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Again 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

Again 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 13d ago
Don'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.
- lucianbr 13d ago
  As long as we don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning for other certain people as well, who like AI coding for various ideological or financial reasons.
  - csallen 13d ago
    That's why I don't believe most AI hate I read on HN and I don't believe much AI hype I read on X.
sandworm101 13d ago
Ya, 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.
- anonzzzies 13d ago
  They sure are though; they have many processes to automate as well: big corn farmers/factories also have admin, erp, crm, departments with processes etc. There are companies doing billions in revenue with departments of people just copy/pasting PDFs who do real life things like you state who have immediate gains. But they won't do it alone yet and luckily need us. They still benefit though vs the large consultant businesses or even their own IT deps though.
  - sandworm101 13d ago
    They do and there are certainly some mid-level management jobs at risk, but ask any farmer/electrician/millright about the claimed impact of AI and they will laugh. They have yet to see an AI capable of reliably replacing a fuse let alone doing a solid day's work.
    - anonzzzies 13d ago
      Yes, agree with that, but that's usually not the sort of work we talk about here. But sure, robots are close there. All those admin jobs on the other hands...
  - dofm 13d ago
    Literally everyone I know in a large enough company who talks about AI talks about increasingly panicky mandates to use more Copilot coming from above, like you'll lose your job if you don't use it more. I heard exactly this story from my neighbour just three days ago. Literally a call from head office demanding they use Copilot more — to do a task Copilot can't do. Everyone in smaller companies describes various efforts to get AI to do more that ultimately end up involving lots of corrections or nurse-maiding ChatGPT to get it to do exactly what they need, when what they need is often so formulaic they should already have a process. Nobody I talk to describes it in terms of massive productivity gains. Everyone describes it as a puzzle they feel variously compelled to solve.
    - ryandrake 13d ago
sinuhe69 13d ago
If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions? I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly. Or work on the backend when constraints are not strictly enforced (for various historical reasons). Schematic understanding is still an issue. Sometimes additional chunkings and detailed planning/instructions suffice. But other time, humans are still the best vehicles to code.
- ElProlactin 13d ago
  > I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Plenty of reasons, including: 1. They don't (yet) know how to use AI to accomplish what they need. 2. The ROI is still meaningfully positive and they don't want to have to do it themselves. 3. Having a third-party do the work provides protection for decision-makers. If the project fails, the third-party takes the blame and "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". 4. The vendor does bring valuable insight to the table and pairs it with the use of AI to deliver a result that wouldn't have been possible in-house. This doesn't mean that everyone will be able to get work and maintain their rates in AI world but some people will.
  - magicalist 13d ago
    I mean they've boasted[1] about their generated code being so good that they add basically zero value and that they're riding out the rentseeking for as long as possible. Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951
dofm 13d ago
> 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. OK so, it sounds empty and miserable to me, but we can stipulate that this is how it is working out for you. Given that stipulation: how long do you think this can possibly last, when you are in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this? Have you made plans about how you will get out of your office lease, downsize, subcontract this button-pushing to even cheaper people overseas, etc.? Are you ready to lay off everyone who works for you, downsize your house to a smaller mortgage? Because you're on a burning platform. If you can do this, so can everyone else. I mean, I think we all are, possibly, on the same burning platform; I don't think I can fully avoid AI so I am trying to make sense of it. But I intend to fully avoid being in a race with other phone whisperers if I can.
- somenameforme 13d ago
  You're not just in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this. I don't think his anecdote is particularly surprising at all. You can do the same with basically any typical CRUD app, which is already going to be some very large percentage of all business software. But this kind of also leads to the conclusion that so can the people paying you. I think the years of software development/employment for problem solving, in and of itself, are numbered at this point. When people start to understand how relatively easy this stuff is, they're going to be in-housing everything. Not only for price but also because of increased flexibility/confidentiality/control, and even lower concept-to-live timelines. What third party stuff continues to exist will see its comp plummet. I imagine now you can already get some really nice quality software contracted out on places like fiverr for nothing simply because the skill involved to produce quality solutions has plummeted.
  - dofm 13d ago
    I think it's a mistake to assume that quality doesn't plummet when cost does, even if the AI is capable of quality work. The quality issue will always resurface. But yeah — I mean, I am a freelancer who burned out for reasons that are rather more influenced by the SaaS wave. That was hard to compete with. People choose between the solution that meets their needs and changing their processes to meet the ten-times-cheaper solution that doesn't, and that decision is often not at all irrational; by and large you want as many of your problems to be shared problems as possible. I am trying to return to work so I am looking at what AI can really do for me, but the conclusion I draw is that since I cannot simply burn token money to solve people's problems, and because bugs cost me money, I need a strategy where I remain in full control of actual code, but LLMs help me do things faster. If I can't solve that, I am out. Perhaps AI will upend the SaaS market before it fucks the freelancer market and the balance may temporarily shift. But it probably won't. And at that point, as a fiftysomething, even with a bit of financial security, I start thinking about living a rather shorter, happier life, instead of a longer one. Because as much as I might have ideas, I don't think there is much I can switch to where I have appropriately deep skills to survive AI there, and all those alternative jobs will be oversubscribed and less likely to hire me. I wonder if people in this industry have understood what we are doing to ourselves, to our friends.
skrebbel 13d ago
I mean sure if long term maintenance and code quality don’t matter then I wholeheartedly agree with you. It’s spectacular for small projects, limited-scope apps (eg marketing campaigns etc) and for market-testable prototypes. But if you don’t review and edit the code, things become unmaintainable soup very fast, with subtle logic bugs all over the place. And if you do review and edit the code, when working in large nontrivial codebases, then in my experience AI doesn’t actually go faster even if it feels like that at the start of each task. Obviously this only holds if you have any sort of code quality standard to begin with (and I agree that with small / short-lived products you don’t need one)
justonepost2 13d ago
in that case aren't you a completely useless middleman now?
- baq 13d ago
  The technical term is ‘meat proxy’

