A team of programmers is "worse" than their best member. Worse quality of code, worse thinking. You can usually get more done with a lot of mediocre hours of work than a few brilliant hours, though.
AI I've used isn't a better coder than I am - it's just got a lot more hours in an hour than I do.
That's a hot take. AI has fundamentally shifted things. Start-ups can start up 10x faster, and HN is start-up flavored.
If people quit talking about AI, it'll be because it's become foundational infrastructure, so it's not the primary focus of the articles, but just the atmosphere they all exist within, like the computer, or the internet.
But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
Don't get me wrong, I leverage these AI tools as well to be more productive, I'm not against using it or anything else. But I'm also old enough to know that eventually AI will be "old news" when the next hot topic comes around.
> But do you think this is our first rodeo with "XYZ has fundamentally shifted things and startups now start up faster"? RoR did the same, Bootstrap as well, and countless of other things.
I really don't understand anyone who can say something like this with a straight face. Comparing AI to Bootstrap? I...
Only if you're actively inside of the hype-machine and don't see it from the outside with the experience of previously having been inside of the hype-machine.
The logic was/is "other topics been popular on the HN frontpage in the past and their advocates have made bunch of claims about their topics, and eventually it'll die down too, like the others did", that's hardly under attack here as you're on some wild tangent right now.
I'm pretty confident that, presently, with AI, I get more done than I could with 5x hours, but less than I could with 20x hours, and 10's a nice round number.
Nah. I've committed over a million LOC in the past 4 months, discounting personal projects. LOC is a fuzzy measure that doesn't tell much, but, it's easier to mention that than to describe the details of my work.
Nobody knew that LLM's were an option. The architecture was basically waiting there for someone to say, "do that, but turn it up to 11," if I understand right.
Is the alternative is to give the power directly to the powerful? Not only will they hold the guns, but they decide what the markets will bear - often-enough with food for the poor becoming optional, if history has any lessons.
Which non-capitalist system does not ultimately concentrate wealth and power even further? And, if nation-states are organisms, and survival of the fittest is a law, which of those systems can survive in the real world? Excepting perhaps those propped up by a disproportionate natural wealth and homogeneous culture, where it is easier for people to continue to believe in "our good" when hard times come.
Capitalism is the only system that pretends to respect human nature - gives us a lever that says, "want more stuff? provide more value." It gives the self-interested a healthy outlet that the other systems lack. It must be managed, though, by power, and when the two collude you get fascism. So, I guess maybe I share your view, that lobbying breaks the system.
Globally active/influential social systems are still very young. In the couple hundred years such systems have been able to form, we've only attempted a minority of realistically possible systems, and most of this data was collected under very specific sets of circumstances which most likely only cover a tiny subset of realistically possible circumstances.
IMO it's not possible to justify your claims without taking a whole tower of (IMO likely false) assumptions for granted. I'd love to go into detail on each assumption I see, but I've had similar comments regarding flaws of capitalist systems get derailed too many times by very angry commenters who insist that such thoughts are not worth discussing and MUST NOT be discussed.
Gemini Flash is the one I get most excited about, because it's so fast and so good at real-world knowledge, and it's improving so fast - look at how much the benchmarks improved in ~1 month. It's just categorically different than anything else.
Also, I use it every day, and it just got ~10% better at coding, according to the benchmarks. How is that not exciting?
I use Gemini every day and I've noticed any subjective improvement. In many cases it feels worse because it does fewer Google searches than before. As a result I find it hard to get excited about it.
Totally agree. When this current wave of GenAI really started heating up, I guess 2020-2021, my analysis was very straightforward. What are the high level inputs to long-term success? I basically came up with a couple of criteria:
1. Data. Lots of data.
2. Money. Lots of money.
3. Access to necessary hardware.
4. Business alignment/will to do it.
5. Access to talent, current and future.
This is certainly incomplete/naive. In my mind, though, Google was the clear answer.
On a more personal level, I've been deep into the Google ecosystem since I got diederich@gmail.com in 2005. (I actually paid 50 cents on ebay to get a very early invite.) There was no question in my mind that Google's AI work would deeply integrate into their whole ecosystem in very powerful and productive ways. (Yes, I can join you to discuss, at length, the various ways that Google's dominance is problematic/scary.)
Having said all that, I'm quite happy that there is, at the moment, a very rich competitive landscape. Indeed, not too long ago, with Gemini Pro 3.1 languishing, I moved most of my deeper thinking work to ChatGPT, which was, for me at least, clearly outperforming Gemini.
While I certainly didn't anticipate it, Google's strategy of making their fast/relatively inexpensive models surprisingly powerful has been a welcomed surprise.
I think you forgot to mention energy efficiency. If you build AI hardware in-house, your only other expense is energy and the producer surplus is greatest for companies producing below the equilibrium market price.
It's the difference between billions in revenue and billions in profits.
Its not good at not making mistakes, but what it produces is structurally quite nice, not over-engineered (looking at you Sol) and its personality isn’t annoying (looking at you Claude). A bit like Grok Code, but Grok is a better coder.
AI I've used isn't a better coder than I am - it's just got a lot more hours in an hour than I do.
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