Coding agents and the growing 1% problem

https://try.works/coding-agents-and-the-growing-1-problem

by try-working • 3 months ago

2 4 3 months ago

coldtea2• 3 months ago

The “1% problem” with AI is that you can spend a couple of minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour and get something interesting and passable. But in order for you to really share it with other people in your organization and for you to be able to guarantee the quality of the experience, the accuracy of the data and so on, you have to put in orders of magnitude more work, 10x or 100x, than it took to get the first draft out.

This is crazy talk.

try-working• 3 months ago

Elaborate.

coldtea2• 3 months ago

The whole post is based on the deluded idea that AI will cause a big hiring boom, because "the more AI-assisted work you do, the more work you create for yourself".

To begin with, you could just use AI to speedup your current level of work, with your existing developers, and have them use their new free time to further polish it. No hiring boom.

Second, you could use AI to speedup your current level of work and keep less developers, since one developer can now do 2x or 3x the stuff. The rest of your team remains as IS, since they are already there to support your current level of work. No hiring boom.

Third, you could AI to add more features faster, and also use AI to write the documentation for those features, and AI to provide most of the support (chatbot and automated replies and such) for those features, and AI to speed up QA on those features, and AI to design promotional materials for those features. No hiring boom still.

Even the initial claim that it takes 10x or 100x "in order for you to really share it with other people in your organization and for you to be able to guarantee the quality of the experience, the accuracy of the data and so on" if of course bogus. It is faster to do that too, even as you increase your new feature churn. Besides, half-baked is the new standard. What you'll see is more stuff being put out as barely better than the initial vibecoded output, not more polished experiences, or guarantees for the "quality and the accuracy". We didn't get that for a long time pre-AI, and we sure aren't getting this any better with the advent of AI.

Even more important, if everybody is churning new features and products with AI , who exactly is doing the buying of all these? People are cutting spending already for close to a decade now, subscription and app fatigue is real, as is inflation.

Did the author notice the massive layoffs explicitly attributed to AI (even if a lot of them are just due to the worse off economic times, and AI is just used as an excuse to make the companies appear to be forward looking). Do these look anywhere near like a hiring boom?

classified• 3 months ago

Those who enjoy micromanaging a machine have their work cut out for them.

Coding agents and the growing 1% problem

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