Technology

I work adjacent to software developers, and I have been hearing a lot of the same sentiments. What I don't understand, though, is the magnitude of this bubble then.

Typically, bubbles seem to form around some new market phenomenon or technology that threatens to upset the old paradigm and usher in a new boom. Those market phenomena then eventually take their place in the world based on their real value, which is nowhere near the level of the hype, but still substantial.

In this case, I am struggling to find examples of the real benefits of a lot of these AI assistant technologies. I know that there are a lot of successes in the AI realm, but not a single one I know of involves an LLM.

So, I guess my question is, "What specific LLM tools are generating profits or productivity at a substantial level well exceeding their operating costs?" If there really are none, or if the gains are only incremental, then my question becomes an incredulous, "Is this biggest in history tech bubble really composed entirely of unfounded hype?"

The people talking about AI coding the most at my job are architects and it drives me insane.

i use it for programming arduinos for my smarthome. its pretty nice but also aggravating.

Writing apps with AI seems pretty cooked. But I've had some great successes using GitHub copilot for some annoying scripting work.

I have never seen an AI generated code which is correct. Not once. I've certainly seen it broadly correct and used it for the gist of something. But normally it fucks something up - imports, dependencies, logic, API calls, or a combination of all them.

I sure as hell wouldn't trust to use it without reviewing it thoroughly. And anyone stupid enough to use it blindly through "vibe" programming deserves everything they get. And most likely that will be a massive bill and code which is horribly broken in some serious and subtle way.

So when the AI bubble burst, will there be coding jobs available to clean up the mess?

According to Deutsche Bank the AI bubble is a pillar of our economy now.

So when it pops. I guess that's kinda apocalyptic.

I'd much rather write my own bugs to have to waste hours fixing, thanks.

I code with LLMs every day as a senior developer but agents are mostly a big lie. LLMs are great for information index and rubber duck chats which already is incredible feaute of the century but agents are fundamentally bad. Even for Python they are intern-level bad. I was just trying the new Claude and instead of using Python's pathlib.Path it reinvented its own file system path utils and pathlib is not even some new Python feature - it has been de facto way to manage paths for at least 3 years now.

That being said when prompted in great detail with exact instructions agents can be useful but thats not what being sold here.

After so many iterations it seems like agents need a fundamental breakthrough in AI tech is still needed as diminishing returns is going hard now.

I would say absolutely in the general sense nost people, and the salesmen, frame them in.

When I was invited to assist with the GDC development, I got a chance to partner with a few AI developers and see the development process firsthand, try my hand at it myself, and get my hands on a few low parameter models for my own personal use. It's really interesting just how capable some models are in their specific use-cases. However, even high param. models easily become useless at the drop of a hat.

I found the best case, one that's rarely done mind you, is integrate the model into a program that has the ability to call a known database. With a properly trained model to format output in both natural language and use a given database for context calls, and concrete information, the qualitative performance leaps ahead by bounds. Problem is, that requires so much customization it pretty much ends up being something a capable hobbyist would do, it's just not economically sound for a business to adopt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsE0BwQ3l8U&t=1492s

And the band plays on

LLMs work great to ask about tons of documentation and learn more about high-level concepts. It's a good search engine.

The code they produce have basically always disappointed me.

But will something be done about it?

NOooOoOoOoOoo. As long as it is still the new shiny toy for techbros and executive-bros to tinker with, it'll continue.

AI coding is the stupidest thing I've seen since someone decided it was a good idea to measure the code by the amount of lines written.