[entropyneur]

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws.

Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

[amarble]

This weekend I tried what I'd call a medium scale agentic coding project[0], following what Anthropic demonstrated last week autonomously building a C-compiler [1]. Bottom line is, it's possible to make demos that look good, but it really doesn't work well enough to build software you would actually use. This naturally lends itself to the "everybody is taking about how great it is but nobody is building anything real with it" construct we're in right now. It is great, but also not really useful.

[0] https://www.marble.onl/posts/this_cost_170.html

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

[parliament32]

Related, this reminds me of the time Cursor spent millions of dollars worth of tokens to write a new browser with LLMs and ended up with a non-functioning wrapper of existing browser libraries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646777

[jofla_net]

Thank you for doing this.

[xyzzy123]

Org processes have not changed. Lots of the devs I know are enjoying the speedup on mundane work, consuming it as a temporary lifestyle surplus until everything else catches up.

You can't saw faster than the wood arrives. Also the layout of the whole job site is now wrong and the council approvals were the actual bottleneck to how many houses could be built in the first place... :/

[gbuk2013]

Basically this. My last several tickets were HITL coding with AI for several hours and then waiting 1-2 days while the code worked its way through PR and CI/CD process.

Coding speed was never really a bottleneck anywhere I have worked - it’s all the processes around it that take the most time and AI doesn’t help that much there.

[dent9]

True story; I wanted to make a tiny update to our CI / CD to upload copies of some artifacts to S3. It took 1min for the LLM to remind me of the correct syntax in aws cli to do the upload and the syntax to plug it into our GitHub Actions. It then took me the next 3 hours to figure out which IAMs needed to be updated in order to allow the upload before it was revealed that Actually uploading to the S3 requires the company IT to adjust bucket policies and this requires filing a ticket with IT and waiting 1-5 business days for a response then potentially having a call with them to discuss the change and justify why we need it. So now it's four days later and I still can't push to S3.

AI reduced this from a 5-day process to a 4.9-day process

[bunderbunder]

I’m seeing it slightly differently. So much of our new slowdown is rework because we’ve seen a bunch more API and contract churn. The project I’m on has had more rework than I care to contemplate and most of it stems from everyone’s coding agents failing to stay synced up with each other on the details and their human handlers not noticing the discrepancies until we’re well into systems integration work.

If I may hijack your analogy, it would be like if all the construction crews got really fast at their work, so much so that the city decided to go for an “iterative construction” strategy because, in isolation, the cost of one team trying different designs on-site until they hit on one they liked became very small compared to the cost of getting city planners and civil engineers involved up-front. But what wasn’t considered was the rework multiplier effect that comes into play when the people building the water, sewage, electricity, telephones, roads, etc. are all repeatedly tweaking designs with minimal coordination amongst each other. So then those tweaks keep inducing additional design tweaks and rework on adjacent contractors because none of these design changes happen in a vacuum. Next thing you know all the houses are built but now need to be rewired because the electricity panel is designed for a different mains voltage from the drop and also it’s in the wrong part of the house because of a late change from overhead lines in the alleys to underground lines below the street.

Many have observed that coding agents lack object permanence so keeping them on a coherent plan requires giving them such a thoroughly documented plan up front. It actually has me wondering if optimal coding agent usage at scale resembles something of a return to waterfall (probably in more of a Royce sense than the bogeyman agile evangelists derived from the original idea) where the humans on the team mostly spend their time banging out systems specifications and testing protocols, and iteration on the spec becomes somewhat more removed from implementing it than it is in typical practice nowadays.

[arrrg]

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before).

I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.

Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.

Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?

[pzo]

> To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before).

The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste. I think distribution will be very important in the future.

We might end up that in future that you have already in social media where influencers copy someones post/video and not giving credits to original author.

[kombookcha]

>The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste.

Or indeed, somebody might steal and launder your work by scooping them up into a training set for their model and letting it spit out sloppy versions of your thing.

[shinycode]

I agree. It’s really easier to build low-impact tools for personal use. I managed to produce tools I would never have had time to build and I use them everyday. But I will never sell them because it’s tailored to my needs and it makes no sense to open source anything nowadays. For work it’s different, product teams still need to decide what to build and what is helpful to the clients. Our bugs are not self-fixed by AI yet. I think Anthropic saying 100% of their code is AI generated is a marketing stunt. They have all reasons to say that to sell their tool that generates code. It sends a strong signal to the industry that if they can do it, it could be easier for smaller companies. We are not there yet from a client perspective asking a feature and the new feature is shipped 2 days later in prod without human interactions

[c048]

I wonder what happened to the old addage of "only 10% of the time you actually spend coding, the rest of the time is figuring out what is needed".

At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work that needed to be done.

[rtcoms]

For m, I'm demotivated to work on many ideas thinking that anyone can easily copy it or OpenClaw/Nanobot will easily replicate 90% of that unctionality.

So now need to think of different kind of ideas, something on line of games that may take multiple iteration to get perfected.

[pixl97]

>thinking that anyone can easily copy it

I mean this is how it's always been throughout history.

Creating something new is hard, copying something in terms of energy spent, is far easier. This is software or physical objects that don't require massive amounts of expensive technology to reproduce.

[meowface]

In a few decades, AIs will probably be better at those than most humans. Possibly even sooner.

[wongarsu]

At my $work this manifests as more backlog items being ticked off, more one-off internal tooling, features (and tools) getting more bells-and-whistles and much more elaborate UI. Also some long-standing bugs being fixed by claude code.

