Is AI a Bubble? I Didn't Think So Until I Heard of SDD
30 comments
·October 23, 2025SubiculumCode
Look, maybe AI for professional programming is overhyped, but for the huge number of professionals who need to program as a part of their job, but programming is decidedly NOT their job, but who do not have programmers available to them, LLM's are.monunmental. For these people, these LLMs are huge productivity enhancers. We shouldn't be measuring productivity gain by professional programmers, but by the larger population of professionals who are required to wear many different hats.
atomicnumber3
The thing is, the main reason the hype for software engineers is because they're the main cost of extremely lucrative SAAS companies. If you could do software without the engineers, that's basically just a VC's wet dream of extremely low cost of revenue. On top of very low marginal costs, typically 0 delivery costs (compared to shipping), often unencumbered by things like tariffs.
So like, 2-10xing the productivity of someone who gets paid <<< a software engineer? And who is more 1:1 with the profit from each widget? They don't care that much.
But juicing an already extremely juicy fruit? Now that's worth 70x ARR.
unsnap_biceps
What's the end game? Why pay that SAAS paycheck if the AI can do it directly for the clients?
bee_rider
Maybe they think the LLMs will never be able to do sales or… I don’t know… make vision boards (or whatever it is CEOs do).
techblueberry
It can’t.
Terr_
> For these people, these LLMs are huge productivity enhancers.
Yes, it allows them to solve their desperate need to combine spreadsheets, creating one big merged spreadsheet with pockets of corrupted data and fake last-names. It either lies undiscovered until clients complain, or I notice and have to redo the work for them properly, without an LLM. :p
techblueberry
lol and Chamath is over here saying vibe coding is overhyped:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoCodeSaaS/comments/1mvb3tm/chamath...
Professional coders are the only ones who can get anything real out of llms(well, maybe a 19% decrease in productivity but it’s not fake.
Do you have a source on that “impact is monumental for non developers”? Because most of what I’ve been reading is that group is mostly vaporware.
SubiculumCode
There is a big gulf between the know-nothing vibe-coding and a professional programmer using a LLM, with lots and lots of people somewhere in the middle, who can code, but is slow at it because they are always learning on the fly, coding just a few hours a week, targeted at small goals, like data wrangling in a pipeline, small applications to replace clunky and error prone Excel books. No, I don't have a study to back it up, just my own experiences in how much I have done this last year. Maybe it doesn't apply to corps with a lot of top down beuraceacy, but in small to medium-sized enterprises, I am convinced it is an engine of agile innovation
rvasa
Revenue does exist .. showing demand/value. Also, valuation multiple of 25-70x ARR is in that "captn .. the engine is gonna blow up anything sir". Also, given their current design surface, rapid changes to the "core intelligence layer/substrate" & good usage workflow patterns that are still being discovered ... we are probably creating tech debt faster than value. Specs are great .. but we also discover the [stable/actual/valid] spec as we build (and often at the end of the build).
nojs
The “X% AI coded” metric needs to die. It is completely meaningless.
The nature of development work is changing. A project can be 100% written by AI but guided so closely by humans that the process wasn’t much faster. Alternatively, AI can make a project faster by helping with architecture and other things beyond writing code.
When people quote “70% AI coded”, it implies that 100% is some mythical goal that means AI is writing all code unsupervised. But most production AI code at the moment is still developed in lockstep with humans.
pols45
Everyone knows this including the Companies that say these things and their customers.
They leverage/exploit the fact that it takes time to Verify anything. [Hype-verification gap]
Their theory goes if you use that time delay to beat the drum louder than the next guy you have a shot at attracting more customers, investors, employee, govt support than if you dont. Those who don't do it appear less Ambitious or Capable. Exploit and amplify that also.
Chimps have 3 inch brains. And this is all easier to do than solving quantum field equations. So they do it happily, cluelessly, patting each other on the head about how fascinating they are.
As soon as one chimp troupe (corp) does it well, everyone else does the same, and that's when the entire system experiences a phase transition.
It's no more about what individual chimps or companies say or think, a super structure has emerged, which traps everyone Inside the super structure, into patterns they can't escape.
Stories emerge about what the super structure is then doing. Outsider and Insider stories start diverging. And we get a bifurcation point a moment in chaos theory where one neat line splits into 2, 4, 1000, until you can’t tell what’s signal and what’s noise[1] It’s all feedback where every claim feeds on every other claim, a forest of branches growing out of thin air and verification moves too slowly to prune it.
So what's the message to the kids watching it all and getting absorbed by it? Recognize when you have jumped into the chaos stream between bifurcation and verification. When everything starts to sound urgent, revolutionary, world-changing but no one can show you how or why youre standing dead center in chaos. Stories multiply faster than facts can catch up, where everyone’s pretending to see patterns that arent there yet. The louder it gets, the less meaning there is.That’s your cue to walk sideways. Dont let it drain your attention, time and energy. There are better things to do in life. [1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Lo...
cwmoore
SDD: “Specification Driven Development”
bitbasher
Mm, actually, it's Stochasticly Driven Development.
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Terr_
> McKinsey stated AI could “automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today” across all occupations, not specifically software development.
I would wager a large portion of that would be both generating and then triaging a certain level of institutional "bullshit communications".
For example, the employee must give daily status updates, and they have a three-item list for the day. They use an LLM to pad out their three-item bullet list into prose that sounds smart and active and impressive.
Then their manager says "TLDR" and uses an LLM to "summarize" it back into almost the original three-item bullet list. Each employee believes they've "saved time" using the tool, but it's a kind of broken-window fallacy [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
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taude
I'm telling people that if AI can make the process easy or go away, maybe it's time to rethink we need the process.
csomar
LLM biggest productivity boost might uncovering that most of the work we do is B.S. anyway and mostly made up of pushing papers around.
UtopiaPunk
Haha, in my workplace, I feel it's making me come up with BS. I do use it occasionally in my job, and it can be helpful. But there's a very strong push from my C-suite to make everyone in the company use more AI. Doesn't really matter how, we're just supposed to be rubbing AI on stuff. So a few times a day I boop our AI tools and find excuses to mention to my boss that I did an AI thing.
_wire_
Without a definition of thought as work, the entire argument of AI productivity is noise. The value of AI to work is utterly unquantifiable.
But command of human attention is another matter: it can be quantified and it is command of attention that defines the value of FAANG+
The AI boosters hype it in such terms, both intra-model and extra-model: we track the attention and sell seats in the musical chairs of "investment", leaving it to users to explain the productivity gains to themselves.
It's a circus.
BlackjackCF
I always find the X% of developers use AI tools for their work suspect because I know many people who are being pressured by their company to adopt AI tools for their day to day workflows.
o11c
Yeah that's an outright fraudulent claim.
But most fraud is legal, and most illegal fraud never sees legal action taken against it.
Our_Benefactors
As they should be. It’s a necessary tool to learn. If your entire dev team circa 2010 was writing code in notepad++ and sharing code versions in a zip file, you would push them to use an IDE and source control. It’s the same concept.
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username223
It's a wall of text sprinkled with Halloween-colored AI slop images (look for the text artifacts). Which parts, if any, were produced by a human?
CamperBob2
In this week's episode: AI-written article containing AI-generated artwork argues that AI is a bubble
bitbasher
yawn
Specification driven design has been around for a long time. Lets see if AI can make it come true. Dr. David Parnas wrore about Parnas Tables https://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/cisc323/2006w/slides/Bil... ; and then there was Eiffel with Design-By-Contract; and the Type System in F-Sharp seems like magic.