alt Hacker NewsRemembering that LOC and commits don't count, what metrics or even personal experience show that users are getting more features faster?
At least in entertainment I only see cancelled products rapidly increasing.
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This last week, I was able to delete considerably more code than I would have been able to before LLM assistance.
Specifically, I was able to consolidate some CSS because I could ask Claude to calculate the cascade before and after and verify that nothing had changed about rendering.
I’m sure there was a way to do that before by scripting a headless browser, but I didn’t have to learn that tool to unlock this capability.
I'm sure the release cadence on browser updates has gone up; and thanks to all the CVEs getting found now, there's definitely real value from them, even if we simply wouldn't have known about all the risks if it were not for the same AI solving them.
For entertainment, it's definitely been huge for gaming. In Roblox the majority of games now are AI generated. Of the top 100 games, 80 used AI in some way or another and there's 70,000 AI generated games total. Roblox has a huge number of players too (~380 MAU) so tons of people are playing AI generated games.
I think it would be more widespread if there wasn't as much pushback against AI. Big Walk disclosed they used ai to fix a bug and it immediately got review bombed. Kids on Roblox don't care as much, so you can see just how transformative it has been there.
It feels to argue the point that ai doesn’t have visible outcomes you’d have to go down the path of the no true scotsmans fallacy pretty hard.
“Sure there’s a massive increase in the number of apps on the app stores, there’s new examples of decompiled and recompiled games popping up all the time not to mention all the vibe coded games, many companies are reporting they have new bespoke vibe coded tools to do some task they used to do manually, people are just cloning popular apps like photoshop with bespoke customisations to their needs..” etc.
I already know the tiresome response to any such example given by people of this mindset. “Yeah but those aren’t TRUE examples of users getting features faster!” Whatever.
I'm shipping new features to my SaaS customers sometimes as quickly as the same day they bring it up. These are usually fairly small, obviously. I actually posted this story on LinkedIn, as one does:
> Customer email, 9:42 am: "I have a partner asking for our SSH2 public key. I tried using Tediware help but eventually it said to contact support. Are you able to assist?"
> Response, 10:47 am: "You need to generate a key pair yourself and keep the private key. Tediware does not issue SSH keys. Here's what you do. [instructions follow]"
> Follow-up response, 12:20 pm: "Generating your own key pair is now part of the app."
> Time from support request to new feature designed, coded, tested, deployed and announced: 2 hours, 38 minutes.
Side note, this feature has been solid in prod ever since (that story is a couple of months old).
Obviously, some things take weeks still, but they're hard. I just finished writing an X12 translator/parser, from scratch, in Rust. The old translator/parser was written in Ruby and ran documents at 175 kb/s. The new one handles 1 MB/s. It took me seven weeks of on-again/off-again dev work, fuzzing, testing, etc. It went live in prod yesterday.