This reads like shilling/advertisement.. Coding AIs are struggling for anything remotely complex, make up crap and present it as research, write tests that are just "return true", and won't ever question a decision you make.
Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.
I think part of what is happening here is that different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels. If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again to do the same sort of things, then LLMs probably could take your job. A lot of people have joined the industry over time, and it seems like the intelligence bar moved lower and lower over time, particularly for people churning out large volumes of boilerplate code. If you are doing relatively novel stuff, at least in the sense that your abstractions are novel and the shape of the abstraction set is different from the standard things that exist in tutorials etc online, then the LLM will probably not work well with your style.
So some people are panicking and they are probably right, and some other people are rolling their eyes and they are probably right too. I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed. I am skeptical this will happen though, as there doesn’t seem to be a way around the problem of the giant indigestible hairball (I.e as you have more and more boilerplate it becomes harder to remain coherent).
Indeed, discussions on LLMs for coding sound like what you would expect if you asked a room full of people to snatch up a 20 kg dumbbell once and then tell you if it's heavy.
> I think the real risk is that dumping out loads of boilerplate becomes so cheap and reliable that people who can actually fluently design coherent abstractions are no longer as needed.
Cough front-end cough web cough development. Admittedly, original patterns can still be invented, but many (most?) of us don't need that level of creativity in our projects.
> If you are just writing a large volume of code over and over again
But why would you do that? Wouldn't you just have your own library of code eventually that you just sell and sell again with little tweaks? Same money for far less work.
People, at least novice developers, tend to prefer fast and quick boilerplate that makes them look effective, over spending one hour sitting just thinking and designing, then implementing some simple abstraction. This is true today, and been true for as long as I've been in programming.
Besides, not all programming work can be abstracted into a library and reused across projects, not because it's technically infeasible, but because the client doesn't want to, cannot for legal reasons or the developer process at the client's organization simply doesn't support that workflow. Those are just the reasons from the top of my head, that I've encountered before, and I'm sure there is more reasons.
But people don't stay novices after years/decades. Of course when you write the boilerplate for the 20x time maybe you still accept that, but when you write it for the 2000x time, I bet you do the lazy thing and just copy it.
> cannot for legal reasons or ...
Sure, you can't copy trade secrets, but that's also not the boilerplate part. Copying e.g. a class hierarchy and renaming all the names and replacing the class contents that represent the domain, won't be a legal problem, because this is not original in the first place.
That’s a very good point I hadn’t heard explained that way before. Makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the circular debates about AI that happen here daily.
Absolutely this, and TFA touches on the point about natural language being insufficiently precise:
AI can write you an entire CRUD app in minutes, and with some back-and-forth you can have an actually-good CRUD app in a few hours.
But AI is not very good (anecdotally, based on my experience) at writing fintech-type code. It's also not very good at writing intricate security stuff like heap overflows. I've never tried, but would certainly never trust it to write cryptography correctly, based on my experience with the latter two topics.
All of the above is "coding", but AI is only good at a subset of it.
Generating CRUD is like solving cancer in mice, we already have a dizzying array of effective solutions… Ruby on Rails, Access 97, model first ORMs with GUI mappers. SharePoint lets anyone do all the things easily.
The issue is and always has been maintenance and evolution. Early missteps cause limitations, customer volume creates momentum, and suddenly real engineering is needed.
I’d be a lot more worried about our jobs if these systems were explaining to people how to solve all their problems with a little Emacs scripting. As is they’re like hyper aggressive tech sales people, happy just to see entanglements, not thinking about the whole business cycle.
Go with Laravel and some admin packages and you generate CRUD pages in minutes. And I think with Django, that is builtin.
But I don’t think I’ve seen pure CRUD on anything other than prototype. Add an Identity and Access Management subsystem and the complexity of requirements will explode. Then you add integration to external services and legacy systems, and that’s where the bulk of the work is. And there’s the scalability issue that is always looming.
Creating CRUD app is barely a level over starting a new project with the IDE wizard.
>Creating CRUD app is barely a level over starting a new project with the IDE wizard.
For you, maybe. But for a non-progrmamer who's starting a business or just needs a website it's the difference between hiring some web dev firm and doing it themselves.
> it's the difference between hiring some web dev firm and doing it themselves.
anecdote but i've had a lot of acquaintances who started at both "hiring some web dev firm" and "doing it themselves" with results largely being the same: "help me fix this unmaintainable mess and i will pay you x"...
jmo but i suspect llms will allow for the later to go further before the "help me" phase but i feel like that aint going away completely...
Just like my previous comments, much depends on the specifics.
My wife's sister and her husband run a small retail shop in $large_city. My sister-in-law taught herself how to set up and modify a website with a shopify storefront largely with LLM help. Now they take online orders. I've looked at the code she wrote and it's not pretty but it generally works. There will probably never be a "help me fix this unmaintainable mess and I will pay you" moment in the life of that business.
The crux of my point is this: In 2015 she would have had to hire somebody to do that work.
This segment of the software industry is where the "LLMs will take our jerbs" argument is coming from.
The people who say "AI is junk and it can't do anything right" are simply operating in a different part of the industry.
> different developers on HN have very different jobs and skill levels.
Definitely this. When I use AIs for web development they do an ok job most of the time. Definitely on par with a junior dev.
For anything outside of that they're still pretty bad. Not useless by any stretch, but it's still a fantasy to think you could replace even a good junior dev with AI in most domains.
I am slightly worried for my job... but only because AI will keep improving and there is a chance it will be as good as me one day. Today it's not a threat at all.
