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?"
    8note · 1790040952 · focus · HN ↗
    more code faster is competing against some of the largest tax hikes of the last ~70 years, economic uncertainty on what the taxes tomorrow will look like, combined with an energy crisis.
    huurtehoog · 1790042145 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you claiming productivity should be growing much more slowly then it is over the past few months or years? Can you show me any analysis that supports that claim?
    Because I have seen plenty of analysis published in the past 30 years that puzzle over the productivity growth stagnation in the face of an exponential growth in capital expenditure in computer technology.
    So by all means share with me some of the groundbreaking results showing that we can finally see more productivity growth than would be otherwise expected by the conjecture.
    kylecazar · 1790064457 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a difference between task-level productivity, which AI has been shown to increase, and effects on the macro. You're talking about the latter while most people here are engineers considering the former.
    It's still unclear if task-level productivity gains bubble up, but it's also still early and I'm not sure we should expect to see immediate results there.
    huurtehoog · 1790073412 · focus · HN ↗
    So it enables doing more things but not necessarily doing more valuable things?
    Yes that is in essence the crux of the problem

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