zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful.

So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress.

The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.

>>grey-a+ba
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].

[0]: >>44164039