[HN Gopher] AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
___________________________________________________________________
AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 155 points
Date : 2025-11-28 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apolloacademy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apolloacademy.com)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Given the charts, that's a _ridiculous_ claim. Just compare early
| 2024 in the first chart, for example.
|
| It's way too early to decide whether it's flattening out.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Especially interesting is the adoption by the smallest
| companies. This means people find it still increasingly useful
| at the grassroot level where things are actually done.
|
| At larger companies adoption will probably stop at the level
| where managers will start to be threatened.
| crote wrote:
| But what does that grassroot adoption look like in practice?
| Is that a developer spending $250/month on Claude, or is it a
| local corner shop using it once a month to replace their clip
| art flyer with AI slop, and the example contract they
| previously found via Google with some legalese gobbledygook
| ChatGPT hallucinated?
|
| Giving AI away for free to people who don't give a rat's ass
| about the quality of its output isn't very difficult. But
| that's not exactly going to pay your datacenter bill...
| malisper wrote:
| Three consecutive months of decline starts to look more like a
| trend. Unless you think there's a transient issue causing the
| decline, something fundamental has changed
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Again: compare early 2024. And that's not the only thing; the
| second chart shows a _possible_ flattening, but by no means
| certain yet, especially not when taken with the clear March-
| April jump; and the first chart shows no dwindling in 1-4,
| and clear recovery in 250+. The lie is easily put to the
| claim the article makes:
|
| > _Data from the Census Bureau and Ramp shows that AI
| adoption rates are starting to flatten out across all firm
| sizes, see charts below._
|
| It's flat-out nonsense, and anyone with _any_ experience in
| this kind of statistics can see it.
| raincole wrote:
| It's just printing headlines out of nothing. If it tried to
| answer why the two graphs show such different numbers (one
| ~14%, the other ~55%) I'd be more interested.
|
| > Note: Data is six-survey moving average. The survey is
| conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US Census Bureau, Macrobond,
| Apollo Chief Economist
|
| > Note: Ramp Al Index measures the adoption rate of artificial
| intelligence products and services among American businesses.
| The sample includes more than 40,000 American businesses and
| billions of dollars in corporate spend using data from Ramp's
| corporate card and bill pay platform. Sources: Ramp, Bloomberg,
| Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist
|
| It seems that the real interesting thing to see here is that
| the companies using Ramp are extremely atypical.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| No no, we just need to put even more money in.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Adoption = number of users
|
| Adoption rate = first derivative
|
| Flattening adoption rate = the second derivative is negative
|
| Starting to flatten = the third derivative is negative
|
| I don't think anyone cares what the third derivative of something
| is when the first derivative could easily change by a macroscopic
| amount overnight.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Not really. In this context adoption might be number of users.
| But adoption rate is a fraction of users that adopted this to
| all users.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Hm that's true. Both seem plausible in English. I didn't look
| closely enough to figure out which they meant.
| postexitus wrote:
| Adoption rate is not derivative of Adoption. Rate of change is.
| Adoption rate is the percentage of uptake (there, same order
| with Adoption itself). It being flattening means first
| derivative is getting close to 0.
| brianshaler wrote:
| It maps pretty cleanly to the well understood derivatives of
| a position vector. Position (user count), velocity (first
| derivative, change in user count over time), acceleration
| (second derivative, speeding up or flattening of the
| velocity), and jerk (third derivative, change in acceleration
| such as the shift between from acceleration to deceleration)
|
| It really is a beautiful title.
| postexitus wrote:
| It is not velocity, it is not change. Have you read the
| graphs? What do you think 12% in Aug and Sep for 250+
| Employee companies mean, that another 12% of companies
| adopted AI or is it a flat "12% of the companies have
| adopted in Aug, and it did not change in Sep"
| brianshaler wrote:
| > Have you read the graphs?
|
| Yes. The title specifically is beautiful. The charts
| aren't nearly as interesting, though probably a bit more
| than a meta discussion on whether certain time intervals
| align with one interpretation of the author's intent or
| another.
| alwa wrote:
| It is a beautiful title and a beautiful way to think about
| it--alas, I think gp is right: here, from the charts
| anyway, the writer seems to mean the count of firms
| reporting adoption (as a proportion of total survey
| respondents).
