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by pjc50 2 days ago
> Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.

This is the big one. It's clear that AI can generate huge volumes of code by KLOC. It is not clear that spending a lot of money tokenmaxxing will eventually result in increased real revenue for software businesses, and eventually even an MBA has to look at a "money in vs money out" chart.
1 comments
mattcasmith 2 days ago
Have been thinking about this a lot recently. AI could be an absolute game changer for a small start-up rushing a product to market – you could quickly build an MVP that would take years and tens of hires before.

But how much ROI is there for large businesses with established products and huge development teams burning through tokens making subtle tweaks that can’t be directly tied to revenue?

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mathw 2 days ago
Not much ROI, if any. My employer's been making some studies and come up with very modest productivity gains - so of course they want us all to use it, but I'm not sure they're taking the true costs into account. Especially not once token pricing actually reflects reality, and we all get brain rot from using the things instead of thinking. If this thing doesn't collapse before we can run a solid coding assistant model on a developer's machine, maybe it's got some legs.

That doesn't seem very likely.

The legacy of LLMs will live on in various models doing various specialist things (they seem like a really good progression on speech synthesis for example) but the current edifice will come crashing down and if we're very very very lucky they won't take the global economy with it.

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j4102_ 2 days ago
I've been thinking about this too. The quality maintenance of large systems isn't something you can just completely automate away with AI. Even if the code is written with AI, you still have to read through and verify it.

Even though that is still faster than regularly writing code, I end up losing that nuanced knowledge that I get from going through documentation and writing it out by hand - actually doing the work. I just don't see it actually replacing developers unless managers are willing to produce MORE code with the SAME level of quality.

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