Comment by pera

"Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features?"

You're posting this question on a forum hosted by YC. Here's a story from March 2024: "YC’s latest W24 batch includes 240 companies. A significant portion of the companies have some AI component, with 63% tagged as “Artificial Intelligence” — a notable increase from 51% in the preceding S23 batch and 29% before that.". https://jamesin.substack.com/p/analysis-of-ycs-latest-w24-ba...

I've not seen the same analysis for more recent batches.

Most likely there’s a slight productivity increase.

The enthusiasts have a cognitive dissonance because they are pretty sure this is huge and we’re living in the future, so they go through various denial strategies when the execs ask them where the money is.

In this case it’s blame. These darned skeptics are ruining it for everyone.

This is an important question. The skepticism tracks with my personal experience - I feel 10-20% more productive but certainly not 5x when measured over a long period of time (say, the last 6 months or more)

I’m nonetheless willing to be patient and see how it plays out. If I’m skeptical about some grandiose claims I must also be equally skeptical and accepting about the possibility of large scale effects happening but not being apparent to me yet.

> Why haven't we seen an explosion of new start-ups, products or features? Why do we still see hundreds of bug tickets on every issue tracking page? Have you noticed anything different on any changelog?

In my personal experience (LLM and code suggestion only) it's because I use LLMs to code unimportant stuff. Actually thinking what I want to do with the business code is exhausting and I'd rather play a little with a fun project. Also, the unit tests that LLMs can now write (and which were too expensive to write myself) were never important to begin with.

Simply put, if we’re living during such a major technological revolution, why does using software suck in such disastrous ways that were unthinkable even ten years ago?

Your argument relies on the idea of an "actual product", what is happening—and I’m seeing it firsthand both in my company’s codebase and in my personal projects—is that AI is contributing more and more to product development. If this trend continues, we may reach a point where 90% of a product is written by AI.

At that stage, the real value will lie in the remaining 10%—the part that requires human judgment, creativity, or architectural thinking. The rest will be seen as routine: simple instructions, redundant CRUD operations, boilerplate, and glue code.

If we focus only on the end result, human will inevitably write less code overall. And writing less code means fewer programming jobs.

Maybe because these companies are smaller and fly under the radar. They require less funding team size is small, probably bankrolled by the founders.

At least that's what I do and what I see among friends.

i don't know - I agree we haven't seen changes to our built environment, but as for an "explosion of new start-ups, products" we sort of are seeing that?

I see new AI assisted products everyday, and a lot of them have real usage. Beyond the code-assistants/gen companies which are very real examples, here's an anecdote.

I was thinking of writing a new story, and found http://sudowrite.com/ via an ad, an ai assistant for helping you write, its already used by a ton of journalists and serious writers, and am trying it out.

Then i wanted to plan a trip - tried google but saw nothing useful, and then asked chatgpt and now have a clear plan

So as an example of what this could look like that would be convincing to me. I started out pretty firmly believing that Rust was a fad.

Then Mozilla and Google did things with it that I did not think were possible for them to do. Not "they wrote a bunch of code with it", stuff like "they eliminated an entire class of bugs from a section of their codebase."

Then I watched a bunch of essentially hobby developers write kernel drivers for brand new architecture, and watched them turn brand new Macbooks into one of the best-in-class ways to run Linux. I do not believe they could have done that with their resources at that speed, using C or C++.

And at that point, you kind of begrudgingly say, "okay, I don't know if I like this, but fine, heck you, whatever. I guess it might genuinely redefine some parts of software development, you win."

So this is not impossible. You can convince devs like me that your tools are real and they work.

And frankly, there are a billion problems in modern computing that are high impact - stuff like Gnome accessibility, competitive browser engines, FOSS UX, collaboration tools. Entire demographics who have serious problems that could be solved by software if there was enough expertise and time and there were resources to solve them. Often, the issue at play is that there is no intersection between people who are very well acquainted with those communities and understand their needs, and people who have experience writing software.

In theory, LLMs help solve this. In theory. If you're a good programmer, and suddenly you have a tool that makes you 4x as productive as a developer: you could have a very serious impact on a lot of communities right now. I have not seen it happen. Not in the enterprise world, but also not in the FOSS world, not in communities with lower technical resources, not in the public sector. And again, I can be convinced by this, I have dismissed tools that I later switched opinions on because I saw the impact and I couldn't ignore the impact: Rust, NodeJS, Flatpak, etc, etc.

The problem is people have been telling me that Coding Assistants (and now Coding Agents) are one of those tools for multiple years now, and I'm still waiting to see the impact. I'm not waiting to see how many companies pick them up, I'm not waiting to see the job market. I'm waiting to see if this means that real stuff starts getting written at a higher quality significantly faster, and I don't see it.

I see a lot of individual devs showing me hobby projects, and a lot of AI startups, and... frankly, not much else.

and builder.ai just filed for bankruptcy after a billion dollar valuation. Timely.

One of our AI enabled internal projects is moving ~135 faster than before. Of course you can't perfectly compare. New framework, better insights, updated libraries etc.