Comment by gtsop 2 days ago
Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?
Your words predict an explosion of unimaginary magnitude for new code and for new buisnesses. Where is it? Nowhere.
Edit: And dont start about how you vibed a SaaS service, show income numbers from paying customers (not buyouts)
But that example is of writing a green field library that deals with an extremely well documented spec. While impressive, this isn’t what 99% of software engineering is. I’m generally a believer/user but this is a poor example to point at and say “look, gains”.
Do you have some magical insight into every codebase in existence? No? Ok then…
What numbers? It doesn’t matter if it’s one or a million, it’s had a positive impact on the velocity of a non zero number of projects. You wrote:
> Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?
Yes is the answer. I could probably put it in front of your face and you’d reject it. You do you. All the best.
Perhaps I'm misreading the person to whom you're replying, but usefullness, while subjective, isn't typically based on one person's opinion. If enough people agree on the usefullness of something, we as a collective call it "useful".
Perhaps we take the example of a blender. There's enough need to blend/puree/chop food-like-items, that a large group of people agree on the usefullness of a blender. A salad-shooter, while a novel idea, might not be seen as "useful".
Creating software that most folks wouldn't find useful still might be considered "neat" or "cool". But it may not be adding anything to the industry. The fact that someone shipped something quickly doesn't make it any better.
Ultimately, or at least in this discussion, we should decouple the software’s end use from the question of whether it satisfies the creator’s requirements and vision in a safe and robust way. How you get there and what happens after are two different problems.
There was this recent post about a Cloudflare OAuth client where the author checked in all the AI prompts, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166.
The author of the library (kentonv) comments in the HN thread that he said it took him a few days to write the library with AI help, while he thinks it would have taken weeks or months to write manually.
Also, while it may be technically true we're "two years in", I don't think this is a fair assessment. I've been trying AI tools for a while, and the first time I felt "OK, now this is really starting to enhance my velocity" was with the release of Claude 4 in May of this year.