Yea, LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer. They take direction, their models act as the “do the research” part, and they output lots of code: code that has to be carefully scrutinized and refined. They are like very ambitious interns who never get tired and want to please, but often just produce crap that has to be totally redone or refactored heavily in order to go into production.
If you think LLMs are “better programmers than you,” well, I have some disappointing news for you that might take you a while to accept.
> LLMs produce results on par with what I would expect out of a solid junior developer
This is a common take but it hasn't been my experience. LLMs produce results that vary from expert all the way to slightly better than markov chains. The average result might be equal to a junior developer, and the worst case doesn't happen that often, but the fact that it happens from time to time makes it completely unreliable for a lot of tasks.
Junior developers are much more consistent. Sure, you will find the occasional developer that would delete the test file rather than fixing the tests, but either they will learn their lesson after seeing your wth face or you can fire them. Can't do that with llms.
I think any further discussion about quality just needs to have the following metadata:
- Language
- Total LOC
- Subject matter expertise required
- Total dependency chain
- Subjective score (audited randomly)
And we can start doing some analysis. Otherwise we're pissing into ten kinds of winds.
My own subjective experience is earth shattering at webapps in html and css (because I'm terrible and slow at it), and annoyingly good but a bit wrong usually in planning and optimization in rust and horribly lost at systems design or debugging a reasonably large rust system.
I agree in that these discussions (this whole hn thread tbh) are seriously lacking in concrete examples to be more than holy wars 3.0.
Besides one point: junior developers can learn from their egregious mistakes, llms can't no matter how strongly worded you are in their system prompt.
In a functional work environment, you will build trust with your coworkers little by little. The pale equivalent in LLMs is improving system prompts and writing more and more ai directives that might or might not be followed.
> Besides one point: junior developers can learn from their egregious mistakes, llms can't no matter how strongly worded you are in their system prompt.
I think if you set off an LLM to do something, and it does a "egregious mistake" in the implementation, and then you adjust the system prompt to explicitly guard against that or go towards a different implementation and you restart from scratch again yet it does the exact same "egregious mistake", then you need to try a different model/tool than the one you've tried that with.
It's common with smaller models, or bigger models that are heavily quanitized that they aren't great at following system/developer prompts, but that really shouldn't happen with the available SOTA models, I haven't had something ignored like that in years by now.
And honestly this is precisely why I don't fear unemployment, but I do fear less employment overall. I can learn and get better and use LLMs as a tool. So there's still a "me" there steering. Eventually this might not be the case. But if automating things has taught me anything, it's that removing the person is usually such a long tail cost that it's cheaper to keep someone in the loop.
But is this like steel production or piloting (few highly trained experts are in the loop) or more like warehouse work (lots of automation removed any skills like driving or inventory work etc).
This seems to be one of the huge weaknesses of current LLMs: Despite the words "intelligence" and "machine learning" we throw around, they aren't really able to learn and improve their skills without someone changing the model. So, they repeat the same mistakes and invent new mistakes by random chance.
If I was tutoring a junior developer, and he accidentally deleted the whole source tree or something egregious, that would be a milestone learning point in his career, and he would never ever do it again. But if the LLM does it accidentally, it will be apologetic, but after the next context window clear, it has the same chances of doing it again.
> Existing abstractions are sufficient for building any software you want.
Software that doesn't need new abstractions is also already existing. Everything you would need already exists and can be bought much more cheaply than you could do it yourself. Accounting software exists, unreal engine exists and many games use it, why would you ever write something new?
>Software that doesn't need new abstractions is also already existing
This isn't true due to the exponential growth of how many ways you can compose existing abstractions. The chance that a specific permutation will have existing software is small.
I'm supposing that nobody who has a job is producing abstractions that are always novel, but there may be people who find abstractions that are novel for their particular field because it is something most people in that field are not familiar with, or that come up with novel abstractions (infrequently) that improve on existing ones.
Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.
Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.
The possible chess moves is already known ahead of time. Just because an AI can't make up a move like Np5 as a human could do, that doesn't mean anything AI can't play chess. It will be fine with just using the existing moves that have been found so far. The idea that we still need humans to come up with new chess moves is not a requirement for playing chess.
The new abstraction is “this corporation owns this IP and has engineers who can fix and extend it at will”. You can’t git clone that.
But if there is something off the shelf that you can use for the task at hand? Great! The stakeholders want it to do these other 3000 things before next summer.
No it doesn’t read like shilling and advertisement, it’s tiring hearing people continually dismiss coding agents as if they have not massively improved and are driving real value despite limitations and they are only just getting started. I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do, and I’ve done things where Claude made the whole effort take twice as long and 3x more of my time. It’s not like people are ignoring the limitations, it’s that people can see how powerful the already are and how much more headroom there is even with existing paradigms not to mention the compute scaling happening in 26-27 and the idea pipeline from the massive hoarding of talent.
When prices go down or product velocity goes up we'll start believing in the new 20x developer. Until then, it doesn't align with most experiences and just reads like fiction.
You'll notice no one ever seems to talk about the products they're making 20x faster or cheaper.
AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right!
In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check.
If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter?
Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example.
Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc.
Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel.
It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions.
What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs.
So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them.
The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
> you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
Yikes, pretty condescending. Also wrong!
IMO you are strawmanning pretty heavily here.
Believe it or not, using Claude to improve your productivity is pretty dissimilar to vibe coding a commercial airplane(?) which I would agree is probably not FAA approved.
I prefer not to toot my own horn, but to address an idea you seem to have that I don’t know math or CS(?) I have a PhD in astrophysics and a decade of industry experience in tech and other domains so I’m fairly certain I know how math and computers work but maybe not!
