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I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an u
by Jagerbizzle 5mo ago
I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well.
I presume I'm not the only one.
- hellisothers 5mo agoSame and it is working really well (I say contra to most individual reporting).
- andriy_koval 5mo agoI have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.
- vbezhenar 5mo agoJust wait a month, Opus 4.8 will comprehend it for sure.
- overfeed 5mo agoit will comprehend it well enough to complicate it further into a rats-nest that only Opus 4.9 can comprehend, and so on. Good luck if you run into a bug before the N+1 version launches.
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agohonest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong. it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.
- andriy_koval 5mo agoIts a bit of workspace politics, I would need to call that guy out to tell that he is not hyper-performer, but just pushed lots of low quality code which will produce lots of negative impact in a long term. Also, I am not sure if it is trivial to implement. The code is injected into many scenarios and workflows, so replacement will be painful and risky if new solution break some edge case.
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoIt sounds like you might have some larger process problems if someone can just inject a bunch of vibe-coded slop into critical workflows while more discerning eyes are dubious of the quality/reliability etc.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoIn some sense, sure. There’s a lot of processes that weren’t previously needed, because sloppy people who couldn’t or wouldn’t think things through were mostly incapable of producing PRs that passed all the existing tests.
- andriy_koval 5mo agoits partially/largely management problem. One of tier1 productivity metric in the group is # of LoC created by engineers, so it creates dynamics of people exchanging favors of pushing AI slop to codebase, or be labeled as low performers.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoThe problem was definitely because they didn't use enough AI fast enough. They should just try again
- svieira 5mo agoI went through one the other day which was a nest of Go code which boiled down to a 10 line shell script.
- BloondAndDoom 5mo agoAI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.
- jdub 5mo ago> Security is less or no concern [waits for chickens to come home to roost]
- connicpu 5mo agoDoesn't take long until someone has the bright idea to pipe customer tickets directly into the poorly written internal tool
- LPisGood 5mo agoWhen attackers can move laterally through everything because every internal tool leaks credentials and data there will be issues.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoInternal tool Doesn’t have credential. Checkmate ;)
- overfeed 5mo ago> [waits for chickens to come home to roost] "We are writing down X billions over 4 years, and have cancel several ambitious programs related to our AI experiments. We were following standard practice in the industry, so [shareholders] can't blame us for these chickens coming to roost. If everyone is guilty, is anyone really guilty?"
- sumedh 5mo agoAnthropic seems to be doing fine :)
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
- se4u 5mo agoI'd be interested to learn what kind of internal tooling are you improving ?
- TimTheTinker 5mo agoPersonally, a static analysis PR check to catch some types of preventable runtime production errors in application code
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoWe've had a lot of complaints about our review processes, time to submit, etc, and a lot of that boils down to tools no one has time to improve. It's now trivial to fix these problems while still doing our day jobs -- shipping a product.
- appplication 5mo agoI’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues. This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.
- msy 5mo agoWe suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
- Jagerbizzle 5mo agoI'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers. I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.
- casey2 5mo agoSuch as?
- nathancahill 5mo agoCreating stakeholder value
- natpalmer1776 5mo agoPromoting synergy
- bakugo 5mo agoI guess that's one way to tout a technology as revolutionary without actually needing to provide any proof of it. Just say you're using it for "internal tooling" and "unannounced projects", that way nobody can look at them and notice they're indistinguishable from the slop that clogs up Show HN nowadays. It's better than the "here's my code, it a giant pile of spaghetti but only luddites care about code quality and maintainability anyway" method, at least.
- Daishiman 5mo agoI'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists. I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.
- amluto 5mo agoI am, oddly, able to get really quite a lot of mileage out of $20/mo of OpenAI plan, and I have never encountered a usage limit. I have gotten warnings that I was close a couple times. I wonder what I’m doing differently. I did spend quite a bit of time, mostly manually, improving development processes such that the agent could effectively check its work. This made a difference between the agent mostly not working and mostly working. Maybe if I had instead spent gobs of money it would have worked output tooling improvements?
- komali2 5mo agoI wonder if you're like me? I tried out the MCPs and sub agents and rules and bells and whistles and always just came back to a plain Codex / Claude Code / Cursor Agent terminal window, where I say what I want, @ a few files, let it rip, check the diff, ask for some adjustments, then commit and start the process over after clearing context. Haven't found a process that beats this yet and I burn very few tokens this way.
- devmor 5mo agoI don’t really write code with it at all, and that’s why I burn so many tokens. I like writing code, I’m good at writing code. What I hate doing is dredging through logs, filtering out test scenarios and putting together disparate information from knowledge silos - so I have the AI doing that. It’s my research assistant. Effectively I’m using it like an automated search engine that indexes anything I want and refines the results by using the statistical near neighbors of how other people explained their searches.