If AI coding is so good … where are the little apps?

a year ago by David Gerard to c/techtakes

As you know, AI-assisted coding is incredible. Unleashing creativity! So many people who can’t code are suddenly productive geniuses! Ten times more productive! It was so productive for each of the…

show us the widgets! show us the shovelware!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz_lG6SmgK0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/... - podcast

time: 5 min 44 sec

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diz 21 points a year ago

Note also that genuine labor saving stuff like say the Unity engine with Unity asset store, did result in an absolute flood of shovelware on Steam back in the mid 2010s (although that probably had as much having to do with Steam FOMO-ing about the possibility of not letting the next Minecraft onto Steam).

As a thought experiment imagine an unreliable labor saving tool that speeds up half* of the work 20x, and slows down the other half 3x. You would end up 1.525 times slower.

The fraction of work (not by lines but by hours) that AI helps with is probably less than 50% , and the speed up is probably worse than 20x.

Slowdown could be due to some combination of

Trying to do it with AI until you sink too much time into that and then doing it yourself (>2x slowdown here).
Being slower at working with the code you didn't write.
It being much harder to debug code you didn't write.
Plagiarism being inferior to using open source libraries.

footnote: "half" as measured by the pre-tool hours.

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paraphrand 1 point a year ago

I think it’s simpler. It’s some sort of 80% 20% thing. Or whatever percentages you like.

AI makes it easy to get to 80%. The last 20% (or 5%, whatever) is a huge burden and a lot of effort. And the AI isn’t quite good enough to tackle it yet.

This does not replace anything you said tho. That stuff is also true.

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