alt Hacker NewsGood question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1].
Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the day. I use it every day, and it's saved me hours of work for certain specific tasks [2]. But it's simply not a massive 10x force multiplier that some might lead you to believe.
I'll start believing when maintainers of complex, actively developed, and widely used open-source projects (e.g. ffmpeg, curl, openssh, sqlite) start raving about a massive uptick in positive contributions, pointing to a concrete influx of high-quality AI-assisted commits.
[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
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Disclaimer: I am not promoting llms.
There was a GitHub PR on the ocaml project where someone crafted a long feature (mac silicon debugging support). The pr was rejected because nobody wanted to read it for it was too long. Seems to me that society is not ready for the width of output generated this way. Which may explain the lack of big visible change so far. But I already see people deploying tiny apps made by Claude in a day.
It's gonna be weird...
Well, the LLM industry is not completely without results. We do have ever increasing frequency of outages in major Internet services...Somehow correlates with the AI mandates major tech corps seem to pushing now internally.
The effect of these tools is people losing their software jobs (down 35% since 2020). Unemployed devs aren’t clamoring to go use AI on OSS.
As another example, the MacApps Reddit has been flooded with new apps recently.
"Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones?"
There is. We had to basically create a new category for them on /r/golang because there was a quite distinct step change near the beginning of this year where suddenly over half the posts to the subreddit were "I asked my AI to put something together, here's a repo with 4 commits, 3000 lines of code, and an AI-generated README.md. It compiles and I may have even used it once or twice." It toned down a bit but it's still half-a-dozen posts a day like that on average.
Some of them are at least useful in principle. Some of them are the same sorts of things you'd see twice a month, only now we can see them twice a week if not twice a day. The problem wasn't necessarily the utility or the lack thereof, it was simply the flood of them. It completely disturbed the balance of the subreddit.
To the extent that you haven't heard about these, I'd observe that the world already had more apps than you could possibly have ever heard about and the bottleneck was already marketing rather than production. AIs have presumably not successfully done much about helping people market their creations.