Comment by joenot443
2 hours ago
A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week.
I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.
I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward.
Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any powerwashing for a few years; his neighbor who gets an Instant Pot and uses it for every meal for a month, then sees it gathering dust when the family gets tired of pressure-cooked stews; or like their neighbor who gets a microwave oven and uses it multiple times a day for decades?
I guess only time will tell.
So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it.
A few mundane things got automated, but these were just back office admin type work. Nothing that's going to show on the P&L. Yeah those people now have a little more time for other things, but those other things are also not revenue generating. No FTE got replaced by it so in the end they just paid for a bunch of administrative positions to be a little less busy. Great for the workers who are now less stressed, but almost no impact on the business financials except there's now yet another subscription.
> So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it.
Your employer is doing it wrong. You need usage surveillance with sanctions for low/declining use, then people won't stop using it.
2 replies →
That’s been my theory - there’s some low hanging fruit in every environment where AI knocks it out of the park. Then complex brownfield reality (coupled with non-technical factors) rears its head and the stunning productivity gains are nowhere near to be seen.
That’s the explanation how you can have both the anecdotes of amazing AI productivity and rigorous studies showing anything from actual loss of productivity to single-digit gains.
I think this is directionally right.
The code AI produces is not created equally, not even close.
> or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward
For the product my friend works on, it's definitely the latter. I definitely don't expect this party to last forever.
Some measures should have real, tangible, concrete numbers; others should have “my friends are saying”/“you are blind if you are not seeing it” vibing.
Technical debt is famously difficult to express in either layman's terms or financial terms.
Over here our CTO replaced Intercom with an internal equivalent that costs less than $20 / month to run, haiku and sonnet support agent costs included. In less than a few weeks, in his spare time.
In my limited experience with using agents to create tests it tends to code the tests to the existing code instead of ensuring the correctness from a spec. Great for regression testing but still limited in effectiveness for catching existing issues.
It wouldn't, at least not directly. That's why it wasn't done pre-AI.