AstroBen

Why is it an all or nothing decision?

Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later

There's a good reason for that. The end result of exploring what they can actually do isn't very exciting or marketable

"I shipped code 15% faster with AI this month" doesn't have the pull of a 47 agent setup on a mac mini

thanks for your insightful contribution

The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening

They pass it because it went viral a week ago and has been patched

> you have to account for the fact that AI will get better rapidly

that's nowhere near guaranteed

If they outlast the competition it might be a really hard market to enter. Models are expensive to train, and they'll get outdated. You're on a time limit to make a profit off of it

Google and Meta might be the only real threats against this given how much cash they have and so far Meta is just flopping

You can get an RSS feed here: https://hnrss.github.io/

Seems that might solve your problem

You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date

People think they should magically find out about new products without considering the macro effects of a world without advertising

Ads make the world a better place

They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers

Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices

For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher?

People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them

We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists

Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them

How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them?

How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it

I love ads

I'm curious why you hate ads? Outside of the most obnoxious recipe sites plastered with them I don't find they effect me much

The business landscape would look much different without advertising. New products would struggle to get the word out there. Cost to reach customers would go up, leading to higher product prices and lack of innovation due to not being able to break in

YouTube creators would struggle, probably going under unless they own their own products if they can't rely on sponsorships or ads

People love to complain both about privacy invasion of tracking, and then also about irrelevant products being pushed on them that they'd never want

Bad targeting is the problem! Targeting needs to be better. Do you think a business wants to push their products on people that don't want them? Of course not. It's a total waste of money

Imagine a world where micro-niche businesses could exist, where we could innovate products exactly for you and a tiny sub-group of other people that would improve your life. The only way you'd ever find out about them, and thus that they could be sustainable, is with better ad targeting

I love ads

To put a positive spin on this: we're moving quickly towards a world where AI companies control people's attention on information. This really hurts the ability for new businesses to get their name out there. Ads are really useful for new entries to a market

I think it would suck if to effectively get the word out there for a new product you needed to rely on..

...direct outreach (uneconomical for anything below $100/mo and IMO way more annoying than ads)

...word of mouth (referrals are very, very hard to control and aren't correlated with your product's quality)

..or owning a popular media source

Does that not hurt product innovation?

The harder and more expensive it is to reach customers, the more prices need to go up as a result

ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?

Discord hasn't been video game only for a long time

> The compute will be used to create my own business to make money

tell me you've never seriously attempted starting a software business without telling me

It's like all these people for the last 2 decades "if only I knew how to code I'd make an app and be rich!" yeah sure you would

Sometimes, yeah. I don't think we're disagreeing

What I'd also add:

Because of the unspecified behaviour, you're always going to need someone technical that understands the output to verify it. Tests aren't enough

I'm not even sure if this is a net productivity benefit. I think it is? Some cases it's a clear win.. but definitely not always. You're reducing time coding and now putting extra into spec writing + review + verification

Exponential growth towards what? What's your 2 year prediction?

Codex on high, yeah it had access to compiling/running

Are you saying you've never had them fail at a task?

I wanted to refactor a bunch of tests in a TypeScript project the other day into a format similar to table driven tests that are common in Golang, but seemingly not so much in TypeScript. Vitest has specific syntax affordances for it, though

It utterly failed at the task. Tried many times with increasing specificity in my prompt, did one myself and used it as an example. I ended up giving up and just doing it manually

You're asking me to do the thing I just said was frustrating haha. I have no idea. It's a new technology and we have nothing to draw from to make predictions. But for the sake of fun..

New code generation / modification I think we're hitting a point of diminishing returns and they're not going to improve much here

The limitation is fundamentally that they can only be as good as the detail in the specs given, or the test harnesses provided to them. Any detail left out they're going to make up, and hopefully it's what you want (often it's not!). If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today

Code optimization I think they'll get quite a bit better. If you give them GCC it's probable they'll be able to improve upon it

You're right. It's been pretty incredible. It's also frustrating as hell though when people extrapolate from this progress

Just because we're here doesn't mean we're getting to AGI or software developers begging for jobs at Starbucks

You're heavily implying that because it can do this task, it can do any task at this difficulty or lower. Wrong. This thing isn't a human at the level of writing a compiler, and shouldn't be compared to one

Codex frustratingly failed at refactoring my tests for me the other day, despite me trying many, many prompts of increasing specificity. A task a junior could've done

Am I saying "haha it couldn't do a junior level task so therefor anything harder is out of reach?" No, of course not. Again, it's not a human. The comparison is irrelevant

Calculators are superhuman at arithmetic. Not much else, though. I predict this will be superhuman at some tasks (already is) and we'll be better at others

We're at the apex of the hype cycle. I think it'll die down in a year and we'll get a better picture of how people have integrated the tools

Even if it's not straight astroturfing I think people are wowed and excited and not analyzing it with a clear head

I think you're way over estimating the cost of a phone and Netflix. Even the latest iPhone pro max is going to cost you an amortized ~$20 a month or less. That's completely dwarfed by my housing, food, utility and other unavoidable expenses

Oh how I'd love to just use an old android with graphene os and work half the time. Unfortunately the math doesn't work

Maybe we're talking about different things?

That's one of the biggest benefits of software quality and the long-term investment: how easy is your thing to change?

No-one serious is claiming 6x productivity improvements for close to equal quality

This is proving GP's point that you're going off feels and/or exaggerating

Unsuccessful projects: way less than 10 years

Successful projects: quite often much longer than 10 years

Code quality doesn't matter until lots of people start using what you wrote and you need to maintain/extend/change it

God it's a depressing thought that whatever work you do is just a throwaway no-one will use. That shouldn't be your end goal

True. That capability might be reserved for AGI. The current implementation does feel like a party trick and I don't enjoy working with it

I made a very similar comment to this just today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46925036

I agree, and I didn't even fully consider "recompiling" would change important implementation details. Oh god

This seems like an impossible problem to solve? Either we specify every little detail, or AI reads our minds

This seems like an incredibly bad deal, but maybe they're probing to see if people will pay more

You know if people pay for this en masse it'll be the new default pricing, with fast being another step above

Humans not caring about performance is so common we have Wirth's law

But now the clankers are coming for our jobs suddenly we're optimization specialists