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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company.

We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written.

So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI.

Bad product design is just bad product design. Bad writing is just bad writing. Bad graphic design is just bad graphic design.

The industry needs to get over this hump of pretending we're not all going to adopt AI for every imaginable thing. The cat's out of the bag, for better or for worse.

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It's not just the AI. The post mentions poor choices because of a product management mindset instead of engineers leading the PMs.

Only part of the article I disagree with a bit. I'm willing to bet most infrastructure PM's at CF are technical people with engineering backgrounds.

I think what's more likely the culprit is the desperation to claim ground. They (and many others) want to rush out an answer to all of AI's new challenges out of fear of being beaten to the punch.

It usually leads to a complex, almost incoherent product suite.

Well, let's not normalize bad product design. Worse, let's not normalize pushing out broken projects that never get maintained. It's noise and breaks trust. I'd say the maintenance part is especially bad now, I hold very little trust that people will maintain the projects they share.

I think that's 33% of my rant too! Pushing out features and forgetting about them 1 week later.

I've been fighting against the AI detractors for quite a while now but they refuse to see the light. The reason you're seeing AI everywhere is simply because LLM augmented workflows give you _obscene_ efficiency boosts. You need 500 pages of docs updated? Done. You need a thousand edge case tests written? Done. You need red team threat assessments plus adversarial attack writeups? Done. You need to semantically refactor X lines of code or hook up forty different API endpoints? Done. All practically done in an instant (well thirty or so minutes depending on the model). I've been following certain open source projects (won't name them due to brigading and for privacy reasons) that are 100% LLM generated. Meaning full self-healing infrastructure, automated tests, agents spawning off of agents... They're making _literally_ (and this is not hyperbole) 100 to 200k LoC changes _per week_ with a team of like one to two people. If you look at Bun, which at this point is essentially the poster child for a pure LLM developed project, and take a peep at their Github insights, you'll see this

"Excluding merges, 49 authors have pushed 243 commits to main and 6320 commits to all branches. On main, 1551 files have changed and there have been 165,176 additions and 35,130 deletions". This kind of code velocity is _literally impossible to recreate by humans alone_. Straight impossible. Which is why over time every company that wants to stay remotely competitive will have to switch to it.

Who will read your 500 pages of AI docs? Or check your thousand edge case tests? Who will check the agent spawned off an agent? (That part reads like satire, honestly)

The reason people are AI detractors isn't because they don't believe you can spit out massive amounts of slop. It's because they question the value of it and whether it was worth the immense cost to our planet, ecosystem and society.

Code velocity doesn't matter if you're shipping garbage. Shit fired from a cannon is still shit, even it's kind of cool that you built a shit-cannon.

The reason that "AI-detractors won't see the light" is that some people care about the quality of their work, AND ACTUALLY LIKE SOLVING PROBLEMS.

just because something makes a lot of money doesn't mean it's worth doing; there's this particular brainworm infecting AI enthusiasts that currently profitable == valuable. Tiktok is a profitable company, that doesn't mean it provides a service that is inherently valuable to humanity.

I believe protest and criticism are corrective processes, and we shouldn’t give up.

Thank you! I am a CF customer, I pay for the service, I just want it to get better and better!

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