|
| Which paints a grimmer picture--I was surprised that they
| report a marked _decline_ in adoption amongst firms of 250+
| employees. That rate-as-first-derivative apparently turned
| negative months ago!
|
| Then again, it's awfully scant on context: does the
| absolute number of firms tell us much about how (or how
| productively) they're using this tech? Maybe that's for
| their deluxe investors.
| amelius wrote:
| The function log(x) also has derivative that goes closer and
| closer to 0.
|
| However lim x->inf log(x) is still inf.
| lkey wrote:
| Is it your assertion that an 'infinite' percentage! of the
| businesses will use AI on a long enough time scale?
|
| If you need everything to be math, at least have the
| courtesy to use the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function and not
| unbounded logarithmic curves when referring to on our very
| finite world.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I agree, I think I misunderstood their wording.
|
| In which case it's at least funny, but maybe subtract one
| from all my derivatives.. Which kills my point also. Dang.
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| While there's an extreme amount of hype around AI, it seems
| there's an equal amount of demand for signs that it's a bubble
| or it's slowing down.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Well, that's only because it exhibits all the signs of a
| bubble. It's not exactly a grand conspiracy.
| crote wrote:
| Looking at the graphs in the linked article, a more accurate
| title would probably be "AI adoption has stagnated" - which _a
| lot_ of people are going to care about.
|
| Corporate AI adoption looks to be hitting a plateau, and
| adoption in large companies is even _shrinking_. The only
| market still showing growth is companies with fewer than 5
| employees - and even there it 's only linear growth.
|
| Considering our economy is pumping _billions_ into the AI
| industry, that 's pretty bad news. If the industry isn't
| rapidly growing, why are they building all those data centers?
| Are they just setting money on fire in a desperate attempt to
| keep their share price from plummeting?
| prmph wrote:
| When all the dust settles, I think it's probably going to be
| the biggest bubble ever. The unjustified hype is
| unbelievable.
|
| For some reason I can't even get Claude Code (Running GLM
| 4.6) to do the simplest of tasks today without feeling like I
| want to tear my hair out, whereas it used to be pretty good
| before.
|
| They are all struggling mightily with the economics, and I
| suspect after each big announcement of a new improved model
| x.y.z where they demo shiny so called advancement, all the
| major AI companies heavily throttle their models in use to
| save a buck.
|
| At this point I'm seriously considering biting the bullet and
| avoiding all use of AI for coding, except for research and
| exploring codebases.
|
| First it was Bitcoin, and now this, careening from one hyper-
| bubble to a worse one.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| You could use that logic to dismiss any analysis of any
| trajectory ever.
|
| Perfectly excusable post that says absolutely nothing about
| anything.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Adoption = number of users
|
| > Adoption rate = first derivative
|
| If you mean with respect to time, wrong. The denonimator in
| adoption rate that makes it a "rate" is the number of existing
| businesses, not time. It is adoption scaled to the universe of
| businesses, not the rate of change of adoption over time.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The adoption rate is the rate of adoption over time.
| wtallis wrote:
| One could try to make an argument that "adoption rate"
| _should_ mean change in adoption over time, but the meaning
| as used in this article is unambiguously _not that_. It 's
| just percentages, not time derivatives, as clearly shown by
| the vertical axis labels.
| brianshaler wrote:
| There's another axis on the charts.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Normally, the adoption rate of something is the percentage
| ratio of adopters to non-adopters.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I don't understand, how can adoption rate change overnight if
| its derivative is negative? Trying to draw a parallel to get
| intuition, if adoption is distance, adoption rate speed, and
| the derivative of adoption rate is acceleration, then if I was
| pedal to the floor but then release the pedal and start
| braking, I'll not lose the distance gained (adoption) but my
| acceleration will flatten then get negative and my speed
| (adoption rate) will ultimately get to 0 right? Seems pretty
| significant for an industry built on 2030 projections.
| ajkjk wrote:
| One announcement from a company or government can suddenly
| change the derivative discontinuously.
