Comment by malfist
15 hours ago
At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man.
It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.
That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.
My main problem putting out that many PRs per day is getting them approved and merged back into main so I can start the next one.
I guess “stacked” PRs are a thing now? I haven’t figured out the process that avoids making the merges for stacked PRs a complete mess, though.
Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds
It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers.
It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.
I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?
Your data shows a 20% improvement. That's $20-100k a year depending on how much devs are paid.
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I don’t believe your data. Velocity on my team has gone up 7x on my team over the last two months. I’m having a hard time riding product and my business analysts because they’re not coming up with stories fast enough. We’re actually thinking of having an intervention for them because they’re not using LLMs nearly as much as they should be. Designers are still hand placing components in figmas.
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It's not remotely comparable to tractors. Tractors actually do their job correctly and consistently.
Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.
Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."
The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.