Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers(ai-updates.net) |
Grindr CEO Says AI Is Doing the Work of 200 Engineers(ai-updates.net) |
In my experience of AI so far, it's really easy to just 'do more', but there's also very little value in the things people are doing. They don't make you more revenue or improve the product in a meaningful way, or even make the product better to work on. Price's Law[1] or the Pareto Principle[2], or whatever similar axiom you like, suggest that most people aren't actually contributing all that much.
If you apply AI to 'more work' you just end up with the same distribution of good to bad things - and it's highly likely that will lead to more outages, maintenance, and people burning out from the downsides. You have to make sure that the work is actually useful. That's hard, and something AI is terrible at.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
An important point that’s buried quite a bit down the article. Grindr seems to be measuring AI success not on features shipped or business value created, but on number of lines of code generated which seems a fairly flaky justification for such a large AI spend personally.
Therefore one should not expect higher quality out of many businesses using AI, but you should certainly expect such businesses to highly value AI. The arguments in favor of quality didn't seem to work before, I don't think they will now.
I feel that maybe in the future HN will have to implement a "low quality AI" flag or something(if it has aleady I'm not aware).
It's certainly likely that it happened more than once, but I've not heard a similar one for Simonyi.
When Simonyi started at Microsoft there were only 40 employees. He was the head of the then-new applications group, which I normally don't think of as being a programming job, nor one where LoC is all that relevant.
(That's not to say he wouldn't have written any code. The book "Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" mentions that Cutler, the head of the NT project, wrote some of the code, but not much. And Simonyi, like Cutler, was an expert software developer.)
Wouldn't any PM for Word and Multiplan/Excel be under Simonyi? As the head, he could surely say "no" to the request, and even tell the PM to stop gathering that information, right?
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Simonyi developed the "meta-programming" software production method in his PhD, which he brought to Microsoft. The meta-programmer does all the design work and architectural decisions, which the programmers then code up. If they get stuck, they take the problem back to the meta-programmer.
The meta-programmer doesn't actually write lines of code, or at least those LoC are much less than what the underlying programmers write, making that measurement even less relevant for someone like Simonyi who, of course, would be a meta-programmer.