alt Hacker NewsI feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI: verification of outputs, prompt crafting, cheat detection, debugging, whatever.
This seems observationally true in the tech industry, where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones, and meanwhile the quality of the consumer software that people actually use is in a nosedive.
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> where the world’s best programmers and technologists are tied up fiddling with transformers and datasets and evals so that the world’s worst programmers can slap together temperature converters and insecure twitter clones
This statement is incredibly accurate
I think the software quality nosedive significantly predates generative AI.
I think it's too early to say whether AI is exacerbating the problem (though I'm sympathetic to the view that it is) or improving it, or just maintaining the status quo.
Personally, having worked in professional enterprise software for ~7 years now I've come to a pretty hard conclusion.
Most software should not exist.
That's not even meant in the tasteful "Its a mess" way. From a purely money making efficiency standpoint upwards of 90% of the code I've written in this time has not meaningfully contributed back to the enterprise, and I've tried really hard to get that number lower. Mind you, this is professional software. If you consider the vibe coder guys, I'll estimate that number MUCH higher.
It just feels like the whole way we've fit computing into the world is misaligned. We spent days building UIs that dont help the people we serve and that break at the first change to the process, and because of the support burden of that UI we never get to actually automate anything.
I still think computers are very useful to humanity, but we have forgot how to use them.
>it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which is created by the usage of AI:
I mean, isn't that obvious looking at economic output and growth? The Shopify CEO recently published a memo in which he claimed that high achievers saw "100x growth". Odd that this isn't visible in the Spotify market cap. Did they fire 99% of their engineers instead? Maybe the memo was AI written too.
Are there any 5 man software companies that do the work of 50? I haven't seen them. I wonder how long this can go on with the real world macro data so divorced from what people have talked themselves into.
the state of consumer software is already so bad & LLMs are trained on a good chunk of that so their output can possible produce worse software right? /s
The other night I was too tired to code so I decided to try vibe coding a test framework for the C/C++ API I help maintain. I've tried this a couple times so far with poor results but I wanted to try again. I used Claude 3.5 IIRC.
The AI was surprisingly good at filling in some holes in my specification. It generated a ton of valid C++ code that actually compiled(except it omitted the necessary #includes). I built and ran it and... the output was completely wrong.
OK, great. Now I have a few hundred lines of C++ I need to read through and completely understand to see why it's incorrect.
I don't think it will be a complete waste of time because the exercise spurred my thinking and showed me some interesting ways to solve the problem, but as far as saving me a bunch of time, no. In fact it may actually cost me more time trying to figure out what it's doing.
With all due respect to folks working on web and phone apps, I keep getting the feeling that AI is great for high level, routine sorts of problems and still mostly useless for systems programming.