alt Hacker NewsIt might feel that way, but I'll ask again: where's the payoff? Where's all the amazing software that everyone is now supposedly shipping 10x faster than before?
If I look at the software I'm actually using day-to-day, or that my friends are using, all this stuff looks exactly the same as it did in 2021. Not a single product release from Google, Microsoft, or more scrappy companies in the past 6 months made me go "wow, they couldn't have pulled that off before". All the vibecoded "Show HN" projects seem to be half-broken and then abandoned before being finished.
It feels like we've gotten less ambitious, not more. Because yes, you can prototype more easily, but this means less commitment to what we create.
Mathematics is probably the same way. There's a short-term rush when you pull the lever, but there's less desire to get invested in what comes out.
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This has a clear answer in systems theory; the ability to bang out code was never the limiting factor for Google et al.; large organizations are limited by coordination costs.
It's the small teams you need to pay attention to, the organizations that really were limited by engineering capacity. These are by definition also less visible - for now.
From personal experience in a small (total <10 people) company, we have definitely 10x our product in the last two years. What 4 devs did in 4 years have been dwarfed by what 2 devs were able to do in 1 year with AI. I'm not so familiar with the giant companies, but from afar it seems like they already have practically all the code-writing capacity they wanted anyway. Google could say "let's build a browser" or "let's build a mobile phone OS" or "lets build an experimental Fuschia" and throw all the people they needed on it already.
Generating AI images is something we couldn’t do before. AI assistants are better at web search than anything that came before.
Large companies move slowly and have lots of red tape. Give it a decade before making this call as far as large companies are concerned. That's how long it takes to change processes.
I think software from major companies is in worse shape than in 2021. But that's on purpose, the enshittification continues. Otherwise I agree with you.
>Mathematics is probably the same way. There's a short-term rush when you pull the lever, but there's less desire to get invested in what comes out.
Perhaps it will take until the next generation to come along to really embrace the new AI-assisted way of doing mathematics. The current generation has too many reservations.