I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.
Obviously not troll, I know I’m bragging. But I have to emphasize that it is not some stupid oh “only domain experts know AI is shit. Everyone else is too stupid to understand how bad it is” That is patently wrong.
Few people can do what I do and as a result I likely make more money than you. But now with AI… everyone can do what I do. It has leveled the playing field… what I was before now matters fuck all. Understand?
I still make money right now. But that’s unlikely to last very long. I fully expect it to disappear within the next decade.
You are wrong. People like yourself will likely be smart enough to stay well employed into the future. It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs. And they'll be all shocked Pikachu face when they get a pink slip while their role gets reassigned to an AI agent
> It's the folks who are arguing with you trying to say that AI is useless who will quickly lose their jobs.
Why is it that in every hype there are always the guys like you that want to punish the non-believers? It's not enough to be potentially proven correct, your anger requires the demise of the heretics. It was the same story for cryptocurrencies.
He/she is probably one of those poor souls working for an AI-wrapper-startup who received a ton of compensation in "equity", which will be worth nothing when their founders get acquihired, Windsurf style ;) But until then, they get to threaten us all with the impending doom, because hey, they are looking into the eye of the storm, writing Very Complex Queries against the AI API or whatever...
Isn’t this the same type of emotional response he’s getting accused for? You’re speculating that he will be “punished” just as he speculated for you.
There’s emotions on both sides and the goal is to call it out, throw it to the side and cut through into the substance. The attitude should be: Which one of us is actually right? Rather than: I’m right and you’re a fucking idiot attitude I see everywhere.
Mate, I could not care less if he/her got "punished" or not. I was just assuming what might be driving someone to go and try and answer each and every one of my posts with very low quality comments, reeking of desperation and "elon-style" humour (cheap, cringe puns). You are assuming too much here.
Not too dissimilar to you. I wrote long rebuttals to you points and you just descended into put downs, stalking and false accusations. You essentially told me to fuck off from all of HN in one of your posts.
Right I’m a bot made to promote AI like half the people on this thread.
I don’t know if you noticed a difference from other hype cycles but other ones were speculative. This one is also speculative but the greater divide is that the literal on the ground usefulness of AI is ALREADY going to change the world.
The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what you're trying to convey. You say there's a difference from previous "speculation" but also that it's still speculation. Then you go on to write "ALREADY going to" which is future tense (speculation), even clarifying what the speculation is.
So let me explain it more clearly. AI as it is now is already changing the game. It will reduce the demand of swes across every company as an eventuality if we hold technological progress fixed. There is no speculation here. This comes from on the ground evidence from what I see day to day and what I do and my experience pair programming things from scratch with AI.
The speculation is this: if we follow the trendlines of AI improvement for the past decade and a half, the projection of past improvement indicates AI will only get better and better. It’s a reasonable speculation, but it is nonetheless speculative. I wouldn’t bet my life on continuous improvement of AI to the point of AGI but it’s now more than ever before a speculation that is not unrealistic.
Nice slop response. This is the same thing said about blockchain and NFTs, same schtick, different tech. The only thing "AI" has done is convince some people that it's a magical being that knows everything. Your comments seem to be somewhere on that spectrum. And, sure what if it isn't changing the world for the better, and actually makes things much worse? You're probably okay with that too, I guess, as long as your precious "AI" is doing the changing.
We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.
>The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.
This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.
>This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.
You're not thinking clearly. A couple years ago we didn't even have AI who could do this, then chatGPT came out we had AI who could barely do it, then we had AI who could do simple tasks with A lot of hand holding, now we have AI who can do complex human tasks with minimal hand holding. Where do you think the trendline is pointing.
Your hypothesis is going against all evidence. It's more wishful thinking and irrational. It's a race to the bottom because you wish it will be a race to the bottom, and we both know the trendline is pointing in the opposite direction.
>We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.
I agree AI is bad for us. My claim is it's going to change the world and it is already replacing human tasks. That's all. Whether that's good or bad for us is an ORTHOGANOL argument.
Proof of what? Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers? It’s all so so silly, anti-AI crowds on HN rehash so many of the same tired arguments it’s ridiculous:
- bad for environment: how? Why?
- takes all creative output and doesn’t credit: common crawl has been around for decades and models have been training for decades, the difference is that now they’re good. Regurgitating training data is a known issue for which there are mitigations but welcome to the world of things not being as idealistic as some Stallman-esque hellscape everyone seems to want to live in
- it’s bad and so no one should use it and any professionals who do don’t know what they’re doing: I have been so fortunate to personally know some of the brightest minds on this planet (Astro departmentments, AI research labs) and majority of them use AI for their jobs.
>Should you also have to prove you are not a bot sponsored by short-sellers?
On a 35 day-old account, yes. Anything "post-AI" is suspect now.
The rest of your comment reads like manufactured AI slop, replying to things I never even wrote in my one sentence comment. And no surprise coming from an account created 1 day ago.
I think it’s quite obvious I’m not writing AI slop.
The latest chatgpt for example will produce comments that are now distinguishable from the real thing only because they’re much better written. It’s insane that the main visible marker rn is that the arguments and writings it crafts are superior then what your average joe can write.
My shit writing can’t hold a candle and that’s pretty obvious. AI slop is not accepted here but I can post an example of what AI slop will now look like, if AI responded to you it would look like this:
Fair to be skeptical of new accounts. But account age and “sounds like AI” are not workable filters for truth. Humans can write like bots, bots can write like humans, and both can be new. That standard selects for tenure, not correctness.
