Well, on the surface it may seem like there’s nothing being created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software. At this point, most software you touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.
> every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software
> The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.
Lets back up these statements with some evidence, something quantitative, not just what pre-IPO AI marketing blog posts are telling you.
Why quantitative? I have friends at most major tech companies and I work at a startup now. You shouldn’t write by hand what can be prompted. Doesn’t mean the hard parts shouldn’t be done with the same care as when everything was handwritten, but a lot of minutiae are irrelevant now.
Because anything not quantitative is either “trust me bro” or AI marketing. Some of us are engineers, so we want to see actual numbers and not vibes.
And there are studies on this subject, like the MITRE study that shows that development speed decreases with LLMs while developers think it increases speed.
It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.
> Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code
It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity from them?
You are measuring differently..they measure in how much stuff they ship. They don't measure if it's going to break , if it is not very maintainable, or how much it will cost to keep using the LLM I. The future. Remember its an extraction grift: buy now, pay later. Preferably after you have made the model an intrinsic part of the process. Oh snap, now we definitely need to bailout LLMs cause noone knows how this stuff works. Please help. Useful idiots all around. Classic case of not using their brains the way they evolved for.
Like the new features in Windows 11? They’ve just anointed a “software quality czar” and I suspect this is not coincidence.