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Comment by edanm

7 days ago

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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edanm

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trashb  6 days ago

Those are some high profile (celebrity) developers.

I wonder if they have measured their results? I believe that the perceived speed up of AI coding is often different from reality. The following paper backs this idea https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 . Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?

  • embedding-shape  6 days ago

    Almost off-topic, but got me curious: How can I measure this myself? Say I want to put concrete numbers to this, and actually measure, how should I approach it?

    My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.

    So how would I actually go about and be able to provide data for this?

    • disgruntledphd2  6 days ago

      > My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.

      You'd get a set of 10-15 projects, and a set of 10-15 developers. Then each developer would implement the solution with LLM assistance and without such assistance. You'd ensure that half the developers did LLM first, and the others traditional first.

      You'd only be able to detect large statistical effects, but that would be a good start.

      If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.

      7 replies →

  • edanm  4 days ago

    > I wonder if they have measured their results?

    This is a notoriously difficult thing to measure in a study. More relevantly though, IMO, it's not a small effect that might be difficult to notice - it's a huge, huge speedup.

    How many developers have measured whether they are faster when programming in Python vs assembly? I doubt many have. And I doubt many have chosen Python over assembly because of any study that backs it up. But it's also not exactly a subtle difference - I'm fairly 99% of people will say that, in practice, it's obvious that Python is faster for programming than assembly.

    I talked literally yesterday to a colleague who's a great senior dev, and he made a demo in an hour and a half that he says would've taken him two weeks to do without AI. This isn't a subtle, hard to measure difference. Of course this is in an area where AI coding shines (a new codebase for demo purposes) - but can we at least agree that in some things AI is clearly an order of magnitude speedup?

Adrig  7 days ago

A lot of comments reads like a knee jerk reaction to the Twitter crowd claiming they vibe code apps making 1m$ in 2 weeks.

As a designer I'm having a lot of success vibe coding small use cases, like an alternative to lovable to prototype in my design system and share prototypes easily.

All the devs I work with use cursor, one of them (front) told me most of the code is written by AI. In the real world agentic coding is used massively

margorczynski  7 days ago

I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?".

The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.

  • menaerus  6 days ago

    I agree it's about the ego .. about the other part I am also trying to project few scenarios in my head.

    Wild guess nr.1: large majority of software jobs will be complemented (mostly replaced) with the AI agents, reducing the need for as many people doing the same job.

    Wild guess nr.2: demand for creating software will increase but the demand for software engineers creating that software will not follow the same multiplier.

    Wild guess nr.3: we will have the smallest teams ever with only few people on board leading perhaps to instantiating the largest amount of companies than ever.

    Wild guess nr.4: in near future, the pool of software engineers as we know them today, will be drastically downsized, and only the ones who can demonstrate they can bring the substantial value over using the AI models will remain relevant.

    Wild guess nr.5: getting the job in software engineering will be harder than ever.

akoboldfrying  7 days ago

Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/

Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)

grayhatter  6 days ago

You haven't provided a sample either... But sure, lets dig in.

> Antirez

When I first read his recent article, I found the whole article, uncompelling. > Linus Torvalds

I can't find a single source where he's an advocate for AI. I've seen the commit, and while some of the github comments are gold. I wasn't able to draw any meaningful conclusions from the commit in isolation. Especially not when the last I read about it, he used it because he doesn't write python code. So I don't know what conclusions there are I can pull from this commit, other than AI can emit code. I knew that.

I don't have enough context to comment on the opinions of Steve Yegge or his AI generated output. I simply don't know enough, and after a quick search nothing other than AI influencer jumped out at me.

Then I try to care about who I give my time and attention to, or who I associate with so this is the end of list.

I contrast these, examples with all the hype that's proven over and over to be a miscommunication if I'm being charitable, or an outright lie if I'm not. I also think it's important to consider the incentives leading to these "miscommunications" when evaluating how much good faith you assign them.

On top of that, there's the countless examples of AI confidently lying to me about something. Explaining my fundamental concrete objection to being lied to; would take another hour I shouldn't spend on a HN comment.

What specific examples of impressive things/projects/commits/code am I missing? What output, makes all the downsides of AI a worthwhile trade off?

> 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

I remember reading something that when tested, they're not actually faster. Any source on this other than vibes?

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