More importantly, you did not engage any claim. If the position is simply “post-AI content from new accounts is suspect,” say that as a moderation concern. But as an argument, suspicion alone does not refute anything.
Pick one concrete claim and say why it is wrong or what evidence would change your mind. Otherwise “this reads like slop” is just pattern matching. That is exactly the failure mode being complained about.
This is such a fantastic response. And outsiders should very well be made aware what kind of plane they are stepping into. No offence to the aviation enthusiasts in your example but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane, in the same way I will do everything in my power to avoid using AI coded software that does anything important or critical...
> but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane
speaking of airplanes... considering how much llm usage is being pushed top-down in many places, i wonder how long until some news drops of some catastrophic one-liner got through via llm generated code...
Bro idk why you waste your time writing all this. No one cares that you were an early adopter, all that means is that you used the rudimentary LLM implementations that were available from 2022-2024 which are now completely obselete. Whatever experience you think you have with AI tools is useless because you clearly haven't kept up with the times. AI platforms and tools have been changing quickly. Every six months the capabilities have massively improved.
Next time before you waste ten minutes typing out these self aggrandizing tirades maybe try asking the AI to just write it for you instead
Maybe he's already ahead of you by not using current models, 2026 models are going to make 2025 models completely obsolete, wasting time on them is dumb.
How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not?
For all I know, he is more competent than you; he figured out how to utilize Claude Code in a productive way, which is a point for him.
I'd have to guess whether you are an expert working on software not well suited for AI, or just average with a stubborn attitude towards AI and potentially not having tried the latest generation of models and agentic harnesses.
Right: they disagree with me and so must not know what they’re talking about. Hey guess how I know neither of you are all as good as you think you are: your egos! You know what the brightest people at the top of their respective fields have in common? They tend not to think that new technologies they don’t understand how to use are dumb and they don’t think everyone who disagrees with them is dumb!
I think it's worth framing things back to what we're reacting to. The top poster said:
> I really really want this to be true. I want to be relevant. I don’t know what to do if all those predictions are true and there is no need (or very little need) for programmers anymore.
The rest of the post is basically their human declaration of obsolescence to the programming field. To which someone reacted by saying that this sounds like shilling. And indeed it does for many professional developers, including those that supplement their craft with LLMs. Declaring that you feel inadequate because of LLMs only reveals something about you. Defending this position is a tell that puts anyone sharing that perspective in the same boat: you didn't know what you were doing in the first place. It's like when someone who couldn't solve the "invert a binary tree" problem gets offended because they believed they were tricked into an impossible task. No, you may be a smart person that understands enough of the rudiment of programming to hack some interesting scripts, but that's actually a pretty easy problem and failing to solve it indeed signals that you lack some fundamentals.
> Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise.
I've read Antirez, Simon Willison, Bryan Cantrill, and Armin Ronacher on how they work or want to work with AI. From none I've got this attitude that they're no longer needed as part of the process.
I've yet to see it from someone who isn't directly or indirectly affiliated with an organisation that would benefit from increased AI tool adoption. Not saying it's impossible, but...
Whereas there are what feels like endless examples of high profile, skilled engineers who are calling BS on the whole thing.
You can say the same about people saying the opposite. I haven’t heard from a single person who says AI can’t write code that does not a financially interest directly or indirectly in humans writing code.
That seems rather disingenuous to me. I see many posts which clearly come from developers like you and me who are happy with the results they are getting.
Every time people on here comment something about "shilling" or "boosters". It would seem to me that in the rarest of cases someone shares their opinion to profit from it, while you act like that is super common.
> Considering those views are shared by a number of high profile, skilled engineers, this is obviously no basis for doubting someone's expertise
Again, a lot of fluff, a lot of of "a number ofs", "highly this, highly that". But very little concrete information. What happened to the pocket PhDs promised for this past summer? Where are the single-dude billion dollar companies built with AI tools ? Or even a multiple-dudes billion dollar companies ? What are you talking about?
"Littered" is a great verb to use here. Also I did not ask for a deviated proxy non-measure, like how many people who are choking themselves to death in a meaningless bullshit job are now surviving by having LLMs generate their spreadsheets and presentations. I asked for solid proof of succesful, commercial products built up by dreaming them up through LLMs.
The proof is all around you. I am talking about software professionals not some bullshit spread sheet thing.
What I’m saying is this: From my pov Everyone is using LLMs to write code now. The overwhelming majority of software products in existence today are now being changed with LLM code.
The majority of software products being created from scratch are also mostly LLM code.
This is obvious to me. It’s not speculation, where I live and where I’m from and where I work it’s the obvious status quo. When I see someone like you I’m thinking because the change happened so fast you’re one of the people living in a bubble. Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up.
Wait until you have that one coworker who’s going at 10x speed as everyone else and you find out it’s because of AI. That is what will slowly happen to these bubbles. To keep pace you will have to switch to AI to see the difference.
I also don’t know how to offer you proof. Do you use google? If so you’ve used products that have been changed by LLM code. Is that proof? Do you use any products built by a start up in the last year? The majority of that code will be written by an LLM.
> Your company and the people around you haven’t started using it because the culture hasn’t caught up.
We have been using LLMs since 2021, if I havent repeated that enough in these threads. What culture do I have to catch up with? I have been paying top tier LLM models for my entire team since it became an option. Do you think you are proselytizing to the un-initiated here? That is a naive view at best. My issue is that the tools are at best a worse replacement for the pre-2019 google search and at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
Doesn’t make sense to me. If it’s bad why pay for the tool?
