[spicyusername]

You're going to keep seeing this because people don't like AI adoption.

But the fact is this is not how it is. Every competent developer I know is delivering significantly more after being AI enabled.

Anyone seriously using the tools without a chip on their shoulder is going to say the same.

Are the tools delivering perfect code 100% of the time, no, of course not. But that's the new skill. Guiding them so they deliver good enough code at 5-50x the velocity. As the models improve and the ecosystem tries out new workflows, the skill changes and the output gets better and better.

What we're capable of delivering now is incredible and would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

[thegrim33]

Of course your claim of 5-50x velocity is not born out in any metrics which track industry software velocity and you need to bend yourself backwards to come up with reasons to explain why they aren't.

[esafak]

I could easily enjoy a 10x improvement when working on something I'm not familiar with once you factor in the learning time.

[kimjune01]

are merged PRs a measure of velocity? github.com/kimjune01/

[svieira]

This you?

https://june.kim/speedrunning-open-source

> tinygrad I picked on purpose. geohot narrates rejections in public, and a narrated rejection is data; a silent close is noise. Thirteen PRs, one merged, twelve closed. His comments tell the escalation story:

>> be careful with AI usage, we never trade complexity for speed

>> You need to stop with AI PRs, you will be banned.

>> Last warning about low quality PRs before I ban you from our GitHub.

>> I don’t even understand what this does. I’m not reading anything written by AI

> Each line a little more done with my shit than the last.

> Some of those PRs had real bugs with real fixes. The MATVEC pattern rejected equal-range elementwise reduces, a genuine correctness issue. But by that point the maintainer had stopped reading code and started reading provenance. “We never trade complexity for speed” is a valid engineering principle. “I’m not reading anything written by AI” is not.

> I went there for maximum surprise and got it. He had a review queue and a quality bar to protect; I had a clanker and a question. The price was his afternoon, three warnings, an account ban, and real bugs left unfixed.

Because this is Facebook-level "let's make people angry on the internet and see what happens" levels of treating people as if they were means to an end rather than an end in themselves. And you should stop.

[wiseowise]

Lil bro thinks he’s Mario Zechner, lol.

[bluefirebrand]

No, not any more than lines of code written are measures of velocity

[collingreen]

No, of course not? I don't even disagree with your main premise but obviously "raw number of merged PRs" is not a high signal metric, even more so in the age of agentic/vibe coding.

[suttontom]

It's really rare that you get someone claiming 10-50x productivity gains who posts some proof. It's not surprising that the person posting it has "contributed" nothing remotely of value except for a huge number of PRs that were closed as AI-generated spam and has been banned from contributing to multiple projects. These are the people telling you that you should be 50 times more productive and if you're not then you're "doing it wrong." You are crypto bro 2.0.

[zeroonetwothree]

I’d we are talking about adding code to a large existing production code base then there’s no way I can see to get 5x, let alone 50x. My experience and the data I’ve seen is more like a 10-20% improvement. We see the volume of code increase more than that but a lot of is bug fixes only necessary because the initial commit wasn’t adequately tested and reviewed. So the net effect is less.

Now if you mean generating some one off script or playing around with a prototype in some area you don’t know then I can see more like 5-10x but these are typically not the bottleneck for shipping software.

[spicyusername]

I'm waist deep in hundred thousand line code bases.

Biggest problem there isn't delivering the code, it's coordinating. Old problems are new again.

When every developer can now deliver 10,000 line changes in an hour, you have to be very tactful about how people carve up the code base to work in it.

[mrbungie]

I'm always wondering who has the time to consume all the new code that is being produced. Like sure, you can produce at 5-10X the speed, but is someone using those features? Not sure if the typical consumer mind can keep up with such speed of changes.

[pelotron]

My embedded systems company has a very strict code quality standard that requires every single patch to be reviewed. This can be very time consuming especially when reviewing the deeper tech modules that have few experts. Imagining what it looks like to now be required to review 10x the code per day is a little dire... I can imagine developers simply turning into code reviewers for the bots. Is this the future? Or do we eventually turn the bots loose on code review as well?