|
| Derivatives irl do not follow the rules of calculus that you
| learn in class because they don't have to be continuous. (you
| could quibble that if you zoom in enough it can be regarded
| as continuous.. But you don't gain anything from doing that,
| it really does behave discontinuous)
| Neywiny wrote:
| Not sure what kinda calculus you took at least here in the
| states it's very standard to learn about such functions in
| class, and yes there is a difference between discontinuous
| and the slope being really large (though finite) for a
| brief period of time
| ajkjk wrote:
| You rarely study delta and step functions in an
| introductory calculus class. In this case the first
| derivative would be a step function, in the sense that
| over any finite interval it appears to be discontinuous.
| Since you can only sample a function in reality there's
| no distinguishing the discontinuous version from its
| smooth approximation.
|
| (I suppose a rudimentary version of this is taught in
| intro calc. It's been a long time so I don't really
| remember.)
| Neywiny wrote:
| I'm sure it depends on who's teaching the class and what
| curriculum they follow, but we were doing piecewise
| linear functions well before differentiation so I think I
| do actually disagree as per your caveat. It's also
| possible that the courses triaged different material. As
| a calc for engineers not calc for math majors taker, my
| experience may have been heavier on deltas and steps.
| alwa wrote:
| Not to be all "do you know who X is," but I did have to
| chuckle a little when I saw who it is that you're
| teaching differentiation to here...
| umanwizard wrote:
| Derivatives in actual calculus don't have to be continuous
| either. Consider the function defined by f(x) = x^2
| sin(1/x) for x != 0; f(0) = 0.
|
| The derivative at 0 exists and is 0, because lim h-> 0 (h^2
| sin(1/h))/h = lim h-> 0 (h sin(1/h)), which equals 0
| because the sin function is bounded.
|
| When x !=0, the derivative is given by the product and
| chain rules as 2x sin(1/x) - cos(1/x), which obviously
| approaches no limit as x-> 0, and so the derivative exists
| but is discontinuous.
| alwa wrote:
| As seems to have sort of happened between March and April
| of this year, at least from the Ramp chart in TFA. I wonder
| what that was about.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Person who draws comparison from current situation to
| derivatives points out that derivatives rules don't apply
| to current situation.
|
| Awesome stuff.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I don't understand your point. It seemed like the person
| I was replying to didn't understand how both claims could
| be simultaneously true so I was elaborating.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Yeah, what a jerk.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Hehehehehheeh
| voxleone wrote:
| You win today.
| voxleone wrote:
| I can't believe i was down voted for this silly comment on
| a third derivative pun. Get a life, techie.
| benatkin wrote:
| I think it might be answering long-term questions about direct
| chat use of AIs. Of course as AI goes through its macroscopic
| changes the amount it gets used for each person will increase,
| however some will continue to avoid using AI directly, just
| like I don't fully use GPS navigation but I benefit from it
| whether I like it or not when others are transporting me or
| delivering things to me.
| xgulfie wrote:
| If I was openAI or whatever I would be investing in circular
| partnerships with claude or whatever, claim agentic use should be
| considered the same as real users, then have each other's LLM
| systems use each other and finally achieve infinite, uncapped
| user growth
| anon191928 wrote:
| so no expot. growth? who would have guess?
|
| /s
| malisper wrote:
| From the chart, the percentage of companies using AI has been
| going down over the past couple of months
|
| That's a massive deal because the AI companies today are valued
| on the assumption that they'll 10x their revenue over the next
| couple of years. If their revenue growth starts to slow down,
| their valuations will change to reflect that
| adventured wrote:
| This bubble phase will play out just as the previous have in
| tech: consolidation, most of the value creation will go to a
| small group of companies. Most will die, some will thrive.
|
| Companies like Anthropic will not survive as an independent.
| They won't come close to having enough revenue & profit to
| sustain their operating costs (they're Lyft to Google or
| OpenAI's Uber, Anthropic will never reach the scale needed to
| roll over to significant profit generation). Its fair value is
| 1/10th or less what it's being valued at currently (yes because
| I say so). Anthropic's valuation will implode to reconcile
| that, as the market for AI does. Some larger company will scoop
| them up during the pain phase, once they get desperate enough
| to sell. When the implosion of the speculative hype is done,
| the real value creation will begin thereafter. Over the
| following two or three decades a radical amount of value will
| be generated by AI collectively, far beyond anything seen
| during this hype phase. A lot of lesser AI companies will
| follow the same path as Anthropic.
| simonw wrote:
| Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025:
| https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... -
| their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down
| for Large Companies".
