Comment by cube2222
6 days ago
Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from?
You set up a strawman (AI only companies, agents doing everything on their own) which is irrelevant to the point the article is making. One excerpt:
> Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.
I think this article is very on point, I relate with basically every paragraph. It's not a panacea, it's not a 10x improvement by any means, but it's a very meaningful improvement to both productivity (less than 2x I'd say, which would already be a ton) and fun for me. As I've mentioned in the past here
> I feel like there’s also a meaningful split of software engineers into those who primarily enjoy the process of crafting code itself, and those that primarily enjoy building stuff, treating the code more as a means to an end (even if they enjoy the process of writing code!). The former will likely not have fun with AI, and will likely be increasingly less happy with how all of this evolves over time. The latter I expect are and will mostly be elated.
which is a point the article makes too (tables), in a slightly different way.
Also, to be clear, I agree that 90% of the marketing around AI is overblown BS. But that's again beside the point, and the article is making no outlandish claims of that kind.
Overall, I hope this article (as intended) will make more people lose their dismissiveness and wake up their curiosity, as I expect the future of those is akin to that of people today saying they're "not really good at computers". It's a paradigm-shift, and it takes getting used to and productive in, as some imo smart people are mentioning even in this thread[0].
> Maybe they're just busy shipping code instead of proving stuff to you, which they stand nothing to gain from?
Well, in this case they’re busy writing articles trying to convince us, instead of proving stuff to us.
Point taken. I’d still argue though that writing an article like this is at least an order of magnitude easier than proving a, say, 30% productivity boost to outside observers.