Thread

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

317 points · 408 comments · julian_digital

torben-friis · 1790026444 · focus · HN ↗
Here's my constant question:
Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.
Why have we not seen an improvements in products?
While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.
Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?
1. apf6 · 1790027561 · focus · HN ↗
  Last year people were asking "if AI is so great then where are the new apps?". Then data for 2026 came out and now the IOS app store has a 84% percent year-over-year increase in new app submissions.
  For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I've seen. There's probably more - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_claude_to_build_an_operating_system_from/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...
  For that other stuff you mentioned like the right click menu. Those huge corporate projects suffer more from layers of institutional dysfunction and will be very very slow to show any improvement. Their dysfunction can't be solved with just faster coding.
  Using AI to build more features is easier than using AI to improve existing projects. People will gradually figure out how to do latter too, it'll just take longer.
  1. torben-friis · 1790028007 · focus · HN ↗
    That's just volume though. I also know, and have no trouble believing, that github is going down partly due to the weight of all the vibecoded pushes. But that does not necessarily translate to people's needs and wants being covered, for all we know iOS just has a plague of unused POCs.
    Do you have actual productive examples? As in, products with a real userbase that couldn't exist or be scaled pre-AI? Genuinely asking, I might have missed some large hits. The closest I can remember was bun rewrite kerfuffle, which seemed more a marketing action than anything.
    apf6 · 1790028985 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's just volume though
    If we sorted through all those new apps and ignored all the crap, I'm pretty sure we would find an overall increase in actually useful apps. I just shipped a new app myself, and I think it's useful, and I wouldn't have finished mine without AI assistance.
    > products with a real userbase that couldn't exist or be scaled pre-AI?
    Coding hasn't been the bottleneck for product creation for a while. So I don't think there are going to be many examples that fit that exact criteria. Any app idea was 'possible' before, it just took more developer hours to do it. So now teams are doing more things that were weren't worth the effort before, but are a lot more feasible with AI assistance.
    huurtehoog · 1790040113 · focus · HN ↗
    Has economic growth accelerated? TFP, labor productivity?
    Where is the net benefit people keep talking about when they claim productivity gains are obvious because "more code faster, can't you see?"
    brabel · 1790059715 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s interesting that people claimed the exact same thing when computers were being introduced to the work place int the 80s and 90s. Lots of papers showing how productivity didn’t go up at all and using a paper and pen seems to be just as efficient as using a PC.
    Even in the 19th century, when electricity became widely available, there was no productivity gain for 30 years at least. This is a well understood phenomenon.
    Google for “the Solow Paradox”.
    huurtehoog · 1790073760 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah you must be referring to this off the cuff comment by Robert Solow in a book review: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" (1987)
    <a href="https://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-pro...
    It's an interesting question and very much not resolved. It indeed led to a flurry of studies in the 1990s, and more recently to several updates and meta-analyses.
    The problem of "does computer technology investment causes increased productivity" is an interesting issue in economics and statistics. It is far from clear that the (immense) investment in computers over the past several decades has caused a corresponding excess growth in productivity.
    Some of the literature published after 2015 that I have read on this topic:
    "Information technology (IT) productivity paradox in the 21st century"
    > Thus we are still unable to confirm or reject the existence of an IT productivity paradox
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-12-2012-0129" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-12-2012-0129
    -------
    "Benchmarking the IT productivity paradox: Recent evidence from the manufacturing sector"
    (This one was published in 2006 but I find it relevant because it does a very well scoped analysis in manufacturing firms thus addressing the oft-mentioned argument that computer technology may leverage task productivity in a way that is hard to measure in aggregate)
    > However, many scholars from both sides of the IT paradox debate agree that difficulty still exists in specifying how to assess the IT contribution, and the availability of reliable data sets
    > Regardless of the final decision to differentiate or conform, our results make a compelling argument that more spending does not necessarily mean better IT productivity.
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcm.2004.12.012" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcm.2004.12.012
    -------
    "Lessons from three decades of IT productivity research: towards a better understanding of IT‑induced productivity effects"
    (This is one of the most inclined to disagree with the existence of the paradox, and still very cautious in the language used for writing the conclusion, e.g.:)
    > But to not at least consider the ongoing technological change as an important determinant of the deceleration in productivity growth seems ill-advised."
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-019-00173-6" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-019-00173-6
    -------
    The Productivity Paradox: A Meta-Analysis
    (This I'm quoting from the submitted manuscript. I haven't gotten around to reading the published version yet, but:)
    > Since the size of the eﬀect helps make the right decision in business-related investments, our result of ICT elasticity being very close to zero with values, about 0.3% for productivity and no eﬀect on proﬁtability, supports the argument that there are better forms of investment to be made
    <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2016.11.003" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2016.11.003
    ruszki · 1790104235 · focus · HN ↗
    And how many things were there which didn't provide the promised gains?

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