Obviously your team disagrees that it’s a worse replacement for google or else why demand it against your will?
> at worst a huge danger in the hands of people who dont know what they are doing.
I agree with this. But the upside negates this and I agree with your own team on that.
Btw if you’re paying top dollar for AI.. your developers are unlikely using it as a google search replacement. At top dollar AI is used as an agent. What it ends up doing is extremely different from a google search in this mode. That may be good or bad but it is a distinctly different outcome then a google search and that makes your google analogy ill fitted to what your team is actually using it for.
Have you had your head in the sand for the past two years?
At the recent AWS conference, they were showcasing Kiro extensively with real life products that have been built with it. And the Amazon developers all allege that they've all been using Kiro and other AI tools and agents heavily for the past year+ now to build AWS's own services. Google and Microsoft have also reported similar internal efforts.
The platforms you interact with on a daily basis are now all being built with the help of AI tools and agents
If you think no one is building real commercial products with AI then you are either blind or an idiot or both. Why don't you just spend two seconds emailing your company AWS ProServe folks and ask them, I'm sure they'll give you a laundry list of things they're using AI for internally and sign you up for a Kiro demo as well
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are balls deep invested in AI, a rational person should draw 0 conclusions in them showcasing how productive they are with it.
I'd say it's more about the fear of their $50billion+ investments not paying off is creeping up on them.
I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias by people who should know better (if you think 100% of LLM outputs are "slop" with no quality consideration factored in, you're hopelessly biased). The commercialized seems like an arbitrary and pointless bar, I've seen some hot garbage that's "commercialized" and some great code that's not.
> I'm sure you're interacting with a ton of tools built via agents, ironically even in software engineering people are trying to human-wash AI code due to anti-AI bias
Please just for fun - reach out to for example Klarna support via their website and tell me how much of your experience can be attributed to an anti-AI bias and how much to the fact that the LLMs are a complete shit for any important production use cases.
My man here is reaching out to Klarna Support, this tells a LOT about his life decision making skills which clearly shine through as well in his comments on the topic of AI
You’ve never read Simon Willison’s blog? His repo is full of work that he’s created with LLM’s. He makes money off of them. There are plenty of examples you just need to look.
The paradigm shift hit the world like a wall. I know entire teams where the manager thinks AI is bullshit and the entire team is not allowed to use AI.
I love coding. But reality is reality and these fools just aren’t keeping pace with how fast the world is changing.
Or we're in another hype cycle and billions of dollars are being pumped in to sustain the current bubble with a lot of promises about how fast the world is changing. Doesn't mean AI can't be a useful tool.
When people say “hype cycle” that can mean so many different things. That valuations are too high and many industry “promises” are wrong is maybe true but to me it’s irrelevant, this isn’t speculative, I think most posters who are positive on agents in these threads are talking about two things: current, existing tools, and the existing rate of progress. Check out e.g. Epoch.ai for great industry analyses. To compare AI to crypto is disingenuous, they are completely different and crypto is a technology that fundamentally makes no sense in a world where governments want to (and arguably should) control money supply. You may or may not agree on that take but AI is something that governments will push aggressively and see as crucial to national security/control. It means this is not going away
> I’ve done things with Claude I never thought possible for myself to do,
That's the point champ. They seem great to people when they apply them to some domain they are not competent it, that's because they cannot evaluate the issues. So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours? Good for you, but for the love of god have someone more experienced check it before you push into production. Once you apply them to any area where you have at least moderate competence, you will see all sorts of issues that you just cannot unsee. Security and performance is often an issue, not to mention the quality of code....
> So you've never programmed but can now scaffold a React application and basic backend in a couple of hours?
Ahaha, weren’t you the guy who wrote an opus about planes? Is this your baseline for “stuff where LLMs break and real engineering comes into the room”? There’s a harsh wake up call for you around the corner.
What wake up call mate? I've been on board as early adopter with GH Copilot closed beta since 2021, it was around time when you did not even hear about the LLMs. I am just being realistic about the limits of the technology. In the 90s, we did not need to convince people about the Internet. It just worked. Also - what opus? Have the LLMs affected your attention span so much, that you consider what typically an primary school first-grader would read during their first school class, an "opus" no less? No wonder you are so easily impressed.
I expect it’s your “I’m an expert and everyone else is merely an idiot child” attitude that’s probably making it hard to take you seriously.
And don’t get me wrong - I totally understand this personality. There are a similar few I’ve worked with recently who are broadly quite skeptical of what seems to be an obvious fact to me - their roles will need to change and their skillsets will have to develop to take advantage of this new technology.
I am a bit tired of explaining, but I run my own company, so its not like I have to fear my "roles and responsibilities" changing - I am designing them myself. I also am not a general skeptic of the "YAGNI" type - my company and myself have been early adopters on many trends. Those that made sense of course. We also tried to be early adopters of LLMs, all the way since 2021. And I am sorry if that sounds arrogant to you, but anyone still working on them and with them to me looks like the folks who were trying to build computers and TVs with the vaccuum tubes. With the difference that vaccuum tubes computers were actually useful at the time.
95% of companies fail. Yours will too, don't worry. Amazon themselves have already been using in-house versions of this to build AWS for over a year https://kiro.dev/ you can either continue adopting AI in your company or you can start filing your company bankruptcy papers
What would you need to see to change your mind? I can generate at mind-boggling scale. What’s your threshold for realizing you might not have explored every possible vector for AI capabilities?
What you wrote here was relevant about 9 months ago. It’s now outdated. The pace and velocity of improvement of Ai can only be described as violent. It is so fast that there are many people like you who don’t get it.