We have been using Copilot for a year or two but it's not required. Any developer who asks for a license gets one. So far I haven't seen anyone get to the point of prompting it to write entire features at a time.

[Tade0]

> Guiding them so they deliver good enough code at 5-50x the velocity.

Huge problem with this is the rate at which anyone can take accountability for the code produced.

Of course you can let AI do reviews, but my experience so far is that it's, broadly speaking, not working.

[agentultra]

They're expensive to perform and rarely are reproducible but I'll wait for the empirical studies before believing any claims.

We can't even decide if type systems have made us more productive. It's barely been studied. Same with test-driven development.

What it sounds like we'll see, from your description of AI-enabled developers, is a commensurate (perhaps linear) increase in the rate of errors reaching production systems. Every line of code is a liability. Now everyone has a fire-hose they can aim at a production environment.

At least time and effort prevented some bad ideas and potentially bad code from reaching production.

I'm sure the platforms providing these tools are going to be happy with the results when every business writing code this way becomes dependent on them and have no exit strategy. The prices increase, the service gets worse, and you're locked in. Sounds real productive.

[ryandrake]

This is a business mindset, though. AI is great if you care about "delivering" stuff and "velocity" and you don't care what that stuff looks like. I got into computer programming because I like to program computers, not whatever this is. So glad I changed roles away from software development and only do programming at home as a hobby.

[spicyusername]

Woodworkers and furniture factories live happily side by side.

The unfortunate fact is that your boss or your customers never cared what your code looked like. They just cared that it worked bug free.

The craft will live on, no doubt, but the fact is that we're in the age of industrial programming.

Spending too much time twiddling line spacing, abstraction names, and dialing everything in just so is now for fun and not for profit.

Although to be honest, AI enables you to do that at scale too. It's never been easier to rename or refactor tens of thousands of lines to your hearts content. Even twiddling is accelerated.

[snowe2010]

Companies (and countries) learned a hundred years ago that everything you own, all your assets, are actually liabilities. The more you own the more difficult it is to run your business or country. This isn’t the age of industrialism in programming, or maybe it is and we’ll very quickly learn that you don't want to be generating code this quickly. It’s all a liability, not an asset.

[svieira]

> 50x the velocity

:blinks: You are producing in a week what used to take you a year?

[anon22981]

Honest take: I work less now with maybe slightly faster results while the output quality is probably about the same. Some bugs sometimes fall through, but when hasn’t that been the case?

I take effort to write specs for the agent and I take effort reading PR’s but thats maybe an hour of work. Obviously there are meetings, sometimes tasks require more planning, sometimes I investigate production problems/data more manually, but overall - I feel I work less after agents became a thing. Kind of ashamed of it tbh.

[discreteevent]

And at the same time they talk about "competent developer"s

[spicyusername]

Lol, it's not sustained 50x for every task every minute.

But there are definitely many tasks that used to take a very long time that now take almost no time at all, and that can be delivered in parallel with other tasks.

[brazukadev]

"git clone" is still 100x faster than anything you will build.

[devmor]

That's a very silly claim to make, because you can make that same claim about writing a bash script.

[svieira]

Yes, but what _percentage_ are they? Or is this the XKCD optimization graph all over again?

[neogodless]

Can someone translate this?

> What we're capable of delivering now is incredible and would have been unimaginable just a few years ago

What I mean is - are there concrete examples, real world "things" that came from AI programming, that are incredible, and someone can talk about and point to how AI led to the thing being possible?

[pluralmonad]

One thing I will say has been a personal boon, is Claude picking up the slack for my personal (relative) weaknesses. My project frontends are prettier than before and my sysadmin tasks take much less research time. I don't think it makes my strengths that much stronger, but it raises the floor of everything.

