Comment by eitland
1 day ago
If by hype you mean that there isn't extreme real world value right here and right now, then I very much disagree.
Closing in on 20 years since I left school and for me AI is absolutely useful, right here and right now. It is really a bicycle for the mind:
It allows me to get much faster to where I want. (And like bicycles you will get a few crashes early on and possibly later as well, depending on how fast you move and how careful you are.)
I might be in some sweet spot where I am both old enough to know what is going on without using an AI but also young enough to pick up the use of AI relatively effortlessly.
If however by hype you mean that people still have overhyped expactations about the near future, then yes, I agree more and more.
I feel AI can also do simple monotonous coding tasks, but I don't think programming is something it's currently very good at. Samples, yes, trivial programs, sure, but anything non-trivial and it's rarely useful.
Where it really shines today is getting humans up to speed with new technologies, things that are well understood in general but maybe not well understood by you.
Want to say build a window manager in X11, despite never having worked with X11 before? Sure, Claude will point you in the right direction and give you a simple template to work with in 30 seconds. Enormous time saver compared to figuring out how to do that from scratch.
Never touched node in your life but want to build a simple electron app? Sure, here's how you get started. Few hours and several follow up questions later, you're comfortable and productive in the environment.
Getting off the ground with new technologies is so much easier with AI it's kind of ridiculous. The revolutionary part of AI coding is how it makes it much easier to be a true generalist, capable of working in any environment with any technology, whatever is appropriate.