Comment by al_borland

Comment by al_borland 17 hours ago

38 replies

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A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.

Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs.

https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m

My experience has been similar to yours, and I think a lot of the hype is from people like this Google engineer who play into the hype and leave out the context. This sets expectations way out of line from reality and leads to frustration and disappointment.

another_twist 3 hours ago

Thats because getting promoted requires thought leadership and fulfilling AI mandates. Hence the tweet from this PE at Google, another from one at Microsoft wanting to rewrite the entire c++ base to Rust, few other projects also from MS all about getting the right Markdown files etc etc

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keybored 10 hours ago

> A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.

I’ll bring the tar if you bring the feathers.

That sounds hyperbolic but how can someone say something so outrageoulsy false.

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  • thornewolf 9 hours ago

    as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet

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    • keybored 9 hours ago

      A principal engineer at Google made a public post on the World Wide Web and assumed some shared Google/Claude-context. Do you hear yourself?

      Reply View 4 replies
      • tokioyoyo 6 hours ago

        Working in a large scale org gets you accustomed to general problems in decision making that aren’t that obvious. Like I totally understood what she means and in my head nodded with “yeah that tracks”.

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      • grayhatter an hour ago

        People make mistakes, it's not that deep. The correct incentive to encourage is admitting, and understand and forgiving when necessary because you don't want to encourage people to hide mistakes out of shame. That only makes things worse.

        Especially considering forgetting the delta between yours and someone else's shared context is extremely common. And the least egregious mistake you can make when writing an untargeted promo post.

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        • keybored 7 minutes ago

          My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping. Maybe with a later addendum. Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons.

          > when writing an untargeted promo post.

          lol.

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  • JimDabell 6 hours ago

    Who are you referring to here? If you follow the link, you will see that the Google engineer did not say that.

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    • keybored 4 hours ago

      I am quoting the person that I responded to. Which linked to this: https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m

      > I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Cloud Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

      So I see one error. GP said “couldn’t do”. The engineer really said “matched”.

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      • woooooo 26 minutes ago

        The key words in the quote are "not everyone is aligned". It's not about execution ability.

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dysleixc 11 hours ago

May I ask about your level of experience and which AI you tried to use? I have a strong suspicion these two factors are rarely mentioned, which leads to miscommunication. For example, in my experience, up until recently you could get amazing results, but only if you had let's say 5+ years of experience AND were willing to pay at least $100/month for Claude Code AND followed some fairly trivial usage policies (e.g., using the "ultrathink" keyword, planning mode etc) AND didn't feel lazy actually reading the output. Quite often people wouldn't meet one of those criteria and would call out the AI hype bubble.

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  • cocoto 10 hours ago

    From the very beginning everyone tells us “you are using the wrong model”. Fast forward a year, the free models become as good as last year premium models and the result is still bad but you still hear the same message “you are not using the last model”… I just stopped caring to try the new shiny model each month and simply reevaluate the state of the art once a year for my sanity. Or maybe my expectation is clearly too high for these tools.

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    • coryrc 5 hours ago

      Are you sure you haven't moved the goalposts? The context here is "agentic coding" i.e. it does it all, while in the past the context was, to me anyway, "you describe the code you want and it writes it and you check it's what you asked for". The latter does work on free models now.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • laserlight 5 hours ago

        When one is not happy with LLM output, agentic workflow rarely improves quality --- even though it may improve functionality. Now, instead of making sure that LLM is on track at each step, it goes down a rabbit hole, at which point it's impossible to review the work, let alone make it do it your way.

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  • amoss 9 hours ago

    This discussion is a request for positive examples to demonstrate any of the recent grandiose claims about ai assisted development. Attempting to switch instead to attacking the credentials of posters only seems to supply evidence that there are no positive examples, only hype. It doesn't seem to add to the conversation.

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  • consp 10 hours ago

    > would call out the AI hype bubble

    Which is what it is by describing it as a tool needing thousands of dollars and years of time in learning fees while being described as "replaces devs" in an instant. It is a tool and when used sparingly by well trained people, works. To the extend that any large statistical text predictor would.

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  • DoesntMatter22 2 hours ago

    I’ve mostly used the 20 a month cursor plan and I’ve gotten to the point I can code huge things with rarely the need to do anything manually

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  • DoesntMatter22 2 hours ago

    I’ve mostly used the 20 a month cursor plan and I’ve gotten to the point I can code huge things with rarely the need to do anything manually

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hahahahhaah 10 hours ago

Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.

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tw061023 6 hours ago

That, uh, says a lot about Google, doesn't it?

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srcport56445 12 hours ago

Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.

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edanm 12 hours ago

You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post).

While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).

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  • NoPicklez 11 hours ago

    Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.

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    • edanm 11 hours ago

      Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point?

      Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course.

      In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.

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      • trashb 7 hours ago

        Those are some high profile (celebrity) developers.

        I wonder if they have measured their results? I believe that the perceived speed up of AI coding is often different from reality. The following paper backs this idea https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 . Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?

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      • Adrig 7 hours ago

        A lot of comments reads like a knee jerk reaction to the Twitter crowd claiming they vibe code apps making 1m$ in 2 weeks.

        As a designer I'm having a lot of success vibe coding small use cases, like an alternative to lovable to prototype in my design system and share prototypes easily.

        All the devs I work with use cursor, one of them (front) told me most of the code is written by AI. In the real world agentic coding is used massively

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      • margorczynski 8 hours ago

        I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?".

        The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.

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        • menaerus 7 hours ago

          I agree it's about the ego .. about the other part I am also trying to project few scenarios in my head.

          Wild guess nr.1: large majority of software jobs will be complemented (mostly replaced) with the AI agents, reducing the need for as many people doing the same job.

          Wild guess nr.2: demand for creating software will increase but the demand for software engineers creating that software will not follow the same multiplier.

          Wild guess nr.3: we will have the smallest teams ever with only few people on board leading perhaps to instantiating the largest amount of companies than ever.

          Wild guess nr.4: in near future, the pool of software engineers as we know them today, will be drastically downsized, and only the ones who can demonstrate they can bring the substantial value over using the AI models will remain relevant.

          Wild guess nr.5: getting the job in software engineering will be harder than ever.

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      • akoboldfrying 10 hours ago

        Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/

        Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)

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  • NBJack 11 hours ago

    Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.

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