Why I remain a skeptic of LLMs for real software
Four years into the AI revolution, the author argues that LLMs have yet to deliver meaningful improvements in software quality, speed, or cost. Despite $1.5 trillion in investment, independent evidence of productivity gains is thin, and AI-generated code often misses obvious issues. The author also critiques the homogenization of intellectual labor and the industry's focus on lines of code as a metric, citing Peter Naur's work.
A technological revolution is usually marked by old empires falling and being replaced with new players and ideas. It is not clear to me that the industry has produced any new ideas in the last few years that haven’t been in the navel-gazing arena of AI boosterism.
- hax0ron3
>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.
- classictraffic
To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobs
https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...
- hingler36
I have started using AI a bit, but I'm still trying to be careful in that if I ever lose access I can still perform my job at pre-AI ability. My understanding is that tokens are still heavily subsidized, and when that well runs dry I don't want it to be some nightmare to go back to the way I was doing my work in like 2022.