Governments and tech moguls have bet hundreds of billions on artificial intelligence. If the technology does what it promises, we will have to radically rethink how the global economy functions.
Thats a pretty good attitude. I have unfortunately been forced to use as much as possible for work for over a year. On the one hand Claude opus 4.6 is really a massive improvement to what I was using at the beginning of last year, which is honestly a scary trajectory.
On the other, I still don’t have any trust at all for production code as I see far too many errors. I can pump out rapid prototypes way faster than before, (and I was always very very fast at that) but I learn less from them. I still feel like using the LLM is like stealing from the future. For the most part I need to do the actual work eventually, understanding the code takes as long as writing it, and fixing takes longer.
Where I find it really useful is exploratory. It errors a lot but has compressed essentially the whole of human writing, so I can ask about approaches to specific problems and find apis and techniques I wouldn’t necessarily have found before. It still hallucinates an api more than once a day for me, but as long as you check it that’s something.
I still don’t think the revolution is here. It only feels like it could be because it’s been subsidized to hell and back, and I am terrified of the human cost: insane data center use, the economic toll of bubble popping (which of course will be felt by the masses), all the layoffs, and what happens to humans when we offset thinking rather than just memory to computers. There’s gonna be a lot of pain in the coming years
Definitely one of the weaknesses is: what about maintenance? Ai has been poor at maintaining existing code, and we all know that maintenance is much more expensive than development. Will it be able to maintain its own code? What if there are no longer enough developers to do it manually? Where is our future then?
I’ve definitely been adding priority to refactoring. It was always a good idea for maintainability, for new developers to get up to speed and be able to contribute, but now we have the idiot developer that is LLMs. Perhaps more refactoring is meeting it halfway
Thats a pretty good attitude. I have unfortunately been forced to use as much as possible for work for over a year. On the one hand Claude opus 4.6 is really a massive improvement to what I was using at the beginning of last year, which is honestly a scary trajectory.
On the other, I still don’t have any trust at all for production code as I see far too many errors. I can pump out rapid prototypes way faster than before, (and I was always very very fast at that) but I learn less from them. I still feel like using the LLM is like stealing from the future. For the most part I need to do the actual work eventually, understanding the code takes as long as writing it, and fixing takes longer.
Where I find it really useful is exploratory. It errors a lot but has compressed essentially the whole of human writing, so I can ