TechTakes

Software and computers are a joke at this point.

Computers no longer solve real problems and are now just used to solve the problems that overly complex software running on monstrous cheap hardware create.

"Hey I'd like to run a simple electronics schematic program like we had in the DOS days, it ran in 640K and responded instantly!"

"OK sure first you'll need the latest Windows 11 with 64G of RAM and 2TB of storage, running on at least 24 cores, then you need to install a container for the Docker for the VM for the flatpak for the library for the framework because the programmer liked the blue icon, then make sure you are always connected to the internet for updates or it won't run, and somehow the program will still just look like a 16 bit VB app from 1995."

"Well that sounds complicated, where's the support webpage for installing the program in Windows 7?"

"Do you have the latest AI agents installed in your web browser?"

"It's asking me to click OK but I didn't install the 1GB mouse driver that sends my porn browsing habits to Amazon..."

"Just click OK on all the EULAs so you lose the right to the work you'll create with this software, then install a few more dependencies, languages, entire VMs written in byte code compiled to HTML to run on JAVA, then make sure you have a PON from your ISP otherwise how can you expect to have a few kilobytes of data be processed on your computer? This is all in the cloud, baby!"

@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they're more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?

I just want to point out that every single heavily downvoted, idiotic pro-AI reply on this post is from a .ml user (with one programming.dev thrown in).

I wonder which way the causation flows.

And generate shit code

I have an LLM usage mandate in my performance review now. I can’t trust it to do anything important, so I’ll get it to do incredibly noddy things like deleting a clause (that I literally always have highlighted) or generate documentation that’s more long-winded than just reading the code and then go to the bathroom while it happens.

@dgerard I normally consider myself a 10x developer. With the 10x speedup of AI I now consider myself a 100x developer. I can replace an entire small business worth of developers with just myself and my LLM bot assistance. Just pay me $100 million up front no strings and I'll prove it to you! /s

Anyone who has had to unfuck someone else’s work knows it would have been faster to do the work correctly from scratch the first time.

From the blog post referenced:

We do not provide evidence that:

AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

Seems the article should be titled “16 AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower” - though I guess making us think it was intended to be a statistically relevant finding was the point.

That all said, this was genuinely interesting and is in-line with my understanding of the human psychology that’s at play. It would be nice to see this at a wider scale, broken down across different methodologies / toolsets and models.

Devs are famously bad at estimating how long a software project will take.

No, highly complex creative work is inherently extremely difficult to estimate.

Anyway, not shocked at all by the results. This is a great start that begs for larger and more rigorous studies.