|
| I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code
| Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and
| some uploaded census data:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/
|
| Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after
| Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on
| that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-
| interpreter...
| runako wrote:
| Without weighing in on the accuracy of this claim, this would be
| an expected part of the maturity cycle.
|
| Compare to databases. You could probably have plotted a chart of
| database adoption rates in the '90s as small companies started
| running e.g. Lotus Notes, FoxPro and SQL server everywhere to
| build in-house CRMs and back-office apps. Those companies still
| operate those functions, but now most small businesses do not run
| databases themselves. Why manage SQL Server when you can just pay
| for Salesforce and Notion with predictable monthly spend?
|
| (All of this is more complex, but analogous at larger companies.)
|
| My take is the big rise in AI adoption, if it arrives, will
| similarly be embedded inside application functions.
| ghaff wrote:
| People push back against comments like these. But, as you
| suggest, the win isn't about individual developers potentially
| increasing their productivity by some inflated amount. It's
| about baking more prediction and automation into more tools
| that people who aren't developers use. Which is probably part
| of where the general meme of lack of interest in entry level
| programmers come from.
| runako wrote:
| Actually surprising when programmers (especially) push back.
| A couple years ago, people were doing copy/paste from ChatGPT
| to their IDEs. Now, they generally work at a higher level of
| abstraction in dedicated tools like Coded or Cursor. Why
| would other functions prefer the copy/paste lifestyle?
| thesumofall wrote:
| They show two different surveys that are supposed to show the
| same underlying truth but differ by a factor of 3x? For the Ramp
| survey: why the sudden jump from 30% to 50% in March? For the
| Census one: How could it possibly be that only 12% of companies
| with more than 250 people ,,adopted" (whatever that means) AI? It
| would be interesting if it were true but these charts don't make
| any sense at all to me
| tripletao wrote:
| The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce
| goods or services". I guess that's intended to exclude not-yet-
| productive investigations, and maybe also indirect uses--does
| LLM-powered OCR for the expense reports for the travelling
| sales representatives for a widget factory count? That's all
| vague enough that I guess it works mostly as a sentiment check,
| where the absolute value isn't meaningful but the time trend
| might be.
|
| The Ramp chart seems to use actual payment information from
| companies using their accounting platform. That should be more
| objective, though they don't disclose much about their
| methodology (and their customers aren't necessarily
| representative, the purpose and intensity of use aren't
| captured at all, etc.).
|
| https://ramp.com/data/ai-index
| ac29 wrote:
| > The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help
| produce goods or services"
|
| That's odd. I use AI tools at work occasionally, but since
| our business involves selling physical goods, I guess we
| would not count as an AI adopter in this survey.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm more interested in what the implications are for the economy
| and what this next AI winter looks like.
|
| What happens to all the debt? Was all this just for chatbots that
| are finally barely good enough for satnav and image gen that does
| slightly better photoshop that the layperson can use?
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| The least volatile dataset, employee count 1-4 businesses, is
| steadily climbing in adoption. I feel like as long as the
| smallest businesses (so the most agile, non-enterprise software
| ones) increase in adoption, other sizes will follow.
| mattas wrote:
| Not to be lost, but the first chart is actually a 3-month moving
| average. Surprised they buried that in the notes and didn't
| simply include it in the chart title. "Note: Data is six-survey
| moving average. The survey is conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US
| Census Bureau, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist"
| whinvik wrote:
| I think what is happening is that people are realizing AI is not
| just plug and play. It can do amazing things but needs
| engineering around it.
|
| I think what will happen is in parallel more products will be
| built that address the engineering challenges and the models will
| keep getting better. I don't know though if that will lead to
| another hockey stick or just slow and steady.
| emp17344 wrote:
| My guess is AI will find niches where it provides productivity
| boosts, but won't be as useful in the majority of fields. Right
| now, AI works pretty well for coding, and doesn't really excel
| anywhere else. It's not looking like it will get good enough to
| disrupt the economy at large.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| Aside from financially-motivated "testimonials," there's no
| broad evidence that it even works that well for coding, with
| many studies even showing the opposite. Damning with faint
| praise.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I think what's clear is many people _feel_ much more
| productive coding with LLMs, but perceived and actual
| productivity don't necessarily correlate. I'm sure results
| vary quite a bit.
