Remix clone Hacker News

Like AI could write code perfectly as soon as I thought of it, and that would not improve my productivity 10x. Coding was never the slow part. Everything that goes around coding (like determining that the extra load here is not going to overload things, getting PMs to actually make their mind up what the feature is going to do, etc.), means that there's simply not that much time to be saved on coding activities.

▲

nsonha 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Same argument can be said for not using any tooling really. "Tech is the easy part". No difference typing code on notepad and having zero process/engineering infrastructure I guess. Because stakeholder management is the main engineering skill apparently.

Btw, AI doesn't just code, there are AIs for debugging, monitoring etc too.

▲

achierius 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are two levels to this.

1. Tooling obviously does improve performance, but not so huge a margin. Yes, if AI could automate more elements of tooling, that would very much help. If I could tell an AI "bisect this bug, across all projects in our system, starting with this known-bad point", that would be very helpful -- sometimes. And I'm sure we'll get there soon enough. But there is fractal complexity here: what if isolating the bug requires stepping into LLDB, or dumping some object code, or running with certain stressors on certain hardware? So it's not clear that "LLM can produce code from specs, given tight oversight" will map (soon) to "LLM can independently assemble tools together and agentically do what I need done".

2. Even if all tooling were automated, there's still going to be stuff left over. Can the LLM draft architectural specs, reach out to other teams (or their LLMs), sit in meetings and piece together the big picture, sus out what the execs really want us to be working on, etc.? I do spend a significant (double-digit) percentage of my time working on that, so if you eliminate everything else -- then you could get 10x improvement, but going beyond that would start to run up against Amdahl's Law.

▲

necovek 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you were to really measure speed improvement of notepad vs a tricked out IDE, it's probably not much. The problem would be the annoyance caused to an engineer who has to manually type out everything.

No, coding speed is really not the bottleneck to software engineer productivity.

▲

nsonha 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> coding speed > the annoyance caused to an engineer

No one said productivity is this one thing and not that one thing, only you say that because it's convenient for your argument. Productivity is a combination of many things, and again it's not just typing out code that's the only area AI can help.

	▲	necovek 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The argument of "coding speed not a bottleneck to productivity" is not in contradiction to "productivity is a combination": it even implies it. Again, the context here was that somebody discussed speed of coding and you raised the point of not using any tooling with Notepad.