Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.
But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.
They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.
It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!
They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.
Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".
Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?
Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?
Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative.
With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI
Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ?
To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?
But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.
If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?
Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?
What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?
Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?
Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.
Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.
Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.
Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.
My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.
In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.
To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.
Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.
Maybe? The project already had multiple blog posts up before this initial PR and post. I think it was set up by someone as a test/PoC of how this agentic persona could interact with the open source community and not to obtain karma. I think it got «unlucky» with its first project and it spiraled a bit. I agree that this spiraling could have been human instructed. If so, it’s less interesting than if it did that autonomously. Anyway it keeps submitting PRs and is extremely active on its own and other repos.
Do you think you'd ever feel confident enough to submit non-slop patches in the future? I feel like that way, at least the project gains a potential maintainer.
I already do that, but only on projects where I actually wrote the code. I don’t see a future where I would submit something AI fully wrote even if I understood it.
Yup. And if they can normalize AI contributions with operations like these (doesn't seem to be going that well) they can eventually get the humans to slip up in review and add something because we at some point started trusting that their work was solid.
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