alt Hacker News> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.
In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.
AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
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I am an engineer. I hire other engineers. I run a company that ships usable software for small businesses.
We do this every day. I'm sorry to say, we are indeed shipping in days what used to take weeks.
Ever notice how people making this claim never come with receipts?
I commented this yesterday, I’ll repeat it again - what do you guys think organizations that have heavily leaned into AI are shipping nowadays?
Most devs aren’t working on cutting edge, low level, mission critical systems. AI is great for that. Every company I personally know have been fast shipping features that are being used daily by millions of people for the past 7 months.
We have the same thing on my team, and we also understand the limitations of AI generated code. If you’re more or less experienced, you can easily see the “good” and “bad” sides of it. So you kinda plan it out in a way that you can “evolve AI generated software”. I wouldn’t say the same thing in 2025 January, but it’s much different times now. Things are already working.
Yes, it can. I do this regularly.
I have literally built and shipped multiple things that would have taken me many many months to do and I’ve done it in under a week.
Many of these are LLM heavy features where the LLM can literally self-evaluate and self-optimize. I start with a general feature, it will generate adverse, synthetic data, it will build a feature, optimize it the figure out new places to improve. 1 year ago, this would have taken an entire team months to do, now, it’s 2 or 3 days of work.
Yeah absolutely embarassing take. If I had a nickle for every time someone sent me some AI garbage that was supposedly "thoroughly vetted and cross checked agent output", I'd be at least a thousandaire (gotta keep it real).
There are strengths, but if you think its writing stream of code and just using it as is, I would LOVE to compete against you.
People that manage AI agents are not engineers as they do no engineering but are instead just supervisors.
> In a year or so
Look at the best models from Spring 2025, and compare with now (and similarly for Springs 2024 and 2025). Armstrong and lots of others are betting that this trend will continue, and if it does, the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.
AI definitely leads to some productivity gain but the claims of 10x, 100x, 1000+x are (for now) irrational exuberance. Churning out prototype software has always been quick, and now it's blazing. But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game. The virtue is in their parallelizability but you still need to review their work, lest you come back to it wrestling an alligator while a ruined TV tower husk sends spark showers over the pin.