Comment by aenis
8 days ago
There is a large gap between people who have been using AI for coding for the hundreds or thousands of hours, vs. those who do not. People like Ed Zitron, who never managed or participated in dev projects scream from the rooftops that AI coding is only relevant for small hobby projects. Meanwhile, in my own backyard, we are happily shipping production stuff for a few months now, and newly launched IT projects get launched with substantially smaller teams. And anyone who ever had to work with mediocre developers will take Fable any day of the week.
You've never actually read anything Ed Zitron wrote, have you?
No, and I generally agree with most of his thesis - but the stuff he says about AI coding is the weakest part of his spiel.
He heavily leans on developers for his points on coding, and then spices it up.
> For example, major media outlets will gladly write that “AI can build software,” but said sentence suggests that you can just type “build me Slack 2” into Claude and have it fart out a fully-functional, production-ready piece of software, rather than a quasi-functional mound of code-slop that can do enough to trick a business idiot or lazy journalist, but little else.
Here is the latest point he made on development and that seems accurate to me? If a non-technical person hands AI an under-specified prompt you get quasi-functional slop.
Can you link the piece where he says it's only relevant for small hobby projects?
I'm not a huge fan of his or anything but your comment is just.. pulling stuff completely out of no-where.
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I'm sorry, but this is borderline silly. Fable has been out for less than a week and you're already making grand pronouncements about its superiority? How much first-hand evidence could you possibly have for that claim?
Replace Fable with Opus 4.8, 4.7, or 4.6 - and it is still true
If he is already enjoying what he claims with pre-Fable models, then it stands to reason Fable is already above that baseline, and therefore your nitpick is silly.
That both fair and also charitable to the commenter. It's not a given that Fable is "above that baseline," all we can go by is anecdotes and Anthropic's marketing materials. Both tend to be puffed up. And if they're speaking generally about LLM-assisted coding, they could have chosen to say it that way.
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Fable caught us in the middle of a crisis where we had to replace a supplier with a quickly-put-together home made solution. We have been working with it non stop since it launched. And thanks to a lot of baseline experience with previous models, our small band of relatively old hands decided we are badly in love with it.
Now, remind yourself when was the last time you had to work with a developer who went to CS because it pays well, and has zero enthusiasm for what they are building, and are just phoning it in, with minimum effort and low skills. AI models are coming for those people first. And those people are in the fricking millions. Strip IT teams to people with passion either for product or for tech, give them such tools, and watch. Compare this with a normal IT shop with a bunch of great people, a metric ton of average people, a few toxic imbecilles, and the necessary HR/management bureaucracy to keep that bunch on a leash.
that's what I'm seeing it across other teams as well: backlogs size barely smaller and even defects rising. the low performers have only gotten lazier.
the difference now is that people are starting to openly question the extreme productivity gaps and their usual excuses aren't working anymore.
AI doesn't need to replace everyone. just dropping the bottom 1 or 2 people per team would already be catastrophic for the field
I'm happy for you; clearly you've had a good experience.
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