Comment by al_borland
7 days ago
A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.
Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs.
https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m
My experience has been similar to yours, and I think a lot of the hype is from people like this Google engineer who play into the hype and leave out the context. This sets expectations way out of line from reality and leads to frustration and disappointment.
Thats because getting promoted requires thought leadership and fulfilling AI mandates. Hence the tweet from this PE at Google, another from one at Microsoft wanting to rewrite the entire c++ base to Rust, few other projects also from MS all about getting the right Markdown files etc etc
> A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year.
I’ll bring the tar if you bring the feathers.
That sounds hyperbolic but how can someone say something so outrageoulsy false.
as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet
A principal engineer at Google made a public post on the World Wide Web and assumed some shared Google/Claude-context. Do you hear yourself?
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Who are you referring to here? If you follow the link, you will see that the Google engineer did not say that.
I am quoting the person that I responded to. Which linked to this: https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m
> I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Cloud Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.
So I see one error. GP said “couldn’t do”. The engineer really said “matched”.
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Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same.
The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.
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From the very beginning everyone tells us “you are using the wrong model”. Fast forward a year, the free models become as good as last year premium models and the result is still bad but you still hear the same message “you are not using the last model”… I just stopped caring to try the new shiny model each month and simply reevaluate the state of the art once a year for my sanity. Or maybe my expectation is clearly too high for these tools.
Are you sure you haven't moved the goalposts? The context here is "agentic coding" i.e. it does it all, while in the past the context was, to me anyway, "you describe the code you want and it writes it and you check it's what you asked for". The latter does work on free models now.
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This discussion is a request for positive examples to demonstrate any of the recent grandiose claims about ai assisted development. Attempting to switch instead to attacking the credentials of posters only seems to supply evidence that there are no positive examples, only hype. It doesn't seem to add to the conversation.
There's people spending 5k a month on tokens, if you're work generates 7-8 figures per year, that's peanuts and companies will happily pay for that per engineer
> would call out the AI hype bubble
Which is what it is by describing it as a tool needing thousands of dollars and years of time in learning fees while being described as "replaces devs" in an instant. It is a tool and when used sparingly by well trained people, works. To the extend that any large statistical text predictor would.
I’ve mostly used the 20 a month cursor plan and I’ve gotten to the point I can code huge things with rarely the need to do anything manually
I’ve mostly used the 20 a month cursor plan and I’ve gotten to the point I can code huge things with rarely the need to do anything manually
That, uh, says a lot about Google, doesn't it?
Humans regularly design entire Uber, google, youtube, twitter, whatsapp etc in 45 mins in system design interviews. So AI designing some toy version is meh.
Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.
You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post).
While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).
Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.
Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point?
Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course.
In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.
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Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.