csallen 13d ago

Don'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.

lucianbr 13d ago
As long as we don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning for other certain people as well, who like AI coding for various ideological or financial reasons.
- csallen 13d ago
  That's why I don't believe most AI hate I read on HN and I don't believe much AI hype I read on X.

sandworm101 13d ago

Ya, 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.

anonzzzies 13d ago
They sure are though; they have many processes to automate as well: big corn farmers/factories also have admin, erp, crm, departments with processes etc. There are companies doing billions in revenue with departments of people just copy/pasting PDFs who do real life things like you state who have immediate gains. But they won't do it alone yet and luckily need us. They still benefit though vs the large consultant businesses or even their own IT deps though.
- sandworm101 13d ago
  They do and there are certainly some mid-level management jobs at risk, but ask any farmer/electrician/millright about the claimed impact of AI and they will laugh. They have yet to see an AI capable of reliably replacing a fuse let alone doing a solid day's work.
  - anonzzzies 13d ago
    Yes, agree with that, but that's usually not the sort of work we talk about here. But sure, robots are close there. All those admin jobs on the other hands...
- dofm 13d ago
  Literally everyone I know in a large enough company who talks about AI talks about increasingly panicky mandates to use more Copilot coming from above, like you'll lose your job if you don't use it more. I heard exactly this story from my neighbour just three days ago. Literally a call from head office demanding they use Copilot more — to do a task Copilot can't do. Everyone in smaller companies describes various efforts to get AI to do more that ultimately end up involving lots of corrections or nurse-maiding ChatGPT to get it to do exactly what they need, when what they need is often so formulaic they should already have a process. Nobody I talk to describes it in terms of massive productivity gains. Everyone describes it as a puzzle they feel variously compelled to solve.
  - ryandrake 13d ago

sinuhe69 13d ago

If it works for you, great! Just keep going. I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Certainly they understand their problems better than you and they can adapt to rising issues faster if their in-house team does it themselves. And certainly what kind of AI you can access, they can too and perhaps even more. So what will remain your value propositions? I’m a critical user, not a categorical denier. But there are certain categories where I see the current AI face a wall: fitting new ideas, or existing code into an existing architecture particularly. Or work on the backend when constraints are not strictly enforced (for various historical reasons). Schematic understanding is still an issue. Sometimes additional chunkings and detailed planning/instructions suffice. But other time, humans are still the best vehicles to code.

