Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaccola | Hacker News Reader

The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

The only great new product I’ve used is my LLM of choice, and those labs seem to be hiring more humans than ever.

Maybe it’s true that Claude only just got good enough and that 12 months from now our day to day lives will be way better thanks to LLM-driven product improvements/breakthroughs.

My bet is that 12 months from now we will still have no great improvements and the claim will be “LLMs only got good enough in Feb 2027 so you can’t judge anything yet!”

View on HN

I have a similar one. Is Claude Code (web and/or VS Code) still a buggy mess? Pretty much every single agent loop bugs out and requires a hard refresh, which sometimes still doesn’t help. And they have an effectively infinite LLM budget and unreleased models to fix the issues.

Even Pi sucks. I can no longer get it to open. OpenCode sometimes consumes all my 32Gb of memory. Codex sometimes doesn't display the full output (display issue). I stopped using Claude Code because of how unpredictable their agent is (and it is very opaque about what it is doing). I don't even get to how many times I run a prompt and then the response is stopped mid-way. The whole industry is a joke.

Disclaimer: I am not an LLM maximalist, I like to use LLMs, but in a highly controlled way.

One exciting development that LLMs have recently started is automated vulnerability discovery. For instance, Chrome solved more bugs in June than over the past two years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120097

Similarly, the latest Apple security update and the June Android Security Bulletin fixes an insane number of vulnerabilities.

Of course, many of these vulnerabilities are caused by using unsafe languages (C/C++). But LLMs also help porting such code to Rust or other safe languages, because it is the type of transformation that LLMs are pretty good at (clearly defined problem, not many opportunities to go wild).

Yeah I can see this as being an area that will benefit from LLMs. Though, taking it one further, we don’t yet have evidence (so far as I know) that this actually produces more secure software.

It’s not that I’m an LLM hater at all, I use them, I feel like I’m being super productive so I’m not doubting people’s accounts. But if I honestly look back over the past 12 months and ask “have I shipped more value that I would have without LLMs” the answer is probably no.

I think it has helped me learn areas quicker, though for complex mathsy explanations I still ask for it to find me human written posts as Claude’s explanations can be super weird, using convoluted analogies etc..

I am launching projects at about the same rate, but the projects are much more polished and feature full than before AI tools.

Historically, the mindset was to get happy path working launch and see what works, but now you can ship a much more polished products with things like cancellation and account export, private policies, a entire mobile and web app without much effort.

> have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use

Yes: https://blog.google/security/chrome-stronger-with-every-upda...

> The test is simple: have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months?

I'd say it only became viable end of last year but yes, recently there's a surge of hobbist software which is very visible.

How well they will be maintained, that's another story

Can you name a few? Not doubting your claim, just curious because I am maybe not following the same niches you do.

/r/selfhosted was so full of people's "hey look what claude made" -attempts that they had to ban them =)

Nothing wrong with doing something for yourself, but some people want to make everything a "product".

> I'd say it only became viable end of last year

I have seen more interesting GPT wrappers 3 years ago than now.

I can think few great tools like t3code (a software that does a lot) that have been mostly coded by LLMs and yet have a solid architectural foundation and implementation. The software is genuinely gargantuan in its features and capability, you really cannot appreciate it from quickly skimming the readme.

At work, LLMs helped a lot in doing the kind of work you were always tired or had no budget to do, and the codebases have never been healthier, more tested and better documented.

In any case, it's always about the effort and capabilities of the people using it. If you want to vibecode, then you're still stuck in prototype land and I think that even better models won't help, in fact they may have negative value.

The naivety of your post is in any case appalling, you seem to be missing the forest for the tree.

What’s naive about it? Maybe a bunch of people are finding great new software only possible because of LLMs. Good for them. I’m simply stating I haven’t.

(I note in your comment you don’t mention one piece of end user software or how the user has benefitted…)

> have we seen great new products or improvements in the products we use over the past 12,24,36 months

This sentiment drives me nuts.

I'm on a handful of software dev subreddits and the amount of new products popping up has tripled since these tools became available.

I also don't understand how you'd expect to measure this. Is there some single list of all software that's been released that annotates whether AI was used? Do you have some feed of every project that hits GitHub that you're meticulously tracking? The idea that you personally should have seen these improvements or they didn't happen is wild to me.

I work in healthcare. Where the # of products has skyrocketed due to these tools. Some are bad, some are good. But to say that nothing has come out of it is just objectively not true.

Products, yes, because the barrier to making a product had fallen off a cliff (both in developing the software and the marketing/sales fluff around it). But are those products converting to business results? Are those quality products someone will pay for?

In other words, is anyone using these products or is that becoming like the spammy App Stores with tons of low effort stuff?

> But are those products converting to business results? Are those quality products someone will pay for?

Yes. Unequivocally.

I'm in healthcare. I've sat in 20-30 different demos over the last 2 years, all of which involve AI in some capacity and at least half of those were solutions that had already built a customer base.

But a lot of devs won't know that because they aren't sitting in meetings where product decisions are made. I'm in a unique position, but that doesn't meet it's not happening.

There's a staggering amount of new, basic software which often goes unmaintained quickly because no discipline was needed to build it. But I don't think we're seeing, for example, Adobe releasing new creative suite tools faster than before. This isn't something I can quite quantify, though.

It feels like you’re saying “SNR changed; now there’s tons of noise”?

What industry are you in and what's your role? There are new EMR's popping up overnight in healthcare. And that's my point. There's no way a person can say that it's not happening because they personally aren't seeing it. Thinking in terms of "Well why aren't the big companies building software quicker" answers it's own questions. It wasn't the coding that was making it slow.

> There are new EMR's popping up overnight in healthcare

That's probably the last place I want AI generated bullshit to be popping up overnight

> That's probably the last place I want AI generated bullshit to be popping up overnight

Are you in healthcare? Do you understand the ways in which these tools are being used in that domain? Obviously not, so your opinion is meaningless.

He is definitely a customer of people using these tools and his concern is genuine. His opinion is more meaningful than yours if you are creating and trying to sell those tools.

> I'm on a handful of software dev subreddits and the amount of new products popping up has tripled since these tools became available.

> I also don't understand how you'd expect to measure this

I'm confused, are we accepting anecdata or no?

You can't prove a negative like that. So whether it's anecdotal or not is irrelevant.

well exactly. it's impossible to prove the negative so why don't you actually prove the positive (that AI is driving an increase in productivity) instead of throwing out more personal opinions?

It's the opposite: people like you will be telling people using these tools successfully, "but where are all great new products???", which, of course, is almost immeasurable.

The Internet is a better fax machine and all that.

Who is using them successfully and what _are_ the great new products?

Examples, please. It's easy to prove your point if it's true.

This question is a trap. Like programming languages. There's the products everybody hates and the ones nobody uses.

Nobody has to prove anything to you. I don't care one wink if you like or use AI.

Why not prove it though?

What tools?

Yeah, what tools???? What are we even talking about here?

so? name the tools. Preferably tools that aren't AI tools to create AI tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com