alt Hacker NewsThat goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding?
If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation
Replies
N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally.
Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months.
I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature.
But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free.
That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data)
Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.
What would qualify as a breakthrough for you?
What is your bar even? automated coding has changed the game already.
Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year?
The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say.
I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years.
If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.