alt Hacker NewsThe thing I am struggling with is where is the impact of LLM tools, especially given the massive increase in token consumption from 2025 to now and the saturated presence of LLMs everywhere.
Naively speaking, I have so many expectations for the impact of this tech.
I'd expect a noticeable uptick in applications published on Google, Apple and Microsoft app stores. I'd also expect an uptick of games published to Steam. I'd expect an uptick in Github repos and libraries on PyPi.
I'd also expect some impact on the GDP ⸻ a non-negligible part of running a business is communication, planning, ads. Naively, I'd expect that LLMs should be able to both speed some of these things up and lubricate others.
I'd also expect that large corpos like Microsoft and Apple would have more resources to spare on the essential details of their OS like having a functioning taskbar or a predictable, consistent GUI.
I'd expect increased SAT scores or improved PISA results. Maybe even improved mental health, let's go wild.
It's strikes me as a reasonably useful tool, personally.
Yet, where are the goods in the aggregate?
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The tech is still young and projects take time. And there are many slow parts of building that have not been accelerated (mythical man month).
I have started making an indie game, as one does, and it’s easily going 2-4x speed, but even still I’d predict a year of free time development with focus to ‘finish’ this thing. But the latest agentic tech is 3 months old.
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Wow, I'm impressed at your usage of this. Apparently it's 0x2E3B, named "three-em dash".
You must be human!
Programming is a necessary but not sufficient condition for software products to exist. So while the programming has to be good, so too do many other things, like product vision, product management, project management, and of course there still needs to be feedback between all of the above so that engineering isn't implementing a misunderstood version of the product and that product isn't asking for 5 years and a PhD research team. And on and on and on. Typing the code is like 2-10% of actually ending up with a software project and it's more toward the 2% for a software business.
So while AI made coding maybe 110% faster, it has also made literally every other person in the process lose their gd minds and they're wanting to break or skip everything else in the process to just shit out code faster.