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?"
    vouwfietsman · 1790098765 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there's a couple things going on:
    1. the metrics you mention are hard to measure and usually lag 2. the metrics might not be moving yet, because AI accelerates everything a little bit, and most of the hype is still the promise rather than the actuality 3. people are using the gained productivity to speed up secondary tasks / do different work, because applying it to their main work is still complex or not of sufficient quality
    huurtehoog · 1790099784 · focus · HN ↗
    Considering the amount of literature I have found and read on this topic so far, covering 30 years of analysis specifically in the context of productivity driven by investments in computer technology, and using data covering 130 years of economical statistics, its methodology and limitations, I am deeply skeptical of any 3 point dismissal of this problem as being easy to explain away such as your own.
    I said elsewhere, I don't have any beliefs about this problem, I am deeply fascinated by the difficulty involved in productivity analyses and especially by the question of missing productivity that we should expect to be driven by the huge investments in computer technology that have been observed over the past half century - and quickly accelerating of late.
    It's a fascinating topic and I intended merely to point out that quantifying computer technology driven productivity growth is a hard problem. Any facile conclusions one way or the other are suspicious in my view.
    It is not clear to me at all that building and buying more computer and data centers and software is an obviously good investment that should only be increased because it raises productivity. That is the discourse, but there is a very conspicuous lack of hard data to support that claim, and lots of pages going back and forth and proclaiming at the 'conclusions' sessions of papers and chapters that the problem is indeed hard and the work done so far is at best inconclusive.

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