Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up
78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.
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I think it's both true that you can't really write an entire app with just AI... At least not easily.
But also I don't buy that AI doesn't make me more productive. I'm not allowed to use it on my actual code but I have used it several times to generate one-off scripts and visualisations and for those it can easily save hours. They aren't software I need to edit myself though.
Pretty much everyone I've talked to about this says the same thing. LLMs are useful for one-off scripts or quickly generating boilerplate. It just turns out that those tasks don't make up the majority of programming work unless you are in a bullshit job anyway.
We aren't yet great at knowing when LLM will save time and when it will inflate time.
If only we libraries online of boilerplate crap with a few options to transfom them slightly... We'd need a lot less datacentres
We should have tools and libraries that help us avoid boilerplate, not ones that help us write more of it.
Yes!
I'm not even a programmer, but lot of this is really dictated by the language, isn't it? (C or .Net, for example - and all the default crap needed for UI elements I've had to endure in Powershell, which was probably calling a .Net library)
C at least has a preprocessor. C# has almost nothing except generators, which are a huge pain in the ass. Java seems to be similar.
Lisp is the greatest. Everything else is in between.
Bazingo
They're probably pretty good for CRUD apps, which do tend to be like 50% boilerplate, but also I also wouldn't characterise them as "bullshit". Boring maybe.
How dare you!
