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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing, it doesn't have to produce code better than me.

There is a wide range of code that will do the same job. 15s vs 2h for code 60% as good? 10 minutes for code 80% as good? 10 minutes today and 10 minutes tomorrow to fix something that is 30% as good?

A lot of people are going to draw that line in a different place and now that people can make that trade off you will quickly find they will and it probably wont fall where you would like it to.

At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers. They don't pay you to write good code. Sometimes those two align and both sides are happy but they don't and often wont.

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> At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers.

I wonder, given LLM's ability to "produce code faster" are they also producing value faster? I don't see it as an end user. Software is getting worse and worse, buggier and buggier, every release. I don't see it at my company either. We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.

> are they producing value faster?

I don't know. Maybe.

Software might be getting worse but we are not far enough along yet for it to matter. Most people use less than 10 websites total, the internet has shrunk. It will take a while for it to be obvious in the other backend services that they dont know they use. People are really tolerant of buggy shit and some software has already been basically wiped out. Dev tooling is a blood bath right now, things like tailwind and all sorts of little CI tooling is fast disappearing. I wonder what happens to the open core stuff like elasticsearch / gitlab / redis where they gate some features in the enterprise offering that could probably be implemented by LLM pretty fast.

> We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.

Right but did they start altering the schedule when AI entered the picture? We have barely just passed "tokens == productivity".

Also people tolerate quite a bit of buggy shit. Anthropic is down to two 9s (aha) and people still use them. There is a github ci failure post on here like every other day.

> Anthropic is down to two 9s (aha) and people still use them. There is a github ci failure post on here like every other day.

Anthropic and GitHub’s consumers are software teams. I wonder what would happens if something like SolidWorks was that unreliable.

The answer is no, at least so far. There's been a few big quantitative studies (CircleCI, a few others I can't remember) which show this - more code, more branches, more PRs, but actually less going to production. It's not even like a 10% increase on average or something, it's less! And yet anecdotally people say it gives you 2x, 3x, 10x speedups.

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