Comment by tovej
4 days ago
I have yet to meet anyone except managers be excited about LLM's or generative AI.
And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.
4 days ago
I have yet to meet anyone except managers be excited about LLM's or generative AI.
And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.
You don' have to look past this very forum, most people here seem to be very positive about gen AI, when it comes to software development specifically.
Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
I assume those people are managers, have a vested interest in AI, or have only just started programming.
How would you find out if you were wrong?
You're presented with hundreds of people that prove you wrong, and your response is "no, I assume I'm right"?
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I don't know what is your bubble, but I'm a regular programmer and I'm absolutely excited even if a little uncomfortable. I know a lot of people who are the same.
Interesting, every developer I've spoken to is extremely skeptical and has not found any actual productivity boosts.
Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.
I am using AI a lot to do tasks that just would not get done because they would take too long. Also, getting it to iterate on a React web application meant I can think about what I want it to do rather than worry about all the typing I would have to do. Especially powerful when moving things around, hand-written code has a "mental load" to move that telling an AI to do it does not. Obviously not everything is 100% but this is the most productive I have felt for a very long time. And I've been in the game for 25 years.
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I mean there are two different things. One is whether there are actual productivity boosts right now. And the second is the excitement about the technology.
I am definitely more productive. A lot of this productivity is wasted on stuff I probably shouldn't be writing anyways. But since using coding agent, I'm both more productive at my day job and I'm building so many small hobby projects that I would have never found time for otherwise.
But the main topic of discussion in this thread is the excitement about technology. And I have a bit mixed feelings, because on one hand side I feel like a turkey being excited for the Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I think the programming future is bright. there will be so much more software build and for a lot of that you will still need programmers.
My excitement comes from the fact that I can do so much more things that I wouldn't even think about being able to do a few months ago.
Just as an example, in last month I have used the agents to add features to the applications I'm using daily. Text editor, podcast application, Android keyboard. The agents were capable to fork, build, and implement a feature I asked for in a project where I have no idea about the technology. Iif I were hired to do those features, I would be happy if I implemented them after two weeks on the job. With an agent, I get tailor made features in half of a morning. Spending less than ten minutes prompting.
I am building educational games for my kids. They learn a new topic at school? Let me quickly vibe the game to make learning it fun. A project that wouldn't be worth my weekend, but is worth 15 minutes. https://kuboble.com/math/games/snake/index.html?mode=multipl...
So I'm excited because I think coding agents will be for coding what pencil and paper were for writing.
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