|
| My hunch is that long term value might be quite low: a few
| years into vibe coding huge projects, developers might hit a
| wall with a mountain of slop code they can no longer manage
| or understand. There was an article here recently titled
| "vibe code is legacy code" which made a similar argument.
| Again, results surely vary wildly
| mwkaufma wrote:
| It feels like it's creating economic activity in the tech
| sector the same way that walking down the street and
| smashing everyone's windshields would create economic
| activity for local auto shops.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| It depends on a lot of things.
|
| I know JavaScript on a pretty surface level, but I can use
| Claude to wire up react and tailwind, and then my experience
| with all the other programming I've done gives me enough
| intuition to clean it up. That helps me turn rough things
| into usable tools that can be reused or deployed in small
| scale.
|
| That's a productivity increase for sure.
|
| It has not helped me with the problems that I need to spend
| 2-5 days just thinking about and wrapping my head around
| solutions to. Even if it does come up with solutions that
| pass tests, they still need to be scrutinized and rewritten.
|
| But the small tasks it's good at add up to being worth the
| price tag for a subscription.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| Do you feel like you begin to _really_ understand React and
| Tailwind? Major tools that you seem to use now.
|
| Do you feel that you will become so well-versed in it that
| you will be able to debug weird edge cases in the future?
|
| Will you be able to reason about performance? Develop deep
| intuition why pattern X doesn't work for React but pattern
| Y does. etc?
|
| I personally learned for myself that this learning is not
| happening. My knowledge of tools that I used LLMs for
| stayed pretty superficial. I became dependent on the
| machine.
| adventured wrote:
| The average person has no idea what to use AI for to get
| substantial value out of what it can now do.
|
| It's the switch between: know which service to use, consider
| capabilities, try to get AI to do a thing, if you even have a
| thing that needs done that it can do; versus: AI just does a
| thing for you, requiring little to no thought. Very active vs
| very passive. Use will go up in direct relation to that
| changeover. The super users are already at peak, they're fully
| engaged. A software developer wants a very active relationship
| with their AI; Joe Average does not.
|
| The complexity has to vanish entirely. It's the difference
| between hiding the extraordinary engineering that is Google
| search behind a simple input box, and making users select a
| hundred settings before firing off a search. Imagine if the
| average search user needed to know something meaningful about the
| capabilities of Google search or search in general, before using
| it. Prime Google search (~1998-2016) obliterated the competition
| (including the portals) with that one simple search box, by
| shifting all the complexity to the back-end; they made it so
| simple the user really couldn't screw anything up. That's also
| why ChatGPT got so far so fast: input box, type something,
| complexity mostly hidden.
| ineedasername wrote:
| What is their definition of adoption? A company where every
| employee has some level of access to AI is the bare minimum of
| "full adoption" for a given company but a threadbare one.
|
| A company that has implemented most current AI technologies in
| their applicable areas in known-functionally capabilities? That
| is a vastly larger definition of Full Adoption.
|
| It's the different between access and full utilization. The gulf
| is massive. And I'm not aware of any major company, or really
| any, that have said, "yep, we're done, we're doing everything we
| think we can with AI and we're not going to try to improve upon
| it."
|
| Implementation of acquired capabilities, implementations... Very
| early days. And it appears this study's definition is more like
| user access, not completed implementations. Somewhat annoyingly,
| I receive 3 or 4 calls a day, sometimes on weekends, from
| contracting firms looking for leads, TPMs, ML/Data scientists
| with genai / workflow experience. 3 months ago, without having
| done anything to put my name out any more that however it had
| been found before that, I was only getting 1 ever day or two.
|
| I don't think this study is using a useful definition for what
| they intend to measure. It is certainly not capturing more than a
| fraction of activity.
| prmph wrote:
| Does it really matter? In this case, it is the perception that
| matters. If companies _feel_ that AI is not quite as helpful as
| they thought it might, even if they have not maxed out what
| they theoretically could do with it, then that is all that
| matter in trying to get sense of where this might go
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| What a shitty plot. Here are the sins I count:
|
| 1. No y axis label.
|
| 2. It supposedly plots a "rate", but the time interval is
| unspecified. Per second? Per month? Per year? Intuitively my best
| guess is that the rate is per-year. However that would imply the
| second plot believes we are very near to 100% adoption, which I
| think we know is false. So what is this? Some esoteric time
| interval like bi-yearly?
