Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The AI hype seems driven more by stock valuations than genuine productivity gains.

Developers now spend excessive time crafting prompts and managing AI generated pull requests :-) tasks that a simple email to a junior coder could have handled efficiently. We need a study that shows the lost productivity.

When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:

“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding.”

  - Matt Garman – CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - June 2024

"There will be no programmers in five years"

    - Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque - 2023

“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software.”

  - Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft - April 2025

“Coding is dead.”

  - Jensen Huang CEO, NVIDIA - Feb 2024

"This is the year (2025) that AI becomes better than humans at programming for ever..."

   - OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil - March 2025

“Probably in 2025, we at Meta are going to have an AI that can effectively function as a mid-level engineer that can write code."

  - Mark Zuckerberg - Jan 2025

"90% of code will be written by AI in the next 3 months"

    - Dario Amodei - Anthropic CEO  - March 2025

The loss of productivity is,as many things are, not directly measurable. Mediocre code making it into the codebase and hindering future development and increasing maintenance time, or even being the cause for some ideas to never be discovered, how are we going to measure that? How are we going to measure engineers no longer properly knowing the codebases?

Businesses will wake up when it is too late and the damage to the engineering side of their products is already done. Or perhaps won't wake up at all, and somehow (to their management levels) inexplicably fail.

Manager pipe dreams that AI (read LLMs) replacing programmers. There might be a rude awakening when in fact AI replaces some admin type managers.

Are these quotes all from 2025? Would be awesome to put actual dates on them so we can revisit in N years and see if they were right or just hyping.

At your request :-) Added dates to all of them...

> When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:

Correct. This is how most bubbles are kept up as they are all exposed in the hype cycle.

You will not hear about the mistakes [0] [1] [2] it makes when AI gets it wrong or hallucinates and all the AI boosters can do will be "it only gets better" and promise that we will soon be operating airplanes without humans. [3]

Surely you would feel safer if you or your family boarded a plane that was fully operated by ChatGPT, because it is somewhat closer to "AGI"?

I really don't think so.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/openai-explains-why-chatgp...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession...

[3] https://www.flyingmag.com/replacing-airline-pilots-with-ai/

US shareholder capitalism is increasingly dependent on pushing a fantasy where X Company will eventually operate as an unregulated monopoly with armies of machines run by a small group of contract labour with no benefits and no wage bargaining power.

Apart from developer productivity, have we seen anything made 1000x better using GenAI?

OCR cleanup?

Sure, copywriting seems to be pretty much irrelevant now. Same with image generation wherever you can get away with it. The quality may be reduced in many cases but the cost is absolutely a fraction of what it used to be.

Just like anything AI, the problem is getting people to buy the grift being sold as a replacement for human labor.

https://gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-goin...

Problem being....

You fire the copywriter, but you still have to pay for the advertising (google clicks, tv spots etc).

So if you have $100,000 ad campaign and you use AI instead of paying $10,000 to the copywriter, you probably have a higher chance of wasting the $90,0000 ad spend.

So it comes down to, the AI probably makes a skilled copywriter better. But you can't get rid of him

"Amount of time college students spend on homework"? ;-)

claims that AI will reduce the need for engineers are “entirely self-serving horseshit”

-- James Gosling - May 2025

Reply on news.ycombinator.com