Headline features aren't much faster. You still need to gather requirements, design a good architecture, talk with stakeholders, test your implementation, gather feedback, etc. Speeding up the actual coding can only move the needle so much.

[krinchan]

I feel like we work at the same place. IT Husbandry/Debt Paying/KTLO whatever you call it is being ground into dust. Especially repetitive stuff that I originally would've needed a week to automate and never could get to the top of the once quarterly DevOps sprint...bam. GitHub Action workflow runs weekly to pull in the latest OS images, update and roll over a smoke test VM, monitor, roll over the rest or rollback and ping me in Slack. Done in half a day.

I've got a couple Claude Code skills set up where I just copy/paste a Slack link into it and it links people relevant docs, gives them relevant troubleshooting from our logs, and a hook on the slack tools appends a Claude signature to make sure they know they weren't worth my time.

That said, there's this weird quicksand people around me get in where they just spend weeks and weeks on their AI tools and don't actually do much of anything? Like bro you burned your 5 hour CC Enterprise limit all week and committed...nothing?

[Cthulhu_]

I'm sure there's plenty of new software being released and built by agents, but the same problem as handcrafted software remains - finding an audience. The easier and quicker it is to build software, or the more developers build software, the more stuff is thrown at a wall to see what sticks, but I don't think there's more capacity for sticktivity, if my analogy hasn't broken down by now.

[bananaflag]

I think, if there were to be a noticeable increase in software quantity due to agentic coding, we should test it by looking into indie games.

[Cthulhu_]

According to SteamDB (and Reddit), 2024 and 2025 both saw about 19.000 games released on Steam - there's a big jump between '23 and '24 of about 5000 games, but oddly it plateaued then.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1pl7kg1/over_1900...

[co_king_3]

LLMs are unusably bad at generating game code

[conartist6]

It's AI features and 10x more bugs. Microsoft is leading the way.

[dent9]

It's ironic to me because I'm the Luddite who refuses to adopt agentic AI and still using only the Chat interface with Codex and Claude inside the VS Code extensions to help me with both work projects and personal projects. And I've had amazing results with only this. "Look at this codebase and tell me the best ways to integrate some new feature", "look at this source code file and tell me what's wrong with it", "show me how to implement this thing I want". Then I copy and adapt the results as needed and integrate it with the rest of my work. This has worked great and I've shipped a ton of projects much faster and easier. Clearly the AI could have written a lot of it itself but I'm not sure I'm really lacking in any benefits with this method. So this makes the whole agentic push especially seem like some kinda over hyped gimmick.

[sdoering]

Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers. I created a few CLI tools that make my life and that of my agent smoother sailing for information retrieval. I created, inspired by a blog post, a digital personal assistant, that really enables me to better juggle different work contexts as well as different projects within these work contexts.

I created a platform for a virtual pub quiz for my team at my day job, built multiple pandingpages for events, debugged dark table to recognize my new camera (it was to new to be included in the camera.xml file, but the specs were known). I debugged quite a few parts of a legacy shitshow of an application, did a lot of infrastructure optimization and I also created a massive ton of content as a centaur in dialog with the help of Claude Code.

But I don't do "Show HN" posts. And I don't advertise my builds - because other than those named, most are one off things, that I throw away after this one problem was solved.

To me code became way more ephemeral.

But YMMV - and that is a good thing. I also believe that way less people than the hype bubble implies are actually really into hard core usage like Pete Steinberger or Armin Ronacher and the likes.

[overfeed]

> Quite a few - and I know I am only speaking for myself - live on my different computers

I use AI/agents in quite similar ways, and even rekindled multiple personal projects that had stalled. However, to borrow OPs parlance, these are not "houses" - more like sheds and tree-houses. They are fun and useful, but not moving the needle on housing stock supply, so to speak.

[mkvoid]

If you recall it, would you mind sharing the blog post that inspired the digital personal assistant?

[csande17]

It's not 10x, but https://www.ft.com/content/5ac2ee5f-f8bd-4f39-a759-3c5c50c8b... has some graphs suggesting a 1.5x increase in metrics like "number of new apps published in the iOS App Store" and "lines of code committed by US GitHub users".

People haven't noticed because the software industry was already mostly unoriginal slop, even prior to LLMs, and people are good at ignoring unoriginal slop.

[arghwhat]

The real outcome is mostly a change in workflow and a reasonable increase in throughput. There might be a 10x or even 100x increase in creation of tiny tools or apps (yay to another 1000 budget assistant/egg timer/etc. apps on the app/play store), but hardly something one would notice.

To be honest, I think the surrounding paragraph lumps together all anti-AI sentiments.

For example, there is a big difference between "all AI output is slop" (which is objectively false) and "AI enables sloppy people to do sloppy work" (which is objectively true), and there's a whole spectrum.

What bugs me personally is not at all my own usage of these tools, but the increase in workload caused by other people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage. In recent months, the extra workload has far exceeded my own productivity gains.

For the non-technical, imagine a hypochondriac using chatgpt to generate hundreds of pages of "health analysis" that they then hand to their doctor and expect a thorough read and opinion of, vs. the doctor using chatgpt for sparring on a particular issue.

[pixl97]

>people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

[PlatoIsADisease]

You aren't notcing it?

Small and mid sized companies are getting custom software now.

Small software is able to be packed with extra features instead of bare minimum.

[8note]

do you have the right expectations?

rather than new stuff for everyone to use, the future could easily be everyone building their own bespoke tools for their own problems.

[nathias]

yes, there is a very large increase in TUI tools

[n4pw01f]

I am seeing shit tons of chatbots for everything under the sun being onboarded at corporate