[lp4v4n]

I'm curious to check how faster AAA games will hit the market in the next years compared to the pre-LLM era. Or how much of the aging COBOL code base out there will disappear in the next decade.

When concrete things like that start to happen, then I will start to believe in the 10x claim.

[chickensong]

I'm not sure those are great examples. Why not just consider normal apps?

I don't think we'll see AAA game velocity change until asset generation progresses quite a bit, not to mention stuff like rigging. Even then, there's still a layer between code and engine where you have to wire everything together which an LLM will struggle with.

Replacing some old COBOL is probably more of a management decision based on appetite for change and politics rather than development speed.

Aren't there some measurable things like github repo creation, PRs, app store additions, etc. that can be correlated to LLM adoption? Didn't Show HN have to get throttled after LLMs arrived?

[Towaway69]

I think your answer is the reason why. LLM performance is fine when applied to everything they can do.

Take LLM out that safe space and suddenly they are no silver bullet, in fact they are unless.

So of course those making the 10x claim mean in the safe space where LLM can handle all activities required. You can’t have it both ways 10x and difficult and confusing tasks for LLMs.

[chickensong]

Right, I get that. I'm just saying it seems wrong to throw up minority examples. Nobody is pumping out AAA games at speed with LLMs, nor is anyone claiming to do so. There will likely always be some areas where LLMs are bad or useless.

How many people are writing crud apps using mainstream languages vs COBOL though? You don't need 100% silver bullet 1-shot everything, just to recognize the signals that for many use cases, there's a significant shift happening. The safe space is expanding and velocity is increasing.

[Towaway69]

Definitely the safe space is expanding but how fragile and expensive is this expansion?

AI requires a larger amount of fragile resources to work as opposed to an editor, keyboard and a human.

It some sense it’s a bit like the bitcoin revolution that slowed down once transaction times ballooned out. And blockchains didn’t replace databases as expected. Probably for very good reasons: resources required v. results delivered.

I personally agree that AI is great technology for some great new tools. But we still haven’t found its limits: cost v. results. That happened with bitcoins and blockchains is still outstanding for AIs.

[chickensong]

The resources are definitely an issue. I'm still sucking from the corporate teat, but my hope is that by the time the frontier race slows down and they tighten the screws too much, the local models will be good enough. It sounds like recent local models are already getting pretty good for normal duties, but honestly, if it all goes away tomorrow, that's fine too. I'll go back to the old ways. I'd miss the informational capabilities more than the coding capabilities, but I'm no stranger to man pages.

As an aside, I still think there's a place for blockchains. They're not a good replacement for a typical database, but I think some of the concepts are useful. The idea of distributed ledgers and smart contracts have a lot of applications IMHO, particularly in government. The traceability of transactions seems like a great fit to enable transparency of government spending. Of course, governments are allergic to that idea for the usual reasons, but it's still a nice idea. Distributed computing is hard, and it's a shame that blockchains were usurped by crypto bro scams. I'm still rooting for the folks who are trying to push distributed technology forward though.

[plausibility]

I feel like that’s tied to the hardware the companies are using. All the banks I’ve worked at run z/OS mainframes, can they even deploy modern run of the mill Go/Python/Rust code or is getting off COBOL reliant on hardware changes?