[dw_arthur]

It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.

[sillyfluke]

>funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet.

That's because the threat is now not other businesses, but your own users who decide to vibe-code their own "Claw" product instead of using your company's vibeslop, so there are no buyers for your single-week product. All these new harness developers are engaging in resume-driven development to save their own asses. The only ones that are not naked when the tide recedes are the ones that are able to jump to the next layer of abstraction on the infinite staircase, until the next tide comes five seconds later.

[crystal_revenge]

I used to think this was a sign that AI code isn't really useful, but I've changed my tune (also I believe these numbers have changed in the last few months).

As an example: One of my most promising projects I was discussing with a friend and we realized together we could potentially use these tools to build a two person agency with no need to hire anyone ever. If this were to work, could theoretically make nice revenue and it shouldn't show up in any metric anywhere.

Additionally I've heard of countless teams cancelling their contracts with outsourced engineers because cheap but bad coders in India are worse that an LLM and still cost more. I'm not sure if there's a number around this activity, but again, these type of changes don't show up in the usual places.

My current belief is not that AI will replace traditional software engineering it will replace a good chunk of the entire model of software.

[sillyfluke]

>One of my most promising projects I was discussing with a friend and we realized together we could potentially use these tools to build a two person agency with no need to hire anyone ever...My current belief is not that AI will replace traditional software engineering it will replace a good chunk of the entire model of software

You're not following your last line to its logical conclusion regarding your own prospects: no one is going to buy the vibeslop your two person agency is selling because they'd rather create and maintain their own vibeslop instead of dealing with yours.

If you follow some of your thoughts to their logical conclusion you'll realize the parent is right: there will be limited productivity that ends up fueling the economy when nobody is buying each other's vibeslop.

[HWR_14]

> If this were to work, could theoretically make nice revenue and it shouldn't show up in any metric anywhere.

Except production GDP, the standard measure of economic activity.

[bryanrasmussen]

>One of my most promising projects I was discussing with a friend and we realized together we could potentially use these tools to build a two person agency with no need to hire anyone ever. If this were to work, could theoretically make nice revenue and it shouldn't show up in any metric anywhere.

potentially...if this were to work...theoretically

shouldn't show up? I would worry that something with so many variables wouldn't show up.

[ehnto]

My intuition from talking to people across different parts of the industry, is that adoption at bigger companies is really limited or slow, or totally banned. Additionally some developers are not seeing it help their specific roles all that much anyway. This is hard to level with success other people are having, but software is a super broad discipline which I think explains a lot of the mixed success stories.

It seems to depend a lot on the industry and niche you're in, working at an agency I get experience across many different projects and industries and sometimes you are just at the edge of AIs training and it can get very unhelpful. Noting many if not most companies are working on proprietary code in donain specific problems, that isn't all that surprising either.

[fragmede]

I wouldn't say it hasn't shown up. The number of ShowHN's per weekend has definitely gone up, and while that isn't rigorous scientific proof, I'd consider is a leading edge indicator of something. Unfortunately, we as an industry have yet to agree on anything approaching a scientific measure of productivity, other than to collectively agree that Lines of Code is universally agree that LoC is terrible. Thus even if someone was able to quantify that, say, they're having days where they generate 5000 LoC when previously they were getting O(500) LoC, that's not something we could agree upon as improved productivity.

So then the question is, lis there anything other than feels to say productive has or has not gone up? What would we accept as actual evidence one way or another? Commits-per-day is similarly not a good measure either. Jira tickets and tshirts sizes? We don't have a good measure, so while ShowHN's per weekend is equally dumb, it's also equally good in the bag of lies, damn lies, and statistics.

[bitdiffusion]

There was a post a few days ago about how the quality of SnowHN had gone down with people asking how they could block this category of submissions - so I wouldn't be too quick to equate an increase in ShowHN with anything positive.

[LtWorf]

I think if you're doing front-end development AI is good. If you are reading a db and sending a json to said webpage AI is decent, if you are doing literally anything else AI is next to useless.

At least, in my own experience.

[kakapo5672]

This is actually an old syndrome with technology. It takes a longt ime for the effect to be reliably measured. Famously, it took many years for the internet itself to show up in significant productivity gains (if the internet is actually useful why don't the numbers show that? - a common comment in the 1990s and 2000s). So it seems to me we're just the usual dynamic here. Productivity in trillion-dollar economies do not turn on a dime

[joe_mamba]

>Famously, it took many years for the internet itself to show up in significant productivity gains

Yeah but the actual productivity gains that the internet and software tools introduced has had diminishing returns after a while.

Like, are people more productive today when they use Outlook and Slack than they were 20 years ago when using IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Sametime? I'm not. Are people more productive with the Excel of today than with Excel 2003/2007? I'm not. Is Windows 11 and MacOS Tahoe making people more productive than Windows 7 and Snow Leopard? Not me. Are IDEs of today offering so much more productivity boost than what Visual Studio, CodeWarrior and Borland Delphi did back in the day? Don't think so.

To me it seems that at least on the productivity side, we've mostly been reinventing the wheel "but in Rust/Electron" for the last 15 or so years, and the biggest productivity gains came IMHO from increased compute power due to semiconductor advancement, so that the same tasks finished faster today than 20 years ago, but not that the SW or the internet got so much more capable since then.