Comment by danShumway

So as an example of what this could look like that would be convincing to me. I started out pretty firmly believing that Rust was a fad.

Then Mozilla and Google did things with it that I did not think were possible for them to do. Not "they wrote a bunch of code with it", stuff like "they eliminated an entire class of bugs from a section of their codebase."

Then I watched a bunch of essentially hobby developers write kernel drivers for brand new architecture, and watched them turn brand new Macbooks into one of the best-in-class ways to run Linux. I do not believe they could have done that with their resources at that speed, using C or C++.

And at that point, you kind of begrudgingly say, "okay, I don't know if I like this, but fine, heck you, whatever. I guess it might genuinely redefine some parts of software development, you win."

So this is not impossible. You can convince devs like me that your tools are real and they work.

And frankly, there are a billion problems in modern computing that are high impact - stuff like Gnome accessibility, competitive browser engines, FOSS UX, collaboration tools. Entire demographics who have serious problems that could be solved by software if there was enough expertise and time and there were resources to solve them. Often, the issue at play is that there is no intersection between people who are very well acquainted with those communities and understand their needs, and people who have experience writing software.

In theory, LLMs help solve this. In theory. If you're a good programmer, and suddenly you have a tool that makes you 4x as productive as a developer: you could have a very serious impact on a lot of communities right now. I have not seen it happen. Not in the enterprise world, but also not in the FOSS world, not in communities with lower technical resources, not in the public sector. And again, I can be convinced by this, I have dismissed tools that I later switched opinions on because I saw the impact and I couldn't ignore the impact: Rust, NodeJS, Flatpak, etc, etc.

The problem is people have been telling me that Coding Assistants (and now Coding Agents) are one of those tools for multiple years now, and I'm still waiting to see the impact. I'm not waiting to see how many companies pick them up, I'm not waiting to see the job market. I'm waiting to see if this means that real stuff starts getting written at a higher quality significantly faster, and I don't see it.

I see a lot of individual devs showing me hobby projects, and a lot of AI startups, and... frankly, not much else.