ourselves go extict, but I am old enough to already be regarded as a crufty dinosaur who is stuck in his ways, and I'm made peace with all of that. What I can't get my head around is watching people use this awesome tool (and it is, admittedly, awesome) to literally just speed up all the mistakes they were already making. Perhaps it is because I am aging, but slowing down and having a think seems more valuable to me now than it ever has, especially when creating something new. AI is powerful and, like any good tool, could be useful in the right hands, but more often than not I see it being used as an accelerant for all the worst parts of product development to appease a market that has suddenly been told they can now pick all three points on the Iron Triangle instead of just two. This makes about as much sense to me as taking a laxitive when you already are suffering diarrhea.
- anonzzzies 21d agoAgain I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone finds it counterproductive. This was strictly impossible for our small team before recent AI and hiring more people didn't work for the pricing. Our profits jumped, revenue jumped, client count jumped. What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences? We do spend all our time either code reviewing or talking with clients but the latter was already the case and the former was just better spaced out over time as this would before take many months.
- csallen 21d agoDon't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning. Certain people don't like AI coding for various ideological reasons, and so they will, not coincidentally, consistently fail to find it productive or helpful.
- sandworm101 21d agoYa, AI is very good at generating number, be that code for software, images for ads, or banal prose for company blogs. AI not so good at growing corn, cooking eggs, biulding houses, running fiber, treating disease, changing brake pads, loading a truck... or any of the other millions of physical-world jobs on which the economy is biult. If you company is all about creating things that go on the internet, sure, AI is your thing. But for most companies the internet is a communications tool rather than a product. Those companies are not seeing the claimed productivity gains.