alt Hacker NewsFast AI seems genuinely exciting and somewhat unsettling to me. Right now Claude is faster than me on some tasks but we’re at least close. I have a prompt to clean up a PR that’s been running for 1h now and I expect it to take another few. It’s hard to imagine how the workflow would look like if it was near-instant. On the one hand, it might be easier to focus. Some prompts take so long that I start to multitask and regret it later. On the other, AI that takes a few seconds to max few minutes to solve what used to take hours or days? That’s a game changer and I don’t even know where we fit in.
Replies
> Right now Claude is faster than me on some tasks but we’re at least close.
I dont doubt it, but I don't think you can spawn 10 copies of yourself working simultaneously.
If we get low enough latency, there's no reason to multitask. You can ask it to do one thing at a time and immediately see what it did. That's a nice way to work!
This is normal interactive UI for tasks that aren't compute-intensive. Programs spend most of their time idle, waiting for us to click a button. We shouldn't be waiting for them or spinning more plates to keep them busy.
However, a faster llm isn't enough. You also need fast compiles and fast tests.
I'd be very curious about the bottleneck breakdown in most current software dev - I suspect inference is far from the bottleneck in most things I do, though driving it to 0 would still be nice. I do agree that if it was 0 we'd probably change development approaches to reduce the new bottlenecks more, but it'll take full-process innovation to really get something near-instant.
(I should go measure this now, I'm curious)
Have you tried Gemini 3.5 Flash? It's quite fast. Amazing how fast it finishes tasks. Much faster than Claude.
We fit in for the things that are not artificial.
So long as AI lives in server farms, humans will be needed for tasks in the physical world.
It's only if we combine AI with robots that things get really dicey.
asking for curiosities sake. What kind of PR loop are you running that takes a few hours?
I don't see many companies being willing to pay 3x more for faster code generation. Cloud-based AI code generation is already extremely fast, and hardly the bottleneck for most software product development.
There can't be many normal use cases where there'd be any cost benefit.
Use Claude fast mode and turn off thinking. Tell it to just explain what it's plan is to you at a high level.
It will go much faster.
I'm using Deepseek-v4-pro as my main model and this is sometimes pretty annoying, I have to do some easy boring task, think "I'll just leave the agent to do it and go take a nap", but it's already done writing the code before I even walk away from the computer