Comment by maccard
2 days ago
What stage is it at then? Because every new model is met with people saying they haven’t opened an editor in a year, or how they’re 10x more productive. But I’m not seeing 10x more tickets closed, 10x more bugs fixed, or 10x more feature designs that we can smash through. I see verbosity and noise when used by the people who were behind, and I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
>I see the same level of quality and excellence from people who use it like it’s another tool in their toolbelt
It's certainly currently an edge if you know what to tell the mystery box of magic in precise terms.
I don't think this distinction is going to endure though - every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted. We started with it printing hello world, to autocomplete where you still needed to be able to know what the line should do, to autocompleting functions, to writing entire units, to working out architecture tradeoffs, to doing research planning architecture execution and testing all autonomously. That trajectory plus people retreating to nebulous "I'm adding taste" tells me this is going to sail straight past "tool in toolbelt" territory at Mach 10.
Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement (i.e. https://metr.org/ ).
I’ll agree it’s an edge. But edges aren’t worth the GDP of a middle sized European country.
> every level of "it can't do it" has fallen and generally faster & more decisively than predicted
I disagree. The agent + harness model was a huge leap and really moved the bar. The tools became genuinely useful for coding very quickly.
> Everyone has their own perspective but to me "show me the receipt" at a specific point in time is a completely wrong lens for a tech that shows clear signs of exponential improvement
At some point, the exponential improvements have to show results or it’s just a Ponzi scheme.
I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
That's why I'm saying this whole look at one point in time logic isn't useful here. Depending on where you set the cutoff you get diametrically opposed answers.
>Ponzi scheme
The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement. Tech genie is out of the bottle, people are intrigued and people with ability to tinker on this are spread globally. Even if the entirety of western tech & financial sphere disappeared tomorrow tech progress here would wobble and slow not stop.
Even the one global nexus where progress could have been killed globally - Taiwan - is looking like it'll de-risk shortly between CXMT and SMIC's rapid progress.
In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent) continues until proven otherwise. Stack enough improvements on top of each other and instead of a useful script you shall have your photoshop. Maybe...
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