Disrespect the trend line and get rolled over by the steamroller. Labs are cooking and what is available commercially is lobotomized for safety and alignment. If your baseline of current max capability is sonnet 4.5 released just this summer you’re going to be very surprised in the next few months.
I don't understand this idea that non-believers will be "steamrolled" by those who are currently adopting AI into their workflows. If their claims are validated and the new AI workflows end up achieving that claimed 10x productivity speedup, or even a 2x speedup, nobody is cursed to be steamrolled - they'll simply adopt those same workflows same as everyone else. In the meantime they aren't wasting their time trying to figure out the best way to coax and beg the LLM's into better performance.
That's actually what I'm arguing for; use tools where they are applicable. I'm against blind contrarianism and the 'nothing ever happens' attitude since that IME is being proven more wrong each week.
Right, like I was steamrolled by the "Team of Pocket Ph.D Experts" announced earlier this year with ChatGPT 5 ? Remember that underwhelming experience? The Grok to which you could "paste your entire source code file"? The constantly debilitating Claude models? Satya Nadella desperately dropping down to a PO role and bypassing his executives to try and micro-manage Copilot product development because the O365 Copilot experience is experiencing a MASSIVE pushback globally from teams and companies forced to use it ? Or is there another steamrolling coming around? What is this time? Zuckerberg implements 3D avatars in a metaverse with legs that can walk around and talk to us via LLMs? And then they sit down at virtual desks and type on virtual keyboards to produce software? Enlighten me please!
First examine your post. Can you create a 3D avatar with legs that can walk and talk?
If not, then for this area you’ve been steam rolled.
Anyway main point is, you’re looking at the hype headlines which are ludicrous. Where most optimists come from is that they are using it in the daily to code. To them it’s right in front of their eyes.
I’m not sure what your experience is but my opinion on AI doesn’t come from speculation. It comes from on the ground experience on how AI currently has changed my job role completely. If I hold the technology to be fixed and to not improve into the future then my point still stands. I’m not speculating. Most AI optimists aren’t speculating.
The current on the ground performance is what’s causing the divide. Some people have seen it fully others only have a rudimentary trial.
I have a hard time trusting the judgement of someone writing this:
> I no longer write code. I’ve been a swe for over a decade. AI writes all my code following my instructions. My code output is now expected to be 5x what it was before because we are now augmented by AI. All my coworkers use AI. We don’t use ChatGPT we use anthropic. If I didn’t use AI I would be fired for being too slow.
You should drop the prejudice and focus to be aware of the situation. This is happening all over the world, most people who have crossed this bridge just don’t share, just like they don’t share that they’ve brushed their teeth this morning.
People are sharing it. Look at this entire thread. It’s so conflicted.
We have half the thread saying it’s 5x and the other half saying they’re delusional and lack critical thinking.
I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking. If half the thread is saying on the ground AI has changed things and the other half just labels everyone as crazy without investigation… guess which one didn’t do any critical thinking?
Last week I built an app that cross compiled into Tauri and electron that’s essentially a google earth clone for farms. It uses mapbox and deckgl and you can play back gps tracks of tractor movements and the gps traces change color as the tractor moves in actual real time. There’s pausing, seeking, bookmarking, skipping. All happening in real time because it’s optimized to use shader code and uniforms to do all these updates rather than redrawing the layers. There’s also color grading for gps fix values and satellite counts which the user can switch instantaneously to with zero slow down on tracks with thousands and thousands of points. It all interfaces with an API that scans gcp storage for gps tracks and organizes it into a queryable api that interfaces with our firebase based authentication. The backend is deployed by terraform and written in strictly typed typescript and it’s automatically deployed and checked by GHA. Of course the electron and tauri app have GUI login interfaces that work fully correctly with the backend api and it all looks professionally designed like a movie player merged with Google earth for farm orchards.
I have rudimentary understanding for many of the technologies involved in the above. But I was able to write that whole internal tool in less than a week thanks to AI. I couldn’t have pulled it off without rudimentary understanding of the tech so some novice swe couldn’t really do it without the optimizations I used but that’s literally all I needed. I never wrote shader code for prod in my life and left to its own devices the AI would have come up with an implementation that’s too laggy to work properly.
That’s all that’s needed. Some basic high level understanding and AI did everything else and now our company has an internal tool that is polished beyond anything that would’ve been given effort to before AI.
I’m willing to bet you didn’t use AI agents in a meaningful way. Maybe copying and pasting some snippets of code into a chatbot and not liking the output. And then you do it every couple of weeks to have your finger on the pulse of AI.
Go deeper. Build an app with AI. Hand hold it into building something you never built before. It’s essentially a pair programming endeavor. Im willing to bet you haven’t done this. Go in with the goal of building something polished and don’t automatically dismiss it when the AI does something stupid (it inevitably will) Doing this is what actual “critical thinking” is.
> I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking.
My critical thinking is sharp enough to recognize that you're the recently banned
ninetyninenine user [0]. Just as unbalanced and quarrelsome as before I can see. It's probably better to draw some conclusion from a ban and adjust, or just leave.
Bro no one said 5x now or your fired that’s your own imagination adding flavor to it.
It’s obvious to anyone if your output is 5x less than everyone else you will eventually be let go. There’s no paradigm shift where the boss suddenly announced that. But the underlying unsaid expectation is obvious given what everyone is doing.
What happened was this, a couple new hires and some current employees started were using AI. There output was magnified and they were not only having more output but they were deploying code outside their areas of expertise doing dev ops, infra, backend and frontend.
