Comment by kristopolous
1 day ago
It's the "Day-50" problem.
On Day-0, AI is great but by Day-50 there's preferences and nuance that aren't captured through textual evidence. The productivity gains mostly vanish.
Ultimately AI coding efficacy is an HCI relationship and you need different relationships (workflows) at different points in time.
That's why, currently, as time progresses you use AI less and less on any feature and fall back to human. Your workflow isn't flexible enough.
So the real problem isn't the Day-0 solution, it's solving the HCI workflow problem to get productivity gains at Day-50.
Smarter AI isn't going to solve this. Large enough code becomes internally contradictory, documentation becomes dated, tickets become invalid, design docs are based on older conceptions. Devin, plandex, aider, goose, claude desktop, openai codex, these are all Day-0 relationships. The best might be a Day-10 solution, but none are Day-50.
Day-50 productivity is ultimately a user-interface problem - a relationship negotiation and a fundamentally dynamic relationship. The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts.
I talked about what I'm doing to empower new workflows over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814203
You pinpoint a truly important thing, even though I cannot put words onto it, I think that getting lost with AI coding assistants is far worse than getting lost as a programmer. It is like doing vanilla code or trying to make a framework suit your needs.
AI coding assistants provide 90% of the time more value than the good old google search. Nothing more, nothing less. But I don't use AI to code for me, I just use it to optimize very small fractions (ie: methods/functions at most).
> The future world of GPT-5 and Sonnet-4 still won't read your thoughts. Chills ahead. For sure, it will happen some day. And there won't be any reason to not embrace it (although I am, for now, absolutely reluctant to such idea).
It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.
Scroll through things like https://www.yourware.so/ which is a no-code gallery of apps.
There's this utility threshold due to a 1967 observation by Melvin Conway:
> [O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
The next step only comes from the next structure.
Lovable's multiplayer mode (https://lovable.dev/blog/lovable-2-0) combined with Agno teams (https://github.com/agno-agi/agno) might be a suitable solution if you can define the roles right. Some can be non or "semi"-human (if you can get the dynamic workflow right)
> It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.
Back in the day, basically every "getting started in Ruby on Rails" tutorial involved making a Twitter-like thing. This seemed kind of magic at the time. Now, did Rails ultimately end up fundamentally end up totally changing the face of webdev, allowing anyone to make Twitter in an afternoon? Well, ah, no, but it made for a good tech demo.