Thread

1. askonomm · 1790605097 · focus · HN ↗

   What I've found is that AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent. This then has the effect that product quality suffers more, faster. As a result of the sheer amount of code now being pushed out, code reviews, a thing that previously somewhat prevented lazy and incompetent developers from pushing out horrible code, is effectively dead in the water since no human can actually review such amounts of code realistically anymore. Some companies have adopted AI to review code, which, well ... you have AI make code, AI review code ... I hope you can see the stupidity here if you expect to see any deterministic results at all.

   I guess time will tell if the consumer will adapt to the lower quality of products, allowing companies to justify the existence of lazy and incompetent developers, or if the consumer will push back, forcing companies to increase the quality of their developers.

   Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.

   1. whatever1 · 1790605354 · focus · HN ↗

      Even if you are competent I cannot review your 5,000 lines of code you produce per day vs the 100 you were producing before the LLM apocalypse.

      1. rfgplk · 1790605820 · focus · HN ↗

         5,000 is the output velocity of someone not fully immersed in agentic coding. I've seen repos do ~100k to ~250k loc changes per week.

         1. 0c3ca83 · 1790606842 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, they're certainly squeezing 500 lines of functionality into 250,000 lines of code. Agents are great at this.

            1. bitwize · 1790609916 · focus · HN ↗

               Tell me you're not using a frontier model without telling me you're not using a frontier model

               1. paganel · 1790610455 · focus · HN ↗

                  Where's the great software, then? I'm genuinely asking: where is it? Because I can't find it, and it's been close to a year since AI for programming has started to take off.

                  1. dawnerd · 1790610908 · focus · HN ↗

                     In fact, a lot of the once great software that's switched to AI driven development has gotten worse.

                     1. cat-snatcher · 1790611649 · focus · HN ↗

                        For example?

                        1. 0c3ca83 · 1790614035 · focus · HN ↗

                           Google.

                           1. cat-snatcher · 1790614947 · focus · HN ↗

                              It was going downhill way before AI.

                              1. intrikate · 1790617123 · focus · HN ↗

                                 That's true, but also doesn't prevent the accelerated decay that it seems to be undergoing since AI hit the scene en masse a few years ago.
                        2. dawnerd · 1790617048 · focus · HN ↗

                           Clickup. Windows. Github, VSCode...

                           Could be argued they were going downhill before but it's a much faster decline since 2023-ish

                           1. necovek · 1790622201 · focus · HN ↗

                              Somebody posted that GitHub status summary: in ten years, they averaged 10 incidents per month — this includes the last 12 months. In the last six months, average is 22.

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