7 ms·
I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside. Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity:
by vb7132 7mo ago
I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside.
Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity:
First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at:
1. Writing boiler plate code
2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration)
3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts
4. Documentation, menial tasks
At a big tech product company #1 #2 #3 are not as frequent as one would think - most of the time is spent in meetings and meetings about meetings. Things move slowly - it's designed to be like that. Majority devs are working on integrating systems - whatever their manager sold to their manager and so on. The only time AI really helped me at my job was when I did a one-week hackathon. Outside of that, integrations of AI felt like more work rather than less - without much productivity boost.
Outside, it has proven to be a real productivity boost for me. It checks all the four boxes. Plus, I don't have to worry about legal, integrations, production bugs (eventually those will come).
So, depends who you are asking -- it is a huge game changer (or not).
- Madmallard 7mo ago2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration) I have a game written in XNA 100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote. All the assets are there. I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed. 1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempts 2 - the actual physics in gameplay? 0% replicated none of it works 3 - the lobby screen itself? non-functional Okay so what did it even do? Well it put together sort of a boilerplate main menu and barebones options with weird looking text that isn't what I provided (given that I provided a font file), a lobby that I had to manually adjust numerous times before it could get into gameplay, and then nonfunctional gameplay that only handles directional movement and nothing else with sort of half-working fish traveling behavior. I've tried this a dozen times since 2023 with AI and as late as late last year. ALL of the source code is there every single thing that could be translated to be a functional game in another language is there. It NEVER once works or even comes remotely close. The entire codebase is about 20,000 lines, with maybe 3,000 of it being really important stuff. So yeah I don't really think AI is "really good" at anything complex. I haven't really been proven wrong in my 4 years of using it now.
- KronisLV 7mo agoI crave to see people saying "Here's the repo btw: ..." and others trying out porting it over, just so we see all of the ways how AI fails (and how each model does) and maybe in the middle there a few ways to improve its odds. Until it eventually gets included in training data, a bit like how LLMs are oddly good at making SVGs of pelicans on bicycles nowadays. And then, maybe someone slightly crazy comes along and tries seeing how much they can do with regular codegen approaches, without any LLMs in the mix, but also not manual porting.
- Madmallard 7mo agoI'm sure someone who regularly programs games in the destination language I want who also has worked with XNA in the past as a game developer could port it in a week or something yeah
- jb_hn 7mo agoAgreed -- coding agents / LLMs are definitely imperfect, but it's always hard to contextualize "it failed at X" without knowing exactly what X was (or how the agent was instructed to perform X)
- sheeshkebab 7mo agoIn those situations you basically need to guide llm to do it properly. It rarely one shots complex problems like this, especially in non web dev, but could make it faster than doing it manually.
- Madmallard 7mo agoOh believe me I broke it down super finely, down to single files and even single functions in some places It still is completely and utterly hopeless
- sigseg1v 7mo agoI've done this multiple times in various codebases, both medium sized personal ones (approx 50k lines for one project, and a smaller 20k line one earlier) and am currently in the process of doing a similar migration at work (~1.4 million lines, but we didn't migrate the whole thing, more like 300k of it). I found success with it pretty easily for those smaller projects. They were gamedev projects, and the process was basically to generate a source of truth AST and diff it vs a target language AST, and then do some more verifier steps of comparing log output, screenshot output, and getting it to write integration tests. I wrote up a bit of a blog on it. I'm not sure if this will be of any use to you, maybe your case is more difficult, but anyway here you go: https://sigsegv.land/blog/migrating-typescript-to-csharp-accurately/ https://sigsegv.land/blog/migrating-typescript-to-csharp-acc... For me it worked great, and I would (and am) using a similar method for more projects.
- svara 7mo agoYes, throughput is determined by the bottleneck and above a certain organization size, the bottleneck often is coordination costs.
- wvlia5 7mo agoThis is a bot comment.
- m_ke 7mo agohaving been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.
- spacecadet 7mo agoThis. Hell even a company that is 100 people or more. Ive seen companies just grind to snails pace around 80-90 people and then still scale to 400-500 and then it's impossible to really do anything meaningful. I have tried to test for this in interviews over the years but ultimately I just end up disappointed. At this point I don't even look, just work in small independently organized groups or coops.
- baxtr 7mo agoI love tiny teams. I hate big corp. Big corporations are full with people who love to entertain 20+ people in video calls. 1-2 people speak, the other nod their heads while browsing Amazon. I wouldn’t be sad if those jobs vanished.
