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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Back in the early 2000s the sentiment was that IDEs were a force multiplier that was too high to ignore, and that anyone not using something akin to Visual Studio or Eclipse would be out of a job in 5 or so years. Meanwhile, 20 years later, the best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.

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But the vast majority are still using an IDE - and I say this as someone who has adamantly used Vim with plugins for decades.

Something similar will happen with agentic workflows - those who aren't already productive with the status quo will have to eventually adopt productivity enhancing tooling.

That said, it isn't too surprising if the rate of AI adoption starts slowing down around now - agentic tooling has been around for a couple years now, so it makes sense that some amount of vendor/tool rationalization is kicking in.

I think no one can predict what will happen. We need to wait until we can empirically observe who will be more productive on certain tasks.

Thats why I started with AI coding. I wanted to hedge against the possibility that this takes off and I am useless. But it made me sad as hell and so I just said: Screw it. If this is the future, I will NOT participate.

That’s fine, but you don’t want to be blind sided by changes in the industry. If it’s not for you, have a plan B career lined up so you can still put food on the table. Also, if you are good at old fashioned SE and AI, you’ll be OK either way.

The good thing is that the selling point of LLM tools is that they're dead easy to use, so even if you find yourself having to do them in the future, it won't be an issue. I know the AI faithful love talking about how non-believers will be "left behind", and stylize prompt engineering as some kind of deeply involved, complex new science, it really isn't. As more down-to-earth AI fanatics have confirmed to me, it'll probably take you an afternoon of reading some articles on best practices and you'll be back amongst the best of them. This isn't like learning a new language or framework.

It remains to be seen whether these tools are actually a net enhancement to productivity, especially accounting for longer-term / bigger-picture effects -- maintainability, quality assurance, user support, liability concerns, etc.

If they do indeed provide a boost, it is clearly not very massive so far. Otherwise we'd see a huge increase in the software output of the industry: big tech would be churning out new products at a record rate, tons of startups would be reaching maturity at an insane clip in every imaginable industry, new FOSS projects would be appearing faster than ever, ditto with forks of existing projects.

Instead we're getting an overall erosion of software quality, and the vast majority of new startups appear to just be uninspired wrappers around LLMs.

I'm not necessarily talking about AI code agents or AI code review (workflows which I think are difficult for agentic workflows to really show a tangible PoV against humans, but I've seen some of my portfolio companies building promising capabilities that will come out of stealth soon), but various other enhancements such as better code and documentation search, documentation generation, automating low sev ticket triage, low sev customer support, etc.

In those workflows and cases where margins and dollar value provided is low, I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where possible.

Even reaching this point was unimaginable 5 years ago, and is enough to show workflow and dollar value for teams.

To use another analogy, using StackOverflow or Googling was viewed derisively by neckbeards who constantly spammed RTFD back in the day, but now no developer can succeed without being able to be a proficient searcher. And a major value that IDEs provided in comparison to traditional editors was that kind of recommendation capability along with code quality/linting tooling.

Concentrating on abstract tasks where the ability to benchmark between human and artificial intelligence is difficult means concentrating on the trees while missing the forest.

I don't foresee codegen tools replacing experienced developers but I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.

> I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where possible.

Uptake is orthogonal to productivity gain. Especially when LLM uptake is literally being forced upon employees in many companies.

> I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.

That may be true! But my point is they also create new overhead in the process, and the net outcome to overall productivity isn't clear.

Unpacking some of your examples a bit --

Better code and documentation search: this is indeed beneficial to productivity, but how is it an agentic workflow that requires individual developers to adopt and become productive with, relative to the previous status quo?

Documentation generation: between the awful writing style and the lack of trustworthiness, personally I think these easily reduce overall productivity, when accounting for humans consuming the docs. Or in the case of AI consuming docs written by other AI, you end up with an ever-worsening cycle of slop.

Automating low sev ticket triage: Potentially beneficial, but we're not talking about a revolutionary leap in overall team/org/company productivity here.

Low sev customer support: Sounds like a good way to infuriate customers and harm the business.

Hard agree on documentation. In my view, generated documentation is utterly worthless, if not counterproductive. The point of documentation is to convey information that isn't already obvious from the code. If the documentation is just a padded, wordy text extrapolated from the code, reading it is a complete waste of time.

Another thing here is that LLMs don't have to be a productivity boost if it lets you be lazier. Sometimes I'll have an LLM do something and it doesn't save time compared to me doing it but I can fuck off while it's working and grab a drink or something. I can spend my mental energy on hard problems rather than looking through docs to find all of the right functions and plumb things in the code.

OK, but LLMs are being valued as if they are one of the most important technologies ever created. How much will companies pay for a product that doesn't boost productivity but allows employees to be lazier?

As someone that uses vim full time all that happened is people started porting all the best features of IDEs over to vim/emacs as plugins. So those people were right it's just the features flowed.

Pretty sure you can count the number of professional programmers using vanilla vim/neovim on one hand.

People also started using vi edit mode inside IDEs. I've personally encountered that much more often.

It depends where you work. In gaming, the best programmers I know might not even touch the command-line / Linux, and their "life" depens on Visual Studio... Why? Because the eco-system around Visual Studio / Windows and how game console devkits work is pretty much tied - while Playstation is some kind of BSD, and maybe Nintendo - all their proper SDKs are just for Windows and tied around Visual Studio (there are some studios that are the exceptions, but rare).

I'm sure other industries would have their similar examples. And then the best folks in my direct team (infra), much smaller - are the command-line, Linux/docker/etc. guys that use mostly VSCode.

> Meanwhile, 20 years later, the best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.

The best programmers I know are game programmers using Visual Studio. Real Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code.

(vim is definitely a big thing but I'm not sure how many people I know who even use emacs anymore...)

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