|
| 3. More likely, it is not a rate at all, but instead a plot of
| total adoption. In this case, the title is chosen _very_ poorly.
| The author of the plot probably doesn't know what they're looking
| at.
|
| 4. Without grid lines, it's very hard to read the data in the
| middle of the plot.
| kbelder wrote:
| There is no need for a 'rate' to be against a time interval.
| The conversion rate of an email is purchases / emails sent. The
| fatality rate of a disease is casualties / people infected. It
| really just means a ratio.
| mcswell wrote:
| Ok, but in this case, a ration between what and what?
| kbelder wrote:
| The number of businesses that adopted AI versus the number
| of businesses.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly
| decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it
| anymore for writing, I don't use it anymore for talking about
| philosophy, etc. And I use 0 agents. even though I am (was) the
| author of multiple MCP servers. It's just all too brittle and too
| annoying. I feel exhausted when talking to much to those
| "things".... I am also so bored of all those crap papers being
| published about LLM. Sometimes, there are some gems but its all
| so low-effort. LLM papers bore the hell out of me...
|
| Anyway, By cutting out AI for most of my stuff, I really improved
| my well-being. I found the joy back in manual programming,
| because I am one of the few soon that will actually understand
| stuff :-). I found the joy in writing with a fountain pen in a
| notebook and since then, I retain so much more information. Also
| a great opportunity for the future, when the majority will be
| dumbed down even more. And for philosophical interaction. I
| joined an online University and just read the actual books of the
| great thinkers and discuss them with people and knowledgable
| teachers.
|
| For what I use AI still is to correct my sentences (sometimes)
| :-).
|
| It's kinda the same than when I cut all(!) Social Media a while
| ago. It was such a great feeling to finally get rid ot all those
| mind-screwing algorithms.
|
| I don't blame anyone if they use AI. Do what you like.
| ciconia wrote:
| > I don't use it anymore for coding
|
| I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using
| coding agents, and why did you stop?
| estebarb wrote:
| I cannot talk for OP, but I have been researching ways to
| make ML models learn faster, which obviously is a path that
| will be full of funny failures. I'm not able to use ChatGPT
| or Gemini to edit my code, because they will just replace my
| formulas with SimCLR and call it done.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| That's it, these machines don't have an original thought in
| there. They have a lot of data so they seem like they know
| stuff, they clearly know stuff you don't.But go off the
| beaten path and they gently but annoyingly try to steer you
| back.
|
| And that's fine for some things. Horrible if you want to do
| non-conventional things.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| I started to code with them when Cursor came out. I've built
| multiple projects with Claude and thought that this is the
| freaking future. Until all joy disappeared and I began to
| hate the whole process. I felt like I didn't do anything
| meaningful anymore, just telling a stupid machine what I want
| and let it produce very ugly output. So a few months, I just
| stopped. I went back to VIM even....
|
| I am pretty idealistic coder, who always thought of it as an
| art in itself. And using LLMs robbed me of the artistic
| aspect of actually creating something. The process of
| creating is what I love and like and what gives me
| inspiration and energy to actually do it. When a machine robs
| me of that, why would I continue to do it? Money then being
| the only answer... A dreadful existence.
|
| I am not a Marxist, probably bceause I don't really
| understand him, but I think LLM is "detachment of work"
| applied to coders IMHO. Someone should really do a
| phenomenological study on the "Dasein" of a coder with LLM.
|
| Funnily, I don't see any difference in productivity at all. I
| have my own company and I still manage to get everything done
| on deadline.
| sumedh wrote:
| > let it produce very ugly output.
|
| Did you try changing your prompts?
| malkia wrote:
| I'll need to read more about this ("Dasein") as I was not
| aware of it. Yesterday our "adoptive" family had a very
| nice Thanksgiving, and we were considered youngesters
| (close to our 50s) among our hosts & guests and this came
| multiple times when we were discussing AI among many other
| things - "The joy of work", the "human touch", etc. I
| usually don't fall for these "nice feel" talks, but now
| that you mentioned this it hit me. What would I do if
| something like AI completely replace me (if ever).
|
| Thank you, and sorry my thoughts are all over...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore,
| and I'm guessing an SWEs who don't learn how to use it
| consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5
| or so years.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I'm sceptical
|
| The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things
| right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that's not
| very structured.