[neogodless]

But raising the floor or having some improved tools available to pad your skillset is neither incredible nor unimaginable. Could you elaborate how you feel it would have been unimaginable before you started using Claude?

[archagon]

I have to admit that these days, whenever I see a project site clearly built with Calude, I am overcome with a vague sense of nausea and head for the exit.

I don't think I'm the only one.

[spicyusername]

Every software that is released by any big company is now in part AI written.

Over the next few years, every piece of software everywhere will be in part AI written.

There's not going to be anything to point to because it's everything.

[neogodless]

That doesn't really clear anything up.

We've had large applications released by big companies before AI.

Windows 11 existed before Microsoft started relying on AI to contribute to the codebase. What incredible things have been added to Windows 11 now that Microsoft is using AI to write it?

[wiseowise]

They’ve said competent. Obviously you’re not competent enough to understand it. Try to feed their message into latest Opus and ask “explain like I’m five”. Good luck!

[d_silin]

After going back and forth, I stopped using AI for coding at all.

Maybe I am not "competent" developer, but the point has some merit.

[Jyaif]

I love AI, but it's possible that we are in an temporary golden age of software development because of 3 things:

1. The software is simple because lowly humans wrote them and debugged them and maintained them.

2. The humans are competent in software engineering.

3. All of a sudden we now have help from AI.

Point 3. is here to stay, but 1. and 2. could disappear.

[zackify]

I feel the same way.

Even if I'm reviewing more, I built the feature without even opening my editor.

My workflow is:

1. Plan mode 2. Read thoroughly or skim if its an easy task 3. /draft command that puts a draft PR on github 4. Review closely then send to team

[wiseowise]

5. Cover while some poor sod is about to explode from another 3k lines slop PR

[zackify]

lol most prs i made are under 500 lines. who is allowing 3k slop per pr what kind of development philosophy is that

[noveltyaccount]

I'm someone with 20 years in software and the last 10 in management. I have good instincts, good design pattern knowledge, and understand system design well. But my actual coding skills are rusty, I can do it but it takes a lot of time to RTFM because specific libraries and syntax aren't on the top of my mind.

With AI I can build. I'm having so much fun turning ideas into code. I can do a week's worth of work before lunch. I can ask AI to add comments so detailed that my code becomes a refresher tutorial.

It's so exciting to be able to bring my ideas to life, make use of my experience, and not be hobbled by my somewhat atrophied hands-on coding skills. I for one welcome this revolution.

[r_lee]

I keep seeing this point made, but what happens when there is not enough demand for all this code that's being produced?

I'm always seeing these "I can finally make my projects and slack off at work!" but I just can't help but feel like people aren't thinking about what comes next

[wiseowise]

Who said anything about demand. Just let the addict scratch his OCD. It’s a standard value distribution from middle class to hyperscalers. System works as intended.

[noveltyaccount]

Right now the demand for the code I produce is me :) Ideas I've always wanted to pursue but never had the time. Now I have the time.

[devmor]

5-50x huh? Years of AI hype and yet still to this day, not a single person or organization can provide any kind of reputable evidence that it has significantly increased their productivity.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

IME having a "rubber duck" for debugging & planning can be helpful. Having it talk back is a significant boost. Having it write the code isn't. AI is nice at helping me explain the problem I'm trying to solve to myself. It's much harder to write clear, unambiguous, succinct English than any programming language, but being forced to do so to explain something to an AI helps clarify my own thoughts. The AI's output isn't nearly as relevant, though it can be helpful since it can run its own searches across the code & invalidate my assumptions sometimes.

[devmor]

Yes, I'd agree with that.

I think there's a significant value in the "plan" mode that copilot, claude, etc. expose.

I also think there's significant value in using these tools to connect data silos and combine information via RAG.

I think the long term value that comes from this stuff is going to be the specialized, narrower tools we can distill out from it.

[wiseowise]

I’ll release the metrics in 2 years (after vesting), but for now I’ve never been so productive! Like 100x!