alt Hacker NewsI see this sentiment constantly. AI tooling is better than ever and its making building things easier than ever. I have respected coworkers who say that are maxing out multiple $200/month subscriptions.
But I have yet to see any results? Where is the useful stuff?
Replies
I don't know what those people are doing, but I built a personal day-to-day notes manager at work, for work, for under $20 in credits. Yes, I could have just used text files but this is less friction which means I'll actually stick to it. Nothing exactly like this already existed. It was built in under a week in small portions of spare time, and it probably would have been more like a month if I had to choose all the libraries and write the whole thing myself.
Search Ask HN threads, there are lots asking the same question and it looks like people do make useful stuff, it's just personal software not distributed to the public. I find that nice actually, because it's nice to make something just for yourself and is essentially what software is good for, solving your own problem.
Oh, we're building it. It's already out there.
I do think people are seeing useful results, but it’s at least several orders of magnitude less than what is claimed.
My metric is: how much code that I create today do I depend on in 3 months (incl learnings and one off data pulls etc.) and its waaay less than what I generate. A lot of it is frankly noise.
The results are in existing products being built out faster, in more internal tooling that would have previously not been cost-effective. Almost every software engineering shop is just doing the same thing as before but faster, as AI doesn't really give you an edge in the product side of things.
I keep seeing this question asked, and I don't understand. Have you tried it? It's so easy to build useful things for myself now.
I've been able to build things that I otherwise would not have been able to build, in the free time that I have: - a VST audio plugin
- a wedding website with RSVP functionality
- a relaxing game for my wife
At work, I've been able to build much more than I would have been capable of in the past. I'm a backend eng, and it allows me to build much much nicer frontends than I've ever been able to do in the past.
And before you tell me that the code is crap - it doesn't matter! It may or may not be good code, but it works and serves it's purpose very well. Anyways, I'm I'm not launching a rocket, or putting software into cars.