This spread and within months everyone in the company was doing it. The boss can now throw a frontend job to a backend developer and now expect completion in a day or less. This isn’t every task but such output for the majority of tasks it’s normal.
If you’re not meeting that norm it’s blindingly obvious. The boss doesn’t need to announce anything when everyone is faster. There was no deliberate culture shift where the boss announced it. The closest equivalent is the boss hiring a 10x engineer to work alongside you and you have to scramble to catch up. The difference is now we know exactly what is making each engineer 10x and we can use that tool to also operate at that level.
Critical thinking my ass. You’re just labeling and assuming things with your premeditated subconscious bias. If anything it’s your perspective that is religious.
Also can you please stop stalking me and just respond to my points instead of digging through my whole profile and attempting to do character assassinations based off of what I wrote in the past? Thanks.
Whether you agree with it or not is besides the point. The point is it’s happening.
Your initial stance was disbelief. Now you’re just looking down at it as unprofessional.
Bro, I fucking agree. It’s unprofessional. But the entire point initially was that you didn’t believe it and my objective was to tell you that this is what’s happening in reality. Scoff at it all you want, as AI improves less and less “professional” people will be able to enter our field and operate at the same level as us.
The last big release from OpenAI was a big giant billion-dollar flop. Its lackluster update was written about far and wide, even here on HN. But maybe you're living in an alternate reality?
My experience comes from the fact that after over a decade of working as a swe I no longer write code. It’s not some alternate reality thing or reading headlines. It’s my daily life that has changed.
Have you used AI before? Agentic systems are set up so it gives you a diff before even making committing to a change. Sounds like you haven’t really used AI agentically yet.
Seems fine, works, is fine, is better than if you had me go off and write it on my own. You realize you can check the results? You can use Claude to help you understand the changes as you read through them? I mean I just don’t get this weird “it makes mistakes and it’s horrible if you understand the domain that it is generating over” I mean yes definitely sometimes and definitely not other times. What happens if I DONT have someone more experienced to consult with or that will ignore me because they are busy or be wrong because they are also imperfect and not focused. It’s really hard to be convinced that this point of view is not just some knee jerk reaction justified post hoc
Yes you can ask them "to check it for you". The only little problem is as you said yourself "they make mistakes", therefore : YOU CANNOT TRUST THEM. Just because you tell them to "check it" does not mean they will get it right this time. Again, however it seems "fine" to you, please, please, please / have a more senior person check that crap before you inflict serious damage somewhere.
Nope, you read their code, ask them to summarize changes to guide your reading, ask it why it made certain decisions you don’t understand and if you don’t like their explanations you change it (with the agent!). Own and be responsible for the code you commit. I am the “most senior”, and at large tech companies that track, higher level IC corresponds to more AI usage, hmm almost like it’s a useful tool.
Ok but you understand that the fundamental nature of LLMs amplifies errors, right? A hallucination is, by definition, a series of tokens which is plausible enough to be indistinguishable from fact to the model. If you ask an LLM to explain its own hallucinations to you, it will gladly do so, and do it in a way that makes them seem utterly natural. If you ask an LLM to explain its motivations for having done something, it will extemporize whichever motivation feels the most plausible in the moment you're asking it.
LLMs can be handy, but they're not trustworthy. "Own and be responsible for the code you commit" is an impossible ideal to uphold if you never actually sit down and internalize the code in your code base. No "summaries," no "explanations."
So your argument is that if people don't use the tool correctly they might get incorrect results? How is that relevant? If you Google search for the wrong query you'll similarly get incorrect results
This is remarkably dismissive and comes across as arrogant. In reality they assist many people with expert skills in a domain in getting things done in areas they are competent in, without getting bogged down in tedium.
They need a heavy hand to police to make sure they do the right thing. Garbage in, garbage out.
The smarter the hand of the person driving them, the better the output. You see a problem, you correct it. Or make them correct it. The stronger the foundation they're starting from, the better the production.
It's basically the opposite of what you're asserting here.
I would say while LLMs do improve productivity sometimes, I have to say I flatly cannot believe a claim (at least without direct demonstration or evidence) that one person is doing the work of 20 with them in december 2025 at least.
I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number, but those claims quickly fell out of the mainstream as people realised it's just not that big a multiplier in practice in the real world.
I don't think we're seeing this in the market, anywhere. Something like 1 engineer doing the job of 20, what you're talking about is basically whole departments at mid sized companies compressing to one person. Think about that, that has implications for all the additional management staff on top of the 20 engineers too.
It'd either be a complete restructure and rethink of the way software orgs work, or we'd be seeing just incredible, crazy deltas in output of software companies this year of the type that couldn't be ignored, they'd be impossible to not notice.
This is just plainly not happening. Look, if it happens, it happens, 26, 27, 28 or 38. It'll be a cool and interesting new world if it does. But it's just... not happened or happening in 25.
I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools.
One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.
That's why you dont use LLMs as a knowledge source without giving them tools.
"Agents use tools in a loop to achieve a goal."
If you don't give any tools, you get hallucinations and half-truths.
But you give one a tool to do, say, web searches and it's going to be a lot smarter. That's where 90% of the innovation with "AI" today is coming from. The raw models aren't gettin that much smarter anymore, but the scaffolding and frameworks around them are.
Tools are the main reason Claude Code is as good as it is compared to the competition.
> The raw models aren't gettin that much smarter anymore, but the scaffolding and frameworks around them are.
yes, that is my understanding as well, though it gets me thinking if that is true, then what real value is the llm on the server compared to doing that locally + tools?
