[aenis]

There is a large gap between people who have been using AI for coding for the hundreds or thousands of hours, vs. those who do not. People like Ed Zitron, who never managed or participated in dev projects scream from the rooftops that AI coding is only relevant for small hobby projects. Meanwhile, in my own backyard, we are happily shipping production stuff for a few months now, and newly launched IT projects get launched with substantially smaller teams. And anyone who ever had to work with mediocre developers will take Fable any day of the week.

[tripleee]

You've never actually read anything Ed Zitron wrote, have you?

[aenis]

No, and I generally agree with most of his thesis - but the stuff he says about AI coding is the weakest part of his spiel.

[tripleee]

He heavily leans on developers for his points on coding, and then spices it up.

> For example, major media outlets will gladly write that “AI can build software,” but said sentence suggests that you can just type “build me Slack 2” into Claude and have it fart out a fully-functional, production-ready piece of software, rather than a quasi-functional mound of code-slop that can do enough to trick a business idiot or lazy journalist, but little else.

Here is the latest point he made on development and that seems accurate to me? If a non-technical person hands AI an under-specified prompt you get quasi-functional slop.

Can you link the piece where he says it's only relevant for small hobby projects?

I'm not a huge fan of his or anything but your comment is just.. pulling stuff completely out of no-where.

[aenis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mn-TNLwQys&t=677s

around 9:30 "this is a thing that has its use for the little things, but the moment you start expanding it"

This is just plain wrong. We deal with codebases in double digit millions LOCs with models - it takes genuine skills and instrumentation to do right, but it does work. And I know devs who take this view - that AI is dumb, useless, a gimmick - and what they have in common is they have not tried to put in the hours to learn how to tame the beast.

Anyway, I am losing interest in debating the topic, the efficient markets will deal with this objectively. I can't see how a company employing the usual high-low mix of developers can compete with a company that has a small number of elite devs equipped with those tools and unencumbered by having to manage large development teams and associated bureaucracies. Time will tell.

[tripleee]

You can't just take one sentence out of context. Huh?

"...you're just kicking the can. You're still going to have to read all this code to make sure it makes sense"

He's commenting on that maybe it's not a huge productivity boost once you include the reviewing- if you want to get good results you have to know what you're doing, direct it, review it. If you skip this, you get aimless slop.

How on earth is this "plain wrong"?

> the efficient markets will deal with this objectively

maybe. It's a pretty damn complex system.

[FromTheFirstIn]

Pretty sure you’re arguing with a chatbot that’s been told to Stan AI development. Don’t get baited!

[scotty79]

> sentence suggests that you can just type “build me Slack 2” into Claude and have it fart out a fully-functional, production-ready piece of software, rather than a quasi-functional mound of code-slop

How's that different from randomly selected human developer team? Other than price, time and hr. Most software project always failed for a reason.

[tripleee]

answer it yourself: what would you do if a non-technical person came to you and asked to hire you to build "slack v2"

If your next move is to create a pile of quasi-functional slop because they under-specified it.. that's not normal

[scotty79]

That's normal in sense of being a practical outcome of most software development projects.

The truth is, software development process always produced mostly garbage. Looking at only successful projects and saying "see? that's what humans do, completely unlike AI" is a bucket of survivorship bias.

[jdauriemma]

I'm sorry, but this is borderline silly. Fable has been out for less than a week and you're already making grand pronouncements about its superiority? How much first-hand evidence could you possibly have for that claim?

[tossandthrow]

Replace Fable with Opus 4.8, 4.7, or 4.6 - and it is still true

[handfuloflight]

If he is already enjoying what he claims with pre-Fable models, then it stands to reason Fable is already above that baseline, and therefore your nitpick is silly.

[jdauriemma]

That both fair and also charitable to the commenter. It's not a given that Fable is "above that baseline," all we can go by is anecdotes and Anthropic's marketing materials. Both tend to be puffed up. And if they're speaking generally about LLM-assisted coding, they could have chosen to say it that way.

[aenis]

You sometimes meet someone and hit it off immediately. A fellow engineer, hobbyist, anyone. That is my experience after working with Fable since it launched and barely sleeping. I never had more nuanced, interesting and fruitful design discussions in my life. And I've been programming across the entire stack, from transistors to enterprise architecture, and spent 40 years around computers. Love is love, it does not need to be well researched and may well be misplaced :-)

[jdauriemma]

I say the following with sincere concern.

AI is a cool technology but anthropomorphizing it and using the L-word to describe your relationship with it is a symptom of AI psychosis. Respectfully, I suggest that you take a break and touch grass.

[aenis]

Well, in my 47 years on this planed I loved various inanimate objects. Bikes, cars, computers. I'll be fine with my recent infatuation, thanks.

[aenis]

Fable caught us in the middle of a crisis where we had to replace a supplier with a quickly-put-together home made solution. We have been working with it non stop since it launched. And thanks to a lot of baseline experience with previous models, our small band of relatively old hands decided we are badly in love with it.

Now, remind yourself when was the last time you had to work with a developer who went to CS because it pays well, and has zero enthusiasm for what they are building, and are just phoning it in, with minimum effort and low skills. AI models are coming for those people first. And those people are in the fricking millions. Strip IT teams to people with passion either for product or for tech, give them such tools, and watch. Compare this with a normal IT shop with a bunch of great people, a metric ton of average people, a few toxic imbecilles, and the necessary HR/management bureaucracy to keep that bunch on a leash.

[loki-ai]

that's what I'm seeing it across other teams as well: backlogs size barely smaller and even defects rising. the low performers have only gotten lazier.

the difference now is that people are starting to openly question the extreme productivity gaps and their usual excuses aren't working anymore.

AI doesn't need to replace everyone. just dropping the bottom 1 or 2 people per team would already be catastrophic for the field

[jdauriemma]

I'm happy for you; clearly you've had a good experience.