Hacker News Reader

Comment by elcritch | Hacker News Reader

Now this is how companies should be using AI. Not as an excuse to fire half the devs. Less bugs, less failures, better experience for everyone.

View on HN

We haven't fired a single person yet due to AI. We just save everyone time, make input more accurate, make our accountants better, manage our technicians and jobcards better and so on. We also made our system bullet proof to the point that we only had one weekend failure in the last 24 months, and it wasn't our fault (a third party dependency did a large deployment on a friday night). Our system is now deeply "boring" and its awesome.

Congrats, that's awesome.

Oof, we are 1/2 the size we used to be so we can do more with less. We're doing more but with half the people there are still so many gaps that I'm quitting myself out of frustration.

I wish I could work in a place like that! Any open position? :)

Let's hope this is the future of Software Development. There is so much to create yet.

Perhaps the ultimate use case would be to use AI to scan, debug and find issues etc, but never to generate new code. Still have humans writing and understanding everything, keeping things as clean and concise as possible.

It would be great net result for our brains, however too much money has been poured into this business to give up on that. My belief they will push for SWE layoffs trying to position LLM-based agents as a cost efficient alternative to human programmers. Which is extremely stupid and short-sighted but that's the strategy.

They will learn certain lessons the hard way for sure. As much as I want to spin up 100 agents in a loop on our codebase and let them loose, I also know its not feasible as they can easily go down the wrong rabbit holes or over-engineer the wrong solution. They are amazing but cannot be left 100% autonomous just yet.

> just yet.

How long, in your estimates, do you think you have before your career ends?

There are different names for this, such as The Last Mile Problem or the Ninety-Ninety Rule, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Who’s “them” and is there really one homogenous strategy?

Companies will do different things, just like they did with mobile, the internet, and computers in general.

Some strategies will work, some will fail.

"Them" are the management of frontier labs, especially OpenAI and Anthropic as they have no other products than their LLMs and they do have a fairly consistent strategy aimed at convincing large investors that (1) something that doesn't exist yet is bound to exist, and that (2) their products are far better than they really are.

This is fairly common SV strategy, used by Tesla and others, and it works extremely well in spite of people pointing out the obvious weak points.

I mean isn’t that any startup strategy in a nutshell? Why would investors invest in something uncertain if the product already exists and the new company can’t add anything to it?

Literally half of the work we did the last 12 months was this. Refactor and fix, performance improvements, security hole fillings etc. We have one or two devs doing visible feature work, the rest of us is making the system rock solid.

The only companies who will really need to fire are the big tech companies who hired just because, for empire building, or to keep talent out of competitor's hands. Nearly everyone else is actually positioned to leverage AI to now compete against the bigger players. I'm already seeing small companies have a big surge.

This is how I use it. I don't run any companies (nor am I a part of one right now) but were I to run one I would employ AI as the ultimate bug/vuln hunter. Just spin up maybe 20 agents and say "fuzz this thing to death".

> Now this is how companies should be using AI. Not as an excuse to fire half the devs.

AI is getting so good, it will probably be both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com