I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of both the good and the bad that I hear about LLM-based coding tools. Using it for research or to spin up a quick demo or prototype is using it to help plot a course. A lot of the multi-stage agentic workflows also come down to creating guard rails before doing the main implementation so the AI can’t get too far off track. Most of the success stories I hear seem to be in these areas so far. Meanwhile, probably the most common criticism I see is that an AI that is simply given a prompt to implement some new feature or bug fix for an existing system often misunderstands or makes bad assumptions and ends up repeatedly running into dead ends. It moves fast but without knowing which direction to move in.
I've been using AI to help me write it and I've come to a couple conclusions:
- AI can make working PoCs incredibly quickly
- It can even help me think of story lines, decision paths etc
- Given that, there is still a TON of decisions to be made e.g. what artwork to use, what makes sense from a story perspective
- Playtesting alone + iterating still occurs at human speed b/c if humans are the intended audience, getting their opinions takes human time, not computer time
I've started using this example more and more as it highlights that, yes, AI can save huge amounts of time. However, as we learned from the Theory of Constraints, there is always another bottleneck somewhere that will slow things down.
Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.
You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.
Make sure you fit the rocks first.
You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.
That water overflow step is missing / implicit. But that's an observable event.
then you fill 3 liter bottle again, and pour the contents into the 5 liter bottle until the 5 liter one is full
empty the 5 liter bottle, and pour the 1 liter in the 3 liter bottle into the 5 liter bottle
fill the 3 liter bottle again and pour that into the 1 liter already in the 5 liter bottle to get 4 liters of water
> Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any additional containers
I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors recently, love leaning hard into this one.
Not sure, I used to be better at diagnosing this type of episode.
Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.
The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot of money for something that took no time to make at all (see most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
This sort of thing was done at a time when everybody did it, and now that it's not done, nobody does it
No kid ever said "did you see the sweater that Timmy's grandma knitted for him? That kid is so cool! "
Mostly because they all had grams sweaters as well.
I don't know what term you were looking for, but a handmade present for someone dear is about the furthest thing from a "status symbol" that I can think of:
- it can't be bought
- it can't be transferred without losing almost all value (ie: it's only valuable to you, or at most your family, eBay doesn't want it)
- it provides no improvement whatsoever in one's social standing
I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet fully subsumed into their phones.
People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently comment on the knit socks I often wear, ask after who made them, and all of a sudden we're on "how's your mom" terms.
https://www.ebay.com/b/Olympic-Medal/27291/bn_55191416?_sop=...
> People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently comment on the knit socks I often wear,
Ok, that explains pretty much everything about your line of thought.
Thanks.
I'm also completely unimpressed by someone wearing a Rolex though, so different mileage for different people.
Understanding words does not require being impressed by anything, nor caring about the opinion of kids.
I think of it differently. Speed is great because it means you can change direction very easily, and being wrong isn't as costly. As long as you're tracking where you're going, if you end up in the wrong place, but you got there quickly and noticed it, you can quickly move in a different direction to get to the right place.
Sometimes we take time mostly because it's expensive to be wrong. If being wrong doesn't cost anything, going fast and being wrong a lot may actually be better as it lets you explore lots of options. For this strategy to work, however, you need good judgment to recognize when you've reached a wrong position.
I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?
Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all understand, and we don't have it now.
Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management would even use: they decide how productive you are based on completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.
If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really seems to have changed"
"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.
ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom ide scroll.
It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward.
I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.
When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.
Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.
I feel this new world sucks. We have new technology that boosts the productivity of the individual engineer, and we could be doing MUCH better work, instead of just rushed slop to meet quotas.
I feel I'm just building my replacement, to bring the next level of profits to the c-suite. I just wish I wasn't burning out while doing so.
I don’t think it’s exclusive to startups or tech either, it seems more like a downstream consequence of the fact that there’s no real innovation anymore. Capitalism demands constant growth, and when there are real technological improvements you can achieve that growth through higher productivity. If there are none, you have to achieve that growth through other means like forcing employees to work longer or cutting costs. The alpha is all coming from squeezing the labor force right now.
You can't trust us with self-care. There's just too many shiny toys out there!
Oh, I thought it was because they're a way to show off about being rich.
> We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.
Even if she could reach the pedals, my 4yo doesn't have the attention span to drive. This isn't a "lived experience" thing, it's a physical brain development thing. IIRC the are effects with learning math, where starting earlier had limited impact on being able to move to certain more advanced topics earlier; ie there's more going on than just hours of experience.
The standard age for voting is also the age for being a legal adult. There are sound logical reasons that these ages should match.
The standard drinking age is due to pressure by activists, and AIUI is lower in other countries.
Maybe for some. I think these examples were carefully chosen. Hermès are made in France, "Swiss watch" doesn't automatically mean Rolex, though in that case Rolex does own most of their manufacturing (though there is a whole world of carefully made watches out there that don't cost 10K). As for old properties... there is a huge range there, but unless you are living in a castle, most people, at least my city, are likely silently thinking: "I'm so sorry for them that they have to live in that old house."
Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true, however there are people who would be perfectly competent and responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage. Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and vote on whim at 60.
We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated and covers of most error cases.
To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges with a high enough quality - just a thought.
The reason we need to wait is that it takes time for some things to mature.
Imagine a world in which the promise of AI was that workers could keep their jobs, at the same compensation as before, but work fewer hours and days per week due to increased productivity.
What could you do with those extra hours and days? Sleep better. Exercise more. Prepare healthy meals. Spend more time with family and friends. The benefits to physical and mental well-being are priceless. Even if you happened to earn extra money for the same amount of work, your time can be infinitely more valuable than money.
Unfortunately, that's not this world. Which is why the "increased productivity" promise doesn't seem to benefit workers at all.
If you look at the technological utopias that people imagined 50, 60+ years ago, they involved lives of leisure. If you would have told them that advances in technology would not reduce our working hours at all, maybe they would have started smashing the machines back then. Now we're supposed to be happy with more "stuff", even if there's no more time to enjoy stuff.
But anyhow, you can buy large-ish burlapped trees but they aren’t as healthy, often die, and nothing close to a 100+ yr old estate oak tree or a decades old rose garden. You just can’t make it faster, transplanting plants that old will kill them.
Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will typically provide a warranty.