You still can't beat an acre of specialized compute with any kind of home hardware. That's pretty much the power of cloud LLMs.
For a tool use loop local models are getting to "OK" levels, when they get to "pretty good", most of my own stuff can run locally, basically just coordinating tool calls.
Of course, step one is always critically think and evaluate for bad information. I think for research, I mainly use it for things that are testable/verifiable, for example I used it for a tricky proxy chain set up. I did try to use it to learn a language a few months ago which I think was counter productive for the reasons you mentioned.
I use web search (DDG) and I don’t think I have ever try more than one queries in the vast majority of cases. Why because I know where the answer is, I’m using the search engine as an index to where I can find it. Like “csv python” to find that page in the doc.
It's entirely dependent on the type of code being written. For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers. This is a best case scenario.
Your productivity boost will depend entirely on a combination of how much you can remove yourself from the loop (basically, the cost of validation per turn) and how amenable the task/your code is to agents (which determines your P(success)).
Low P(success) isn't a problem if there's no engineer time cost to validation, the agent can just grind the problem out in the background, and obviously if P(success) is high the cost of validation isn't a big deal. The productivity killer is when P(success) is low and the cost of validation is high, these circumstances can push you into the red with agents very quickly.
Thus the key to agents being a force multiplier is to focus on reducing validation costs, increasing P(success) and developing intuition relating to when to back off on pulling the slot machine in favor of more research. This is assuming you're speccing out what you're building so the agent doesn't make poor architectural/algorithmic choices that hamstring you down the line.
Respectfully, if
I may offer constructive criticism, I’d hope this isn’t how you communicate to software developers, customers, prospects, or fellow entrepreneurs.
To be direct, this reads like a fluff comment written by AI with an emphasis on probability and metrics. P(that) || that.
I’ve written software used by a local real estate company to the Mars Perseverance rover. AI is a phenomenally useful tool. But be weary of preposterous claims.
I'll take you at your word regarding respectfully. That was an off the cuff attempt to explain the real levers that control the viability of agents under particular circumstances. The target market wasn't your average business potato but someone who might care about a hand waived "order approximate" estimator kind of like big-O notation, which is equally hand waivey.
Given that, if you want to revisit your comment in a constructive way rather than doing an empty drive by, I'll read your words with an open mind.
> It's entirely dependent on the type of code being written. For verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios, one agent can easily 24/7 the work of 20 FT engineers. This is a best case scenario.
So the "verbose, straightforward code with clear cut test scenarios" is already written by a human?
> I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number,
Purely anecdotal, but I've seen that level of productivity from the vibe tools we have in my workplace.
The main issue is that 1 engineer needs to have the skills of those 20 engineers so they can see where the vibe coding has gone wrong. Without that it falls apart.
My experience is that you get out what you put in. If you have a well-defined foundation, AI can populate the stubs and get it 95% correct. Getting to that point can take a bit of thought, and AI can help with that, too, but if you lean on it too much, you'll get a mess.
And of course, getting to the point where you can write a good foundation has always been the bulk of the work. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
This is completely wrong. Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 don't have any of these issues. They will regularly tell you that you're wrong if you bother to ask them and they will explain why and what a better solution is. They don't make up anything. The code they produce is noticeably more efficient in LoC than previous models. And yes they really will do research, they will search the Internet for docs and articles as needed and cite their references inline with their answers.
You talk as if you haven't used a LLM since 2024. It's now almost 2026 and things have changed a lot.
With apologies, and not GP, but this has been the same feedback I've personally seen on every single model release.
Whenever I discuss the problems that my peers and I have using these things, it's always something along the lines of "but model X.Y solves all that!", so I obediently try again, waste a huge amount of time, and come back to the conclusion that these things aren't great at generation, but they are fantastic at summarization and classification.
When I use them for those tasks, they have real value. For creation? Not so much.
I've stopped getting excited about the "but model X.Y!!" thing. Maybe they are improving? I just personally haven't seen it.
But according to the AI hypers, just like with every other tech hype that's died over the past 30 years, "I must just be doing it wrong".
A lot of people are consistently getting their low expectations disproven when it comes to progress in AI tooling. If you read back in my comment history, six months ago I was posting about how AI is over hyped BS. But I kept using it and eventually new releases of models and tools solved most of the problems I had with them. If it has not happened for you yet then I expect it will eventually. Keep up with using the tools and models and follow their advancements and I think you'll eventually get to the point where your needs are met
I'd be willing to give you access to the experiment I mentioned in a separate reply (have a github repo), as far as the output that you can get for a complex app buildout.
Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput despite my absolute lack of caring that much [0]. Once I get past a certain stage I am thinking of doing an A-B test where I take an earlier commit and try again while paying more attention... (But I at least want to get where there is a full suite of UOW cases before I do that, for comparison's sake.)
> Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.
I've been considered a 'very fast' engineer at most shops (e.x. at multiple shops, stories assigned to me would have a <1 multiplier for points[1])
20 is a bit bloated, unless we are talking about WITCH tier. I definitely can get done in 2-3 hours what could take me a day. I say it that way because at best it's 1-2 hours but other times it's longer, some folks remember the 'best' rather than median.
[0] - It started as 'prompt only', although after a certain point I did start being more aggressive with personal edits.
[1] - IDK why they did it that way instead of capacity, OTOH that saved me when it came to being assigned Manual Testing stories...
It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.
> but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet
i'd like to think if it was really good, we would see product quality improve over time; iow less reported bugs, less support incidents, increased sign-ups etc, that could easily be quantified no?
Those twenty engineers must not have produced much.