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Comment by bradleyjg

3 days ago

Let’s say somehow the politics lined up and you were given huge hiring budget for your team. You went out and recruited what seemed like great talent. Weekly standups make it seem like everyone is ramped up and firing on all cylinders.

It’s great, right? But you look at what your team has actually delivered since—-and it’s just not that much more than last year.

I think that’s where a lot of us are at the micro and macro level. It seems really great from the inside and outside but we are still waiting to see the dramatic change in actual concrete software output.

There's been a dramatic increase in sloppy kinda-working something.vercel.com output in niche circles. I think that shows at least a weak demand for certain types of software, but it's not clear that the vast piles of cash that have been burned producing these "apps" are actually resulting in quality of life improvements.

  • I’m waiting for like GEICO’s app to significantly improve.

    I’m not expecting Chrome to because it already had virtually unlimited resources devoted to it. On the other side I’m not expecting my local water district’s to any time soon because the people in charge don’t care even if it was significantly cheaper to improve.

    But in the middle is something like GEICO and that’s where I expect improvements if this thing is real.

    • Except GEICO probably believes it gets no more money from improving the app. Instead they will attempt to improve their general risk modeling as that's where they think the money will come from.

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    • This may not be the best place, but I am so tired of waiting since ~round 2 of GPT et al for diagrams and graphing...especially if all the relevant data etc can be found online or provided

Escape the tech bubble and you're going to have a very different take.

AppleScript, VB script, IFTT, so many "drag and drop to program" systems that failed. The holy grail for a long time has been automation in users hands. Let them have their own scripts and solutions.

I have lawyers and writers talking to me about "docker containers" and "cron jobs" all of a sudden. You think they figured that out on their own - or is what they are running all from the output of AI/LLM?

There is an ocean of code out there that is being run by one or a hand full of users, automating tasks that you never would have looked at because it would have fallen outside the "is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/) matrix (never mind the dollar cost of coder vs office drone).