|
| I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to
| reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use
| the model again.
|
| I'm sure they'll continue to get better, but out of a job
| better in 5 years? I'm not betting on it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get
| your AI to document your code base and come with some sort
| of pipeline to have different AI check things.
|
| It's fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I'm wrong,
| but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don't start
| adopting at this point. It's a bad bet in my opinion, at
| least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren't going
| full in on it.
| risyachka wrote:
| There is nothing to learn, the entry barrier is zero. Any SWE
| can just start using it when they really need to.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Some of us will need time to learn to give less of a shit
| about quality.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Or you could learn how to do it the right way with
| quality intact. But it's definitely your choice.
| kibwen wrote:
| Back in the early 2000s the sentiment was that IDEs were a
| force multiplier that was too high to ignore, and that anyone
| not using something akin to Visual Studio or Eclipse would be
| out of a job in 5 or so years. Meanwhile, 20 years later, the
| best programmers you know are still using Vim and Emacs.
| alephnerd wrote:
| But the vast majority are still using an IDE - and I say
| this as someone who has adamantly used Vim with plugins for
| decades.
|
| Something similar will happen with agentic workflows -
| those who aren't already productive with the status quo
| will have to eventually adopt productivity enhancing
| tooling.
|
| That said, it isn't too surprising if the rate of AI
| adoption starts slowing down around now - agentic tooling
| has been around for a couple years now, so it makes sense
| that some amount of vendor/tool rationalization is kicking
| in.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| I think no one can predict what will happen. We need to
| wait until we can empirically observe who will be more
| productive on certain tasks.
|
| Thats why I started with AI coding. I wanted to hedge
| against the possibility that this takes off and I am
| useless. But it made me sad as hell and so I just said:
| Screw it. If this is the future, I will NOT participate.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That's fine, but you don't want to be blind sided by
| changes in the industry. If it's not for you, have a plan
| B career lined up so you can still put food on the table.
| Also, if you are good at old fashioned SE and AI, you'll
| be OK either way.
| evanelias wrote:
| It remains to be seen whether these tools are actually a
| net enhancement to productivity, especially accounting
| for longer-term / bigger-picture effects --
| maintainability, quality assurance, user support,
| liability concerns, etc.
|
| If they do indeed provide a boost, it is clearly not very
| massive so far. Otherwise we'd see a huge increase in the
| software output of the industry: big tech would be
| churning out new products at a record rate, tons of
| startups would be reaching maturity at an insane clip in
| every imaginable industry, new FOSS projects would be
| appearing faster than ever, ditto with forks of existing
| projects.
|
| Instead we're getting an overall erosion of software
| quality, and the vast majority of new startups appear to
| just be uninspired wrappers around LLMs.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I'm not necessarily talking about AI code agents or AI
| code review (workflows which I think are difficult for
| agentic workflows to really show a tangible PoV against
| humans, but I've seen some of my portfolio companies
| building promising capabilities that will come out of
| stealth soon), but various other enhancements such as
| better code and documentation search, documentation
| generation, automating low sev ticket triage, low sev
| customer support, etc.
|
| In those workflows and cases where margins and dollar
| value provided is low, I've seen significant uptake of AI
| tooling where possible.
|
| Even reaching this point was unimaginable 5 years ago,
| and is enough to show workflow and dollar value for
| teams.
|
| To use another analogy, using StackOverflow or Googling
| was viewed derisively by neckbeards who constantly
| spammed RTFD back in the day, but now no developer can
| succeed without being able to be a proficient searcher.
| And a major value that IDEs provided in comparison to
| traditional editors was that kind of recommendation
| capability along with code quality/linting tooling.
|
| Concentrating on abstract tasks where the ability to
| benchmark between human and artificial intelligence is
| difficult means concentrating on the trees while missing
| the forest.
|
| I don't foresee codegen tools replacing experienced
| developers but I do absolutely see them reducing _a lot_
| of ancillary work that is associated with the developer
| lifecycle.
| evanelias wrote:
| > I've seen significant uptake of AI tooling where
| possible.
|
| Uptake is orthogonal to productivity gain. Especially
| when LLM uptake is literally being forced upon employees
| in many companies.
