Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.
When you look into the edge cases developer productivity is really tough to understand. It's easy as the engineer yourself to see your own productivity as easy to understand, but if you are ever in the position of trying to assess someone's productivity that you don't work with day to day, its really difficult. There are people who are able to achieve millions in yearly savings with like 10 lines of code updated per year, perf debugging types. I'd never believe that up front if I hadn't seen it after the fact.
Its interesting to me that over the last 10 years of working in agile teams, not one team has analyzed burn rates to see if we are doing better/worse over time. Its like every sprint is a clean slate and no one actually gets better at their job...
Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one has come up with before are basically 0. They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I would say most people don't hit those 2 things in a meaningful way(with or without LLMs).
Most ideas people have aren't original, but the original ideas people do have come after struggling with a lot of unoriginal ideas.
> They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it.
The insight is that good ideas (whether wholly original or otherwise) are the result of many of these insightful moments over time, and when you bypass those insightful moments and the struggle of "recreating" old ideas, you're losing out on that process.
Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
Many innovations are built off cross pollination of domains and I think we are not too far off from having a loop where multiple agents grounded very well in specific domains can find intersections and optimizations by communicating with each other, especially if they are able to run for 12+ hours. The truth is that 99% of attempts at innovation will fail, but the 1% can yield something fantastic, the more attempts we can take, the faster progress will happen.
We are a planet of 8 billion people, interest will vary widely. Expecting everyone to swarm on the same issue at the same time is simply not how humanity has worked in the past. Innovation often happens because many people go different directions, testing what works and what doesn't. Getting AI to play SimCity may be a stepping stone to real life urban planning, or it may be nothing, who knows?
Humanity in the past has acted to eradicate Polio through global vaccinations, fix the Y2K computer bug, allow the Ozone hole to repair by banning CFCs, form a United Nations to prevent WW3 among other things.
I think if the hope is that the whole world comes together to reduce emissions to a meaningful level, there is little to no chance of that. Even in the face of clear evidence, many leaders either do not believe it or do not think it will affect them in their lifetime. Capitalism and globalization march to a different drum.
The hope becomes that we can innovate our way out of the problem with technology, that is the race to the finish. AI will likely help us get there faster, but 2nd place will not be an option.
You could say industrialization was a solution to a problem we didn't have...but efficiency and profit is always the pursuit of business, and unfortunately that is a lot of the world we live in.
And I say this as someone who loves the idea of energy that doesn't come from burning things.
LLMs would not be popular if "spending those few minutes doing it yourself" part was true. In actuality it can be hours, days, or weeks depending on the feature and your pickiness. Everyone acts as if they are the greatest developer and that these tools are subpar, the truth is that most developers are just average, just like most drivers are average but think of themselves as above average. All of the sudden everyone that was piecing together code off of stackoverflow with no idea how to build the damn thing is actually a someone who can understand large code bases and find bugs and write flawless code? Give me a break.
To the degree that those same people are now writing 10-100x more code...that is scary, but the doom and gloom is pretty tiring.
The SO copy-pasting is actually quite accurate. The same folks are now just blindly generating code. That's why most software in the world is shit, and will continue to be in the future. There might just be more of it.
There will most definitely be much more of it, maybe machines are doing this on purpose to increase dependency on them haha. Ultimately, wagging a finger at someone will have no outcome, allowing someone to make real mistakes while vibe coding will be a much better learning experience. Someone that drops a prod database using Claude will have a very lasting memory of that(not saying that should be the goal, critical thinking obviously matters A LOT). Cars didn't used to have seatbelts, a lot of people died, then they got seatbelts and now the world is a better place.
The problem is maintenance and understanding code in the presence of bugs.
It looks very productive at first sight but when you start to find problems it is going to be a lot of fun on a production system.
Because basically you cannot study all the output that the LLM throws line by line if what you want is speed.
Which leaves reliability compromised.
Also, sometimes LLMs throw a lot of extra and unncessary code making things more barroquw than if you had sat down and thought a bit about the problem a bit.
Yes, you can deliver faster code with LLMs, maybe. But it is going to be good enough for maintenance and bug fixing?
I never said anything against using LLMs. You're projecting.
Any engineer worth their weight will always try to avoid adding code. Any amount of code you add to a system, whether is written by you or a all knowing AI is a liability. If you spent a majority of your work day writing code it's understandable to want to rely heavily on LLMs.
Where I'd like for people to draw a line on is not knowing at all what the X thousand lines of code are doing.
In my career, I have never been in a situation where my problems could be a solved by piecing together code from SO. When I say "spend those few minutes doing it yourself" I am specifically talking about UI, but it does apply to other situations too.
For instance, if you had to change your UI layout to something specific. You could try to collect screenshots and articulate what you need to see changed. If you weren't clear enough that cycle of prompting with the AI would waste your time, you could've just made the change yourself.
There are many instances where the latter option is going to be faster and more accurate. This would only be possible if you had some idea of your code base.
When you've let an agent take full control of your codebase you will have to sink time into understanding it. Since clearly everyone is too busy for that you get stuck in a loop, the only way to make those "last 10%" changes is *only* via the agent.
I didn't say anything about your beliefs in AI, my statement was general. You're projecting.
It is still possible to write code with AI AND educate yourself on what the codebase architecture is. Even better, you can educate yourself on good software engineering and architecture and build that into making better specs. You can understand what the code is doing by having good tests, observability, and actually seeing it work. But if you're after peeping what every character is doing, I am not going to stop you!
Iventions site is clearly a showcase and uses maximalism, which is most definitely a design philosophy. Design may about solving problems, but the fact that you feel entitled to think that you know the problem that Iventions is trying to solve, and also that they are doing it wrong is very presumptuous.
Not presumptuous. All based on doing enough usability testing to understand that time and time again people get confused if you try to reinvent the wheel or trying to be fancy when it comes to navigating around your site. Stick to best practices.
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