> I don't think we'll ever manually write code again. It's just so much faster.
If velocity was the most important criteria, well, we could always write tech-debt faster, we just chose not to.
Unless the LLM/agent is carefully curated, it will produce tech-debt faster than it can fix it.
For some products, it seems not a problem - you just want to validate PMF on a product (of course you'll have a new problem now, which is that everyone with $20 to spare can do the same).
For others, a longer-life product is preferable. We shall have to see how things shake out. My best guess would be that we have more useless stuff that is free or close to free, and fewer useful stuff that is free or close to free.
I find this the least convincing argument ever. Its only a gotcha if you assume all/most of the people excited about one were excited about the other. Personally I never met a real person who gave a shit about crypto, much less nfts. But AI interest is everywhere, with it roughly 50/50 in my life of people who are uneasy with it vs use it regularly.
I don't disagree about monumentous amounts of tech debt and risk being created. Its my hope for my own job and skills being relevant going into the future. I do like playing with it, understanding it as a tool. But it is just a tool, not a machine god, and regularly fallible.
Actually I met one guy who was somehow deep in NFTS when this Boring-Ape-NFT took off and he told me how much money he has now (on paper) - then they were vaporized and he lost everything.
I was a doubter. This will literally work 100x faster than you. It can one-shot 1kLOC across dozens of files in mere minutes and understand the context.
You'll need to pay back a lot of those performance gains in reviewing the code, but the overall delta is a 2x speedup at minimum. I'd say it's closer to 4x. You can get a week's worth of work done in a day.
A human context switches too much and cannot physically keep up with these models. We're at the chess take off moment. We're still good at reviewing and steering.
Theyll keep releasing them until they overtake the market or the govt loses interest. Alibaba probably has staying power but not companies like deepseek's owner
The other day I asked AI to one-shot an implementation of hyperbolic trig functions for double-double floats.
I provided a repo (mine) that already implemented double-double arithmetic, trigonometry, and logarithms/exponentials, with plenty of tests.
It produced something that looked this good. It had tests, it followed the style of the existing code base, etc. But it was full of shit and outright lies.
After I reviewed it to fix deficiencies, I don't think there was anything left of the original.
I had much more success the previous week using an AI to rubber duck the algorithms to implement trig.
I am incredibly sceptical that just adding more loops — and less critical thinking/review — to brute force through a solution, is a good idea.
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
I have experienced this issue some time too - I think if you post some "controversial" comment (judged by many quick upvotes and downvotes) it triggers a "cooling down" period before you can post a reply to your immediate child comments in the thread (or it could be mod-triggered). This ensures you don't dominate the thread, and allows a conversation with other participants to develop. Based on how others react to the comments, I assume it also gives the mods a better idea if they need to intervene. I found it a minor annoyance at first, but have learnt to appreciate it - thoughtful comments (with careful moderation) from a diverse group of people is what makes a community like this valuable.
I've gotten into plenty of flamewars with Dems, Republicans, Anti-Vaxxers, Pro-Vaxxers, AI Luddites, AI Fundamentalists, China bots, China hawks, Apple fanatics, Apple haters, far-right, far-left, pro-WFH, anti-WFH, pro-immigration, anti-immigration, and others on HN.
I just don't care about filtering my opinions and use HN as a way to kvetch and impart some information I may know about.
Why would they do that? Once they have their win-condition, there's no reason to innovate. Only to reduce the costs of existing solutions. I expect that unless voice becomes a parameter which drives competition and first-choice for adoption, it will never become a focus of the frontier orgs. Which is curious to me, as almost the opposite of how I'm reading your comment.
I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.
Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)
A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.
I dont get this idea of breaking big companies up is inherently a good thing.
As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake. The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs. Current Google only comes even close with their far out projects(that dont directly make money) such as their quantum computing/deepmind/boston dynamics(when google had them)
Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.
If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams
> As a non-American, I think the breakup of AT&T/Bell Labs was a mistake.
With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.
Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?
Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.
The Bell breakup is the only reason we have communication technologies newer than $2/minute telephone calls or (for the same price) Telex.
Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.
It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.
And yet they sat on transformers until OpenAI kicked off the AI boom by actually productizing that research in ChatGPT. Though it's possible they were just being cautious, my uncharitable view is that they knew this would disrupt their highly lucrative ads business, which is always the problem with monopolies.
Also you're overlooking other top-notch corporate research institutions like Microsoft Research, which arguably are more "Blue Sky" in the sense they are not constrained to any current product lines.
> The world is yet to create a lab as innovative as Bell Labs.
This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.
> I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.
Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.
On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).
I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. That's what Google is missing actually.
Slack is very much developers software in comparison.
Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.
File sharing using Scarepoint is incredible. Incredible bad, that is. Everything is stored in mssql server behind the scenes, in the most inefficient way you could imagine. Scarepoint is the opposite of seamless, number of wasted man-years on it must certainly be in the millions, if not billions. Its ”wiki” sucks. It’s bad software that not even ms themselves want to touch, that’s why many of their other server softwares have migrated away from using it.
It's not though. There are seams everywhere - between Sharepoint, Teams, OneDrive and so forth. It's the worst possible approach. Fortunately the company I work at switched to Slack the day I started (co-incidentally), so I've been able to compare and contrast the two live. Slack wins for every single use case _except_ video and audio (where Zoom or Webex are the only games in town), hands down.
That's on top of the fact that the Teams client is an absolute pig, and is incapable of remembering basic things like "which of the two cameras do I want to use" and "which audio output is appropriate".
The internet used to be filled with thousands of these.
It was magical, serendipitous, and wonderful.
People's creativity hasn't disappeared, but it lives in corporate-owned distribution platforms now.
It's nice that people don't have to spend so much effort building websites, but we definitely lost something in the experience. We did gain convenience for creators and consumers (but also gained ads, tracking, etc.)
There are plenty of highly talented people publishing on YouTube, TikTok, and beyond, but we lost something with the loss of personal websites being popular and the loss of formats like Flash, platforms like NewGrounds, etc.
The old web felt like stepping into someone's personal atelier. Bespoke, intimate, crafted, and intentionally curated.
> I've been saying for years now that the next AI breakthrough could come from big tech but it also has just a likely chance of comming from a smart kid with a whiteboard.
It comes from the company best equipped with capital and infra.
If some university invents a new approach, one of the nimble hyperscalers / foundation model companies will gobble it up.
This is why capital is being spent. That is the only thing that matters: positioning to take advantage of the adoption curve.
No. They're firing high paid seniors and replacing them with low pay juniors. This is IBM we're talking about.
The "limits of AI" bit is just smokescreen.
Firing seniors:
> Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat.
New workers will use AI:
> While she admitted that many of the responsibilities that previously defined entry-level jobs can now be automated, IBM has since rewritten its roles across sectors to account for AI fluency. For example, software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers, and HR staffers will work more on intervening with chatbots, rather than having to answer every question.
Where does it say those cuts were senior software developers?
Obviously they want new workers to use AI but I don't really see anything to suggest they're so successful with AI that they're firing all their seniors and hiring juniors to be meatbags for LLMs.
This just doesn't make any sense. Juniors + AI just does not equal seniors, except for prototyping greenfield projects. Who knows about 2 months from now, it moves fast and stuff, but not right now.
I suspect the gap is that you don't know enough about IBM's business model.
When something doesn't make sense, a very common cause is a lack of context: many things can be extremely sensible for a business to do; things which appear insane from an outsider's point of view.
Then the models will put you out of work. Nobody will need you.
We'll have a world full of largely useless humans.
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