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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

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Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man.

It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.

It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.

> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.

That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

My main problem putting out that many PRs per day is getting them approved and merged back into main so I can start the next one.

I guess “stacked” PRs are a thing now? I haven’t figured out the process that avoids making the merges for stacked PRs a complete mess, though.

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers.

It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.

Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."

The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.

Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.

I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?

Your data shows a 20% improvement. That's $20-100k a year depending on how much devs are paid.

You just compared this AI shift to "tractors on farms". Did tractors increase farming output by 20%?

The first tractors in 1911 or whatever probably did. 50 years on and it was many times that.

No, at least not if you're talking about tractors broadly. The first practical traction engines (~1860) were pretty much instantly revolutionary.

I suppose you could make the claim that the first things commonly called tractors (which were petrol-powered) might not have increased productivity very much, but "tractors on farms" should surely be read as the revolutionary moment, not the change in dominant fuel type 50 years later.

Also, it's likely not safe to read "20% increase in PRs" as "20% productivity improvement".

They dont show that. They show 20% more PR. That is not the same as 20% more productivity.

You don't get paid 20% more for achieving 20% more achievement, that's for sure.

It's not remotely comparable to tractors. Tractors actually do their job correctly and consistently.

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