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Comment by barrell | Hacker News Reader

I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative.

There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times, they can be wildly useful. But I feel like the industry atm wildly overestimates their broader/long term utility.

Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.

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> Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.

This is the big one. It's clear that AI can generate huge volumes of code by KLOC. It is not clear that spending a lot of money tokenmaxxing will eventually result in increased real revenue for software businesses, and eventually even an MBA has to look at a "money in vs money out" chart.

Have been thinking about this a lot recently. AI could be an absolute game changer for a small start-up rushing a product to market – you could quickly build an MVP that would take years and tens of hires before.

But how much ROI is there for large businesses with established products and huge development teams burning through tokens making subtle tweaks that can’t be directly tied to revenue?

Not much ROI, if any. My employer's been making some studies and come up with very modest productivity gains - so of course they want us all to use it, but I'm not sure they're taking the true costs into account. Especially not once token pricing actually reflects reality, and we all get brain rot from using the things instead of thinking. If this thing doesn't collapse before we can run a solid coding assistant model on a developer's machine, maybe it's got some legs.

That doesn't seem very likely.

The legacy of LLMs will live on in various models doing various specialist things (they seem like a really good progression on speech synthesis for example) but the current edifice will come crashing down and if we're very very very lucky they won't take the global economy with it.

I've been thinking about this too. The quality maintenance of large systems isn't something you can just completely automate away with AI. Even if the code is written with AI, you still have to read through and verify it.

Even though that is still faster than regularly writing code, I end up losing that nuanced knowledge that I get from going through documentation and writing it out by hand - actually doing the work. I just don't see it actually replacing developers unless managers are willing to produce MORE code with the SAME level of quality.

> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs.

The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point, because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so much better every month that you personally can replace developers without even trying as a completely non-technical person with basic writing skills.

Given the hype and extreme claims being made, the fact that he remains ignorant and gets practically no use out of LLMs immediately disproves those statements. The counterargument boiling down to "you're using it wrong" is actually just a further indictment of Sam Altman and his like, because it shouldn't be possible to use LLMs wrong!

The rest, well, the hype needs to die before anyone can make sane estimates of what LLM tech can do for us in various fields. Right now it's all a complete mess.

I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing.

His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.

Yeah, probably.

One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.

And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.

So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.

(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)

Personally I only find his swearing and delivery annoying when he is not delivering his point well (ie reducto ad absurdum). I’d be welling to bet a good amount of the complaints about his swearing are really just from a poor delivery, and people don’t know why, so they latch onto his swearing.

His early stuff was just as degenerate and vulgar, but was much less of an issue for me.

Part of the problem is the like - sociomedia factor. Ed’s figured out how to break through the noise. I’m not surprised that Ed Zitron is the kind of counterpoint you get in the Musk-Trump attention economy / CEO’s that sound more like prophets than business executives world.

One person's ignorance of something can never be evidence that it doesn't exist. It's far too easy to be willfully ignorant; no one can force you to abandon ignorance if you don't want to.

On the other hand, the hype of "Sam Altman and his like" being plainly exaggerated doesn't mean there's nothing at all behind it. It's plain to see there's something important about LLM capabilities. I don't even use them myself, as emotionally I find them entirely repugnant, and I can still see that.

We need to wait to get the whole story about LLMs, but we don't need to wait to confidently reject both extremes of opinion about them.

Very little new or ground-breaking (I struggle to think of things AI has produced that aren't themselves just more AI), but various previously-stable sites and services breaking.

The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents.

I'm not talking about the quantity of code produced, but about actual user needs that are now resolved that would not have been before.

The main productivity gain will not come from existing software engineer, but from people that couldn't code at all before but are now able to do things by themselves. We are still very early.

It still takes the same mindset and skills to use AI productively and effectively as regular programming. The productivity boost only applies if you know what you’re doing and can actually steer the agent carefully.

Vibecoding hits a glass ceiling very quickly and this will not be solved incrementally. Besides, if the agent could work autonomously to that degree then it would no longer need any prompting at all and we’re living in a very different world. On the other hand that would make the debt actually meaningless, so I guess that is 'a' solution.

As a developer who has not been able to get any boost in productivity from coding agents, I find it incredibly easy to deny.

I’m a solopreneur, if I could lighten my load I would. However I have yet to save time using coding agents, with the exception of “I made this change to my model file, update all model to match the new format.” Which is cool, but maybe 0.01% of my job, and took a 1 hour task down to 10 minutes.

> The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents.

Is it? Can you produce any evidence for such a productivity boost?

We previously had a backlog of 2 years of features planned. Now we have no work and are just working on tech debt and planning to get more involved in the product side because they need help getting the developers work to do.

I'm sure all your users would totally agree and will be head over heels about the slop you've pushed on them.

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