- ffsm8 7mo agoWell, you should be terrified of those jobs vanishing I think. All of these people will consequently be on the job market competing for your opportunities. Yes you may feel superior to their capabilities - and may even be justified in your opinion (I know nothing about you beyond this comment)... But it'll still significantly impact your professional future if this actually happens. It would massively impact wages at the very least Your viewpoint is incredibly short-sighted and not actually realizing the broad effect on the industry as a whole such a change would bring.
- baxtr 7mo agoMaybe I’m naive but I’m not terrified about the future at all. Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different? Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices. Lower prices increase quality of life for everyone. People who lost their job might be able to pick up doing something they actually enjoy…
- wnmurphy 7mo agoI agree with your categories. The majority of the usage for me is (1) and (3). (1) LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids. No need to go look up examples or read the documentation in most cases, spit out a mostly working starting point. (3) Learning. Ramping up on an unfamiliar project by asking Antigravity questions is really useful. I do think it makes devs faster, in that it takes less time to do these two things. But you're running into the 80% of the job that does not involve writing code, especially at a larger company. In theory, this should allow a company to do more with fewer devs, but in reality it just means that these two activities become easier, and the 80% is still the bottleneck.
- StableAlkyne 7mo ago> LLMs are basically Stack Overflow on steroids That, and I've never had to beg an LLM for an answer, or waste 5 minutes of my life typing up a paragraph to pre-empt the XY Problem Problem. Also never had it close my question as a duplicate of an unrelated question. The accuracy tends to be somewhat lower than SO, but IMO this is a fair tradeoff to avoid having to potentially fight for an answer.
- random3 7mo agoInteresting. Are you generating revenue or, otherwise, what productivity are you measuring? Without generating revenue (which to be clear is a very good proxy to measure impact) everyone can be indeed very prolific in their hobbies. But labor market is about making money for a living and unless you can directly impact your day-to-day needs from your work, it can't be called productive.
- vb7132 7mo agoVery valid point. I will lay down the facts for you: At my previous employer, I was generating $2.5million per year (revenue per employee). I didn't ship a single line of code. All the time was spent trying to convince various stake holders. Now, I have already built a couple of apps that help me better manage my tech news (keeps me sane) plus I am writing a blog that generates $0. It's only been a month. If you measure the immediate dollar value, you are right. But in life, pay-offs are not always realized immediately. Just my opinion anyway.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo agoCan mostly second this. Working on a side project, and it's truly incredible how good AI has been for MOST of it. Also, bewildering how truly awful it was at some seemingly random things - like writing not terribly difficult Assembly that mostly exists already to do Go-style hot splitting (to even get it to understand what older versions of Go did). I suspect it'll still be 3 years before AI is as good at the FAANGs as it is outside, just due to the ungodly huge context and the amount of proprietary stuff it would need to learn to use effectively, plus getting all the access to it, etc. But, even when it does all that, that's maybe 33% of the job. I just don't see mass layoffs at the really big tech companies, unless it's more focused on just cutting and cutting than actually because people have been made redundant. Even at the management level, I'm not sure we're going to see managers managing teams of 30 instead of teams of 10. At the end of the day, a manager needs to know what you're doing and if you're any good at it, and there's only so many people a person can do that effectively with. Maybe low-level managers go away, and it's just TLMs, but someone still needs to do your 1-on-1s and babysit those that need babysat.
- neya 7mo agoI think a lot of people will not like to hear this but we use AI almost for everything internally. The noob way to go about this is just give it a couple of tasks and just give it complete root access to your life. That's always going to end up in disappointment. Instead, I realised, AI always needs an architect. Opinionated. Strategic. Authoritative. It is quite good at following most orders. Hence why you must ALWAYS be in the loop. AI can augment, but not replace. Maybe some day it might. But it's not now, even with the latest SOTA models. I let AI write my emails for me. But never the ability to hit send. I let AI access to my data to make informed decisions, but never let it make the final decision. You may think I'm being paranoid, but I'm a very cautious person. I don't jump into new technology fresh out of the oven and this has served me well for the last 15 years. (I learned my lesson courtesy of MongoDb). With AI, I am taking the same approach. Experiment, understand the limits and only then implement. Working really well so far and have managed to automate tons of tedious tasks from emails to sales to even meetings. I don't use Clawdbot, not any library. I wrote my own wrappers for everything using Elixir. I used Instructor and Ash framework with Phoenix and a bunch of generators to automate tedious tasks. I control the endpoints the models are loaded from (Open router) and use a multi-model flow so no one company has enough data about me. Only bits and pieces of random user IDs. Privacy is the real challenge with AI.