Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?
[0] https://www.marble.onl/posts/this_cost_170.html
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
You can't saw faster than the wood arrives. Also the layout of the whole job site is now wrong and the council approvals were the actual bottleneck to how many houses could be built in the first place... :/
Coding speed was never really a bottleneck anywhere I have worked - it’s all the processes around it that take the most time and AI doesn’t help that much there.
AI reduced this from a 5-day process to a 4.9-day process
If I may hijack your analogy, it would be like if all the construction crews got really fast at their work, so much so that the city decided to go for an “iterative construction” strategy because, in isolation, the cost of one team trying different designs on-site until they hit on one they liked became very small compared to the cost of getting city planners and civil engineers involved up-front. But what wasn’t considered was the rework multiplier effect that comes into play when the people building the water, sewage, electricity, telephones, roads, etc. are all repeatedly tweaking designs with minimal coordination amongst each other. So then those tweaks keep inducing additional design tweaks and rework on adjacent contractors because none of these design changes happen in a vacuum. Next thing you know all the houses are built but now need to be rewired because the electricity panel is designed for a different mains voltage from the drop and also it’s in the wrong part of the house because of a late change from overhead lines in the alleys to underground lines below the street.
Many have observed that coding agents lack object permanence so keeping them on a coherent plan requires giving them such a thoroughly documented plan up front. It actually has me wondering if optimal coding agent usage at scale resembles something of a return to waterfall (probably in more of a Royce sense than the bogeyman agile evangelists derived from the original idea) where the humans on the team mostly spend their time banging out systems specifications and testing protocols, and iteration on the spec becomes somewhat more removed from implementing it than it is in typical practice nowadays.
I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.
Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.
Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?
At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work that needed to be done.
The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste. I think distribution will be very important in the future.
We might end up that in future that you have already in social media where influencers copy someones post/video and not giving credits to original author.
Or indeed, somebody might steal and launder your work by scooping them up into a training set for their model and letting it spit out sloppy versions of your thing.
So now need to think of different kind of ideas, something on line of games that may take multiple iteration to get perfected.
I mean this is how it's always been throughout history.
Creating something new is hard, copying something in terms of energy spent, is far easier. This is software or physical objects that don't require massive amounts of expensive technology to reproduce.
Headline features aren't much faster. You still need to gather requirements, design a good architecture, talk with stakeholders, test your implementation, gather feedback, etc. Speeding up the actual coding can only move the needle so much.
I've got a couple Claude Code skills set up where I just copy/paste a Slack link into it and it links people relevant docs, gives them relevant troubleshooting from our logs, and a hook on the slack tools appends a Claude signature to make sure they know they weren't worth my time.
That said, there's this weird quicksand people around me get in where they just spend weeks and weeks on their AI tools and don't actually do much of anything? Like bro you burned your 5 hour CC Enterprise limit all week and committed...nothing?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1pl7kg1/over_1900...
I created a platform for a virtual pub quiz for my team at my day job, built multiple pandingpages for events, debugged dark table to recognize my new camera (it was to new to be included in the camera.xml file, but the specs were known). I debugged quite a few parts of a legacy shitshow of an application, did a lot of infrastructure optimization and I also created a massive ton of content as a centaur in dialog with the help of Claude Code.
But I don't do "Show HN" posts. And I don't advertise my builds - because other than those named, most are one off things, that I throw away after this one problem was solved.
To me code became way more ephemeral.
But YMMV - and that is a good thing. I also believe that way less people than the hype bubble implies are actually really into hard core usage like Pete Steinberger or Armin Ronacher and the likes.
I use AI/agents in quite similar ways, and even rekindled multiple personal projects that had stalled. However, to borrow OPs parlance, these are not "houses" - more like sheds and tree-houses. They are fun and useful, but not moving the needle on housing stock supply, so to speak.
People haven't noticed because the software industry was already mostly unoriginal slop, even prior to LLMs, and people are good at ignoring unoriginal slop.
To be honest, I think the surrounding paragraph lumps together all anti-AI sentiments.
For example, there is a big difference between "all AI output is slop" (which is objectively false) and "AI enables sloppy people to do sloppy work" (which is objectively true), and there's a whole spectrum.
What bugs me personally is not at all my own usage of these tools, but the increase in workload caused by other people using these tools to drown me in nonsensical garbage. In recent months, the extra workload has far exceeded my own productivity gains.
For the non-technical, imagine a hypochondriac using chatgpt to generate hundreds of pages of "health analysis" that they then hand to their doctor and expect a thorough read and opinion of, vs. the doctor using chatgpt for sparring on a particular issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Small and mid sized companies are getting custom software now.
Small software is able to be packed with extra features instead of bare minimum.
rather than new stuff for everyone to use, the future could easily be everyone building their own bespoke tools for their own problems.