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It would have been great if they had disclosed which products. I've been building tons of projects with AI lately, and while this is a massive productivity boo

It would have been great if they had disclosed which products. I've been building tons of projects with AI lately, and while this is a massive productivity boost, the code itself doesn't scale. The acceleration when you start with zero is massive, but with a growing code base, AI hits a wall at some point. You better understand what you've built going from there.

xhkkffbf 2y ago
I watched this happen decades ago. Smart coders knew about memory allocations. Okay coders just assumed that the garbage collector would handle it. One friend of mine wrote code that was 1000 times faster than the people in the next cubicle over. Why? Because he was careful with memory usage and didn't trigger the virtual memory thrashing. AI is just another form of automation.
- zero_shift 2y ago
  There must be a name for the self-balancing phenomenon where any improvement in productivity is soon swallowed up by an equal increase in waste
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
    Must be it be swallowed up? Is it not possible that an improvement in productivity increases but still be net positive? I believe that's what happens in the real world.
    - UncleEntity 2y ago
      > Must be it be swallowed up? Yes. Because user CPU cycles are cheaper than developer brain power.
  - tjalfi 2y ago
    Are you referring to Jevon's Paradox[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - zero_shift 2y ago
      I guess it's a variant of that, Jevon's Paradox being that increasing supply counterintuitively increases demand
  - cpeterso 2y ago
    Nathan Myhrvold said “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”
- Karellen 2y ago
  Yeah, these new-fangled "compilers" will never catch on. Programmers who rely on them will stop learning machine code, and won't know how their program really works. That's if the compiler actually compiles your code at all, without throwing an internal error, making you change your (correct) code around arbitrarily until it actually accepts it. But at least with an internal compiler error you know the compiler has broken - rather than it silently miscompiling your code to do the wrong thing. But even then, even if the compiler accepts your code without barfing, and generates correct machine code from it, it still won't generate as efficient machine code as you could write by hand yourself. Nope, these compilers will never catch on, and never get reliable enough to be useful for serious software engineering. -- Some programmer circa 1975, probably, who lives in my head mumbling this to themselves whenever I'm sure generative-AI-based "programming" is a crock of shit. Although, to be fair, the 2005-era developer who is drunkenly ranting that UML diagrams will make programming 100x more productive any day now, is a handy counterpoint.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    I mean, the difference between a computer and an LLM is correctness. The compiler MUST conform exactly to a spec. An LLM is useful precisely because it does not.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- feoren 2y ago
  > One friend of mine wrote code that was 1000 times faster than the people in the next cubicle over And did that 1000x speedup make a difference to users? Are we talking about an on-click event that now took 10μs instead of 10ms? Was this a 1000x speedup in a hot critical-path bottleneck, or was it an already quick in-memory post-processing operation that fired after waiting 30 seconds on a sluggish database query? Sorry to doubt so much, but the vast majority of times someone boasts about a speedup like this, it turns out to be done for bragging rights rather than for the benefit of the project. A 1000x speedup is only impressive if you can show that the time you improved upon was actually a problem.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> while this is a massive productivity boost, the code itself doesn't scale Then it's not a productivity boost imo "Produces more tech debt faster" is the worst possible outcome of a 'productivity' tool
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I think you misunderstand the purpose. Who cares if it adds technical debt later if your goal is just to have something to show off to get investments? The goal of every startup is to get funding and an exit. The concern is not long term maintainability.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > Who cares if it adds technical debt later if your goal is just to have something to show off to get investments? The goal of every startup is to get funding and an exit. The concern is not long term maintainability Not everyone works in startups, specifically to avoid this disgusting mentality If I had to deal with this "build garbage quickly to get money and run before the house of cards collapses" mentality in my day to day life I would put my face into a wood chipper I loathe people who think this way, and it is so miserable that all tech is becoming just a vehicle for this sort of grift Robbing banks at gunpoint is more honest
    - JustExAWS 2y ago
      The article is specifically about YC companies - by definition early stage startups.
  - WJW 2y ago
    Even for the small subset of companies for which this is true, you need to have a successful exit at all. Technical debt is fine from that perspective, but only if the whole thing comes crashing down AFTER you sell. If it comes crashing down too soon, you have done nothing but waste a few years of your life. Remember that most successful exits happen more than 5 years after founding. Having an AI vomit out a prototype in a week vs doing it yourself in 4 might get you seed funding marginally faster, but if it delays product development more than 3 weeks over the next 4-5 years it's still not worth it.