|
| > I do absolutely see them reducing a lot of ancillary
| work that is associated with the developer lifecycle.
|
| That may be true! But my point is they also _create_ new
| overhead in the process, and the net outcome to _overall_
| productivity isn 't clear.
|
| Unpacking some of your examples a bit --
|
| Better code and documentation search: this is indeed
| beneficial to productivity, but how is it an agentic
| workflow that requires individual developers to adopt and
| become productive with, relative to the previous status
| quo?
|
| Documentation generation: between the awful writing style
| and the lack of trustworthiness, personally I think these
| easily _reduce_ overall productivity, when accounting for
| humans consuming the docs. Or in the case of AI consuming
| docs written by other AI, you end up with an ever-
| worsening cycle of slop.
|
| Automating low sev ticket triage: Potentially beneficial,
| but we're not talking about a revolutionary leap in
| overall team/org/company productivity here.
|
| Low sev customer support: Sounds like a good way to
| infuriate customers and harm the business.
| malkia wrote:
| It depends where you work. In gaming, the best programmers
| I know might not even touch the command-line / Linux, and
| their "life" depens on Visual Studio... Why? Because the
| eco-system around Visual Studio / Windows and how game
| console devkits work is pretty much tied - while
| Playstation is some kind of BSD, and maybe Nintendo - all
| their proper SDKs are just for Windows and tied around
| Visual Studio (there are some studios that are the
| exceptions, but rare).
|
| I'm sure other industries would have their similar
| examples. And then the best folks in my direct team
| (infra), much smaller - are the command-line,
| Linux/docker/etc. guys that use mostly VSCode.
| sanswork wrote:
| As someone that uses vim full time all that happened is
| people started porting all the best features of IDEs over
| to vim/emacs as plugins. So those people were right it's
| just the features flowed.
|
| Pretty sure you can count the number of professional
| programmers using vanilla vim/neovim on one hand.
| scuff3d wrote:
| They'll be more employable, not less. Since they're the only
| ones who will be able to fix the huge mess left behind by the
| people relying on them.
| fpauser wrote:
| Don't think so.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I _technically_ use it for programming, though really for two
| broad things:
|
| * Sorting. I have never been able to get my head around sorting
| arrays, especially in the Swift syntax. Generating them is
| awesome.
|
| * Extensions/Categories in Swift/Objective C. "Write me an
| extension to the String class that will accept an array of
| Int8s as an argument, and include safety checks." Beautiful.
|
| That said I don't know why you'd use it for anything more.
| Sometimes I'll have it generate like, the skeleton of something
| I'm working on, a view controller with X number of outlets of Y
| type, with so and so functions stubbed in, but even that's
| going down because as I build I realize my initial idea can be
| improved.
| malkia wrote:
| I've been using LLMs as calculators for words, like they can
| summarize, spot, correct, but often can be wrong about this -
| especially when I have to touch language I haven't used in a
| while (Python, Powershell, Rust as recent examples), or sub-
| system (SuperPrefetch on WIndows, Or why audio is dropping on
| coworker's machines when they run some of the tools, and like
| this... don't ask me why), and all kinds of obscure subjects
| (where I'm sure experts exists, but when you need them they
| are not easy (as in "nearby") to reach for, and even then
| might not help)
|
| But now my grain of salt has increased - it's still helpful,
| but much like a real calculator - there is limit (in
| precision), and what it can do.
|
| For one it still can't make good jokes :) (my litmus test)
| redwood wrote:
| I liken it to a drug that feels good over the near term but has
| longer term impacts.. sometimes you have to get things out of
| your system. It's fun while it lasts and then the novelty wears
| off. (And just as some people have the tolerance to do drugs
| for much longer periods of time than others, I think the same
| is the case for AI)
| smt88 wrote:
| No one uses agents. They're a myth that Marc Benioff willed
| into existence. No one who regularly uses LLMs would ever trust
| one to do unattended work.
| fpauser wrote:
| This is also my experience with (so called) AI. Coding with AI
| feels like working with a dumb colleague that constantly
| forgets. It feels so much better to manually write code.
| dinvlad wrote:
| This is the best take
| maxlamb wrote:
| Why would they not define what adoption rate mean? And why is
| "Ramp AI adoption rates" 3-4x just "AI adoption rates"?
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