Hacker News Reader

Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

I was in a lovely meeting where a senior "leader" was looking at effort estimates and said "Do these factor in AI-tools? Seems like it should be at least 30% lower if it did."

Like I use AI tools, I even like using them, but saying "this tool is so good it will cut our dev time by 30%" should be coming from the developers themselves or their direct manager. Otherwise they are just making figures up and forcing them onto their teams.

View on HN

I was that manager. I dunno about your senior leader but with me it was coming from a healthy place. After a few months of ra-ra from the C suite about how we were now an AI-first company (we're a tech consultancy building one-off stuff for customers) and should be using it in all our customer projects, I asked the question, quite reasonably I thought, "so am I going to offer lower prices to my clients, or am I going to see much higher achieved margins on projects I sell?"

And, crickets. In practice I haven't seen any efficiencies despite my teams using AI in their work. I am not seeing delivery coming in under estimates, work costs what it always cost, we're not doing more stuff or better stuff, and my margins are the same. The only difference I can see is that I've had to negotiate a crapton of contractual amendments to allow my teams to use AI in their work.

I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype up and running which is like 5% of any project. Most technical work in enterprise isn't going from zero to something, it's maintaining something, or extending a big, old thing. AI stinks at that (today). You startup people with clean slates may have a different perspective.

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

Yes true, that is a possibility and something that's quite hard to police remotely. It doesn't feel likely, everyone's working kind of the same, booking the same hours and overtime is no different, but I can't rule it out.

It'd mean that hundreds of people would all be goofing off silently. I'd expect at least overtime bookings to decrease and they haven't - even with our strong incentives to not book o/t.

> I still think it's only good for demos and getting a prototype

Have you actually tried that? Because my bet is that if your "prototype" is a anything that is very VERY traditional, e.g. a CMS, online shop, or anything that has examples online, yes it will be quick, but if it's genuinely new, namely something NOT available out there, maybe because it is relying on the latest stack that is not yet well documented, then I bet it will also fail terribly.

Edit: I personally did, namely using LLMs to make XR demos relying on a now relatively popular framework https://aframe.io and basically it fails most of the time by proposing "traditional" HTML/CSS, missing entirely that it's 3D. Anyway, long story short, didn't work for me so curious to know if the "getting a prototype" (a genuine prototype, not a codebase starting from scratch because IMHO that's different) part is validated or just an idea.

I've only seen it do prototypes of CRUD apps, e-commerce storefronts, dashboards - vanilla stuff in other words. Get an end-to-end skeleton up and running fast; it's really good for that.

Never seen it used for anything novel so I can't refute you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com