xhkkffbf 2y ago

I watched this happen decades ago. Smart coders knew about memory allocations. Okay coders just assumed that the garbage collector would handle it. One friend of mine wrote code that was 1000 times faster than the people in the next cubicle over. Why? Because he was careful with memory usage and didn't trigger the virtual memory thrashing. AI is just another form of automation.

zero_shift 2y ago
There must be a name for the self-balancing phenomenon where any improvement in productivity is soon swallowed up by an equal increase in waste
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
  Must be it be swallowed up? Is it not possible that an improvement in productivity increases but still be net positive? I believe that's what happens in the real world.
  - UncleEntity 2y ago
    > Must be it be swallowed up? Yes. Because user CPU cycles are cheaper than developer brain power.
- tjalfi 2y ago
  Are you referring to Jevon's Paradox[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - zero_shift 2y ago
    I guess it's a variant of that, Jevon's Paradox being that increasing supply counterintuitively increases demand
- cpeterso 2y ago
  Nathan Myhrvold said “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”
Karellen 2y ago
Yeah, these new-fangled "compilers" will never catch on. Programmers who rely on them will stop learning machine code, and won't know how their program really works. That's if the compiler actually compiles your code at all, without throwing an internal error, making you change your (correct) code around arbitrarily until it actually accepts it. But at least with an internal compiler error you know the compiler has broken - rather than it silently miscompiling your code to do the wrong thing. But even then, even if the compiler accepts your code without barfing, and generates correct machine code from it, it still won't generate as efficient machine code as you could write by hand yourself. Nope, these compilers will never catch on, and never get reliable enough to be useful for serious software engineering. -- Some programmer circa 1975, probably, who lives in my head mumbling this to themselves whenever I'm sure generative-AI-based "programming" is a crock of shit. Although, to be fair, the 2005-era developer who is drunkenly ranting that UML diagrams will make programming 100x more productive any day now, is a handy counterpoint.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  I mean, the difference between a computer and an LLM is correctness. The compiler MUST conform exactly to a spec. An LLM is useful precisely because it does not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
feoren 2y ago
> One friend of mine wrote code that was 1000 times faster than the people in the next cubicle over And did that 1000x speedup make a difference to users? Are we talking about an on-click event that now took 10μs instead of 10ms? Was this a 1000x speedup in a hot critical-path bottleneck, or was it an already quick in-memory post-processing operation that fired after waiting 30 seconds on a sluggish database query? Sorry to doubt so much, but the vast majority of times someone boasts about a speedup like this, it turns out to be done for bragging rights rather than for the benefit of the project. A 1000x speedup is only impressive if you can show that the time you improved upon was actually a problem.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

> while this is a massive productivity boost, the code itself doesn't scale Then it's not a productivity boost imo "Produces more tech debt faster" is the worst possible outcome of a 'productivity' tool

scarface_74 2y ago
I think you misunderstand the purpose. Who cares if it adds technical debt later if your goal is just to have something to show off to get investments? The goal of every startup is to get funding and an exit. The concern is not long term maintainability.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > Who cares if it adds technical debt later if your goal is just to have something to show off to get investments? The goal of every startup is to get funding and an exit. The concern is not long term maintainability Not everyone works in startups, specifically to avoid this disgusting mentality If I had to deal with this "build garbage quickly to get money and run before the house of cards collapses" mentality in my day to day life I would put my face into a wood chipper I loathe people who think this way, and it is so miserable that all tech is becoming just a vehicle for this sort of grift Robbing banks at gunpoint is more honest
  - JustExAWS 2y ago
    The article is specifically about YC companies - by definition early stage startups.
- WJW 2y ago
  Even for the small subset of companies for which this is true, you need to have a successful exit at all. Technical debt is fine from that perspective, but only if the whole thing comes crashing down AFTER you sell. If it comes crashing down too soon, you have done nothing but waste a few years of your life. Remember that most successful exits happen more than 5 years after founding. Having an AI vomit out a prototype in a week vs doing it yourself in 4 might get you seed funding marginally faster, but if it delays product development more than 3 weeks over the next 4-5 years it's still not worth it.