I’d add on to that lifecycle demands: a development project with no users has a tight cheap feedback loop with high quality bug reports with relatively obvious bug sources, once issues start working through layers of QA and customers the per-issue costs raise by several factors (50x to 200x are numbers I’ve seen from research, YMMV).
I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.
> The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money
Microsoft’s goal isn’t to provide high quality software that outperforms other software, their goal is to provide an obvious and reasonably proximate answer to clueless execs trying to check things off of a procurement list so that existing contracts can snowball and competition is excluded.
We, collectively as a global species, really lost out when MS wasn’t divvied up in their anti-trust trial. Office as its own corporate entity would be in a radically different place right now, as would their enterprise customers.
That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.
I babysat for a military fighter jet mechanic when I was young, he said when they dismantled and rebuilt planes there was a drawer for all the spare parts that were left over.
A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.
If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.
Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.
My personal challenge is that if c, generate then review, isn’t pretty close to a one-shot then I am almost certainly negative for time versus creating from scratch (accounting for over-documenting, prompting, and enforced pauses for generation).
The sunk cost fallacy bites and then bites again and again.
Sam Altman says a lot of crazy stuff, but I don’t think that is where the ‘bubble’ is coming from.
In recent months we’ve had the first automated unmanned amphibious assault, the daily drone count in our hot wars is jumping by leaps and bounds, and arms suppliers are promising future drone shipments in the hundred thousand unit range. The ten year picture for reactive combined swarm intelligence on the battlefield is promising to be widespread, highly lucrative, and in need of constant adaptation to near-peer efforts. Datacenters in space are dumb, datacenters in space to power orbital weapons networks and rapid response capabilities make sense.
On top of that we have international trade, scalable customer service, and a first pass 80/20 answer for businesses focused elsewhere. Shitty, maybe, overpriced, maybe, but useful enough our grandkids are gonna use ‘em.
In both cases, as well as potential new LLM-like tech, there’s an argument to be made for being a leader now to dominate the future. That means compute and tech positioning, and memory & GPU deals.
YouTube was a money loser, Google was ‘losing’ money on them for years, YouTube didn’t have a sustainable business model. YouTube was the biggest, though, and whatever premium Google paid to be #1 then meant they were #1 when the online video business model matured. Now they’re printing money with a platform outcompeting news, social, and video platforms.
Sam altman himself has sort of cooled that rhetoric down - see his recent podcast (frankly I forgot who it was with, I only saw clips of it - but he was wearing orange-brown and had an applovin mug). Maybe it is to contrast against anthropic where they are leaning hard into the EA party line, not sure. This guy always seems to have an ulterior motive behind everything though.
One line I remember was that he said the disruption is not happening the way they thought after GPT4 due to inertia bla bla and that it will be slower gradual change and they got the timelines wrong.
And yes on the defense usecase. That is the main reason governments are giving a hoot about AI. Orbital datacenters too, I know people working on the Indian one, it's entirely for defense usecases. Basically for missile stuff.
In .Net-land we have access to a lot of the underlying MS library code, and reflection/decompilation if needed.
MS has layers, there are A-teams, B-teams, and so-on. Simultaneously they are dropping both world class work and, to your point, a statistically much larger pool of just pretty good code.
A lot of that work is perfunctory and somewhat bloated/weakened by the scale of publishing and their internal tech-political requirements. Components for component I’ve seen in-house replacements for many MS projects from mid-tier devs that are better, smaller, and less brittle over time.
I’d compare it to baking: a home cook or tiny bakery have the advantages of time and focus, perpetual consistency at scale is a whole different baking challenge, one that doesn’t necessarily yield better individual loaves. It doesn’t mean WonderBread is bad at bread, just that they’re optimized for something other than maximal loaf quality.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
Yeah, that's what I think every time I read some discussion online about AI coding assistants. Programming is such a wide field with presence in so many different industries, with all sorts of languages and environments, and many people seem to forget that not everything is webdev. You see one person saying they barely need to code by hand anymore and another who can't believe that because their experience has been the complete opposite, when they're probably both right.
I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.
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