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Comment by smelendez | Hacker News Reader

I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward.

Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any powerwashing for a few years; his neighbor who gets an Instant Pot and uses it for every meal for a month, then sees it gathering dust when the family gets tired of pressure-cooked stews; or like their neighbor who gets a microwave oven and uses it multiple times a day for decades?

I guess only time will tell.

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So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it.

A few mundane things got automated, but these were just back office admin type work. Nothing that's going to show on the P&L. Yeah those people now have a little more time for other things, but those other things are also not revenue generating. No FTE got replaced by it so in the end they just paid for a bunch of administrative positions to be a little less busy. Great for the workers who are now less stressed, but almost no impact on the business financials except there's now yet another subscription.

> So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it.

Your employer is doing it wrong. You need usage surveillance with sanctions for low/declining use, then people won't stop using it.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic.

It's industry best practice. All the market-leading companies are doing it. Do you think you know better than them?

If there's anything I've learned as a software engineer, it's that agreeing with and defending the ideas of business leaders and Silicon Valley VC influencers proves I'm very intelligent.

this sarcasm is very disrespectful, you're mocking a sizeable proportion of the commenters on this site.

when I quote this comment later, with appropriate attribution, please know that I will be shaking my head and frowning while doing so

> you're mocking a sizeable proportion of the commenters on this site.

some would call this god's work

He is, but he's also describing reality.

That's depressing

He’s referencing practices at Meta and probably others

That’s been my theory - there’s some low hanging fruit in every environment where AI knocks it out of the park. Then complex brownfield reality (coupled with non-technical factors) rears its head and the stunning productivity gains are nowhere near to be seen.

That’s the explanation how you can have both the anecdotes of amazing AI productivity and rigorous studies showing anything from actual loss of productivity to single-digit gains.

I think this is directionally right.

The code AI produces is not created equally, not even close.

I also think in addition to that the increased speed compounds the problems much quicker. And I don't mean bugs. I mean that duplicated code here, that additional state variable to keep everything going there. Not removing things that should be removed because we can work around that, etc.

It's like building a super tall Jenga tower very quickly but laying the bricks much worse than a careful player.

> or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward

For the product my friend works on, it's definitely the latter. I definitely don't expect this party to last forever.

I've found it to be that people simply go back to their old ways. Many people are busy and unless they're being actively pushed to change it they feel they only have time to do things the way they have been doing them.

Using AI requires skills to know how to use it, particularly agents then it requires the time to build an improved way of doing things.

I think of it like giving someone excel in the beginning and expecting they know how to use it, when the rest of their team doesn't, they don't have the skills to know how to use it and how it can benefit them.

Nah in competitive industries you need to build features and out compete people and getting AI to do that whilst architecting things well due to experience and having time to think more about the important stuff but have a lot of the more boilerplate and simple things ABs plumbing etc handled by agents is great.

When you try to replace your entire brain with AI things are going to go wrong.

Some measures should have real, tangible, concrete numbers; others should have “my friends are saying”/“you are blind if you are not seeing it” vibing.

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