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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

I work in FAANG, have been for over a decade. These tools are creating a huge amount of value, starting with Copilot but now with tools like Claude Code and Cursor. The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building things.

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> These tools are creating a huge amount of value...

> The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building…

“We’re so much more productive that we don’t have time to tell you how much more productive we are”

Do you see how that sounds?

To be fair, AI isn't going to give us more time outside work. It'll just increase expectations from leadership.

I feel this, honestly. I get so much more work done (currently: building & shipping games, maintaining websites, managing APIs, releasing several mobile apps, and developing native desktop applications) managing 5x claude instances that the majority of my time is sucked up by just prompting whichever agent is done on their next task(s), and there's a real feeling of lost productivity if any agent is left idle for too long.

The only time to browse HN left is when all the agents are comfortably spinning away.

I also work for a FAANG company and so far most employees agree that while LLMs are good for writing docs, presentations or emails, they still lack a lot when it comes to writing a maintainable code (especially in Java, they supposedly do better in Go, don’t know why, not my opinion). Even simple refactorings need to be carefully checked. I really like them for doing stuff that I know nothing about though (eg write a script using a certain tool, tell me how to rewrite my code to use certain library etc) or for reviewing changes

I don't see how FAANG is relevant here. But the 'FAANG' I used to work at had an emergent problem of people throwing a lot of half baked 'AI-powered' code over the wall and let reviewers deal with it (due to incentives, not that they were malicious). In orgs like infra where everything needs to be reviewed carefully, this is purely a burden

I work in a FAANG equivalent for a decade, mostly in C++/embedded systems. I work on commercial products used by millions of people. I use the AI also.

When others are finding gold in rivers similar to mine, and I'm mostly finding dirt, I'm curious to ask and see how similar the rivers really are, or if the river they are panning in is actually somewhere I do find gold, but not a river I get to pan in often.

If the rivers really are similar, maybe I need to work on my panning game :)

I use agentic tools all the time but comments like this always make me feel like someone's trying to sell me their new cryptocoin or NFT.

>creating a huge amount of value Do you write software, or work in accounting/finance/marketing?

What are the AI usage policies like at your org? Where I am, we’re severely limited.

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