ElProlactin 13d ago
> I only have the nagging question that if it’s so easy, why would the clients not do it by themselves? Plenty of reasons, including: 1. They don't (yet) know how to use AI to accomplish what they need. 2. The ROI is still meaningfully positive and they don't want to have to do it themselves. 3. Having a third-party do the work provides protection for decision-makers. If the project fails, the third-party takes the blame and "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". 4. The vendor does bring valuable insight to the table and pairs it with the use of AI to deliver a result that wouldn't have been possible in-house. This doesn't mean that everyone will be able to get work and maintain their rates in AI world but some people will.
- magicalist 13d ago
  I mean they've boasted[1] about their generated code being so good that they add basically zero value and that they're riding out the rentseeking for as long as possible. Meanwhile they've apparently played with LLM porting of Postgres (or Postgres features?) and "would not put it in production"[2], so we can also guess the kind and scope of features being discussed here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594498 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855951

dofm 13d ago

> 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. OK so, it sounds empty and miserable to me, but we can stipulate that this is how it is working out for you. Given that stipulation: how long do you think this can possibly last, when you are in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this? Have you made plans about how you will get out of your office lease, downsize, subcontract this button-pushing to even cheaper people overseas, etc.? Are you ready to lay off everyone who works for you, downsize your house to a smaller mortgage? Because you're on a burning platform. If you can do this, so can everyone else. I mean, I think we all are, possibly, on the same burning platform; I don't think I can fully avoid AI so I am trying to make sense of it. But I intend to fully avoid being in a race with other phone whisperers if I can.

somenameforme 13d ago
You're not just in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this. I don't think his anecdote is particularly surprising at all. You can do the same with basically any typical CRUD app, which is already going to be some very large percentage of all business software. But this kind of also leads to the conclusion that so can the people paying you. I think the years of software development/employment for problem solving, in and of itself, are numbered at this point. When people start to understand how relatively easy this stuff is, they're going to be in-housing everything. Not only for price but also because of increased flexibility/confidentiality/control, and even lower concept-to-live timelines. What third party stuff continues to exist will see its comp plummet. I imagine now you can already get some really nice quality software contracted out on places like fiverr for nothing simply because the skill involved to produce quality solutions has plummeted.
- dofm 13d ago
  I think it's a mistake to assume that quality doesn't plummet when cost does, even if the AI is capable of quality work. The quality issue will always resurface. But yeah — I mean, I am a freelancer who burned out for reasons that are rather more influenced by the SaaS wave. That was hard to compete with. People choose between the solution that meets their needs and changing their processes to meet the ten-times-cheaper solution that doesn't, and that decision is often not at all irrational; by and large you want as many of your problems to be shared problems as possible. I am trying to return to work so I am looking at what AI can really do for me, but the conclusion I draw is that since I cannot simply burn token money to solve people's problems, and because bugs cost me money, I need a strategy where I remain in full control of actual code, but LLMs help me do things faster. If I can't solve that, I am out. Perhaps AI will upend the SaaS market before it fucks the freelancer market and the balance may temporarily shift. But it probably won't. And at that point, as a fiftysomething, even with a bit of financial security, I start thinking about living a rather shorter, happier life, instead of a longer one. Because as much as I might have ideas, I don't think there is much I can switch to where I have appropriately deep skills to survive AI there, and all those alternative jobs will be oversubscribed and less likely to hire me. I wonder if people in this industry have understood what we are doing to ourselves, to our friends.

skrebbel 13d ago

I mean sure if long term maintenance and code quality don’t matter then I wholeheartedly agree with you. It’s spectacular for small projects, limited-scope apps (eg marketing campaigns etc) and for market-testable prototypes. But if you don’t review and edit the code, things become unmaintainable soup very fast, with subtle logic bugs all over the place. And if you do review and edit the code, when working in large nontrivial codebases, then in my experience AI doesn’t actually go faster even if it feels like that at the start of each task. Obviously this only holds if you have any sort of code quality standard to begin with (and I agree that with small / short-lived products you don’t need one)

justonepost2 13d ago

in that case aren't you a completely useless middleman now?

baq 13d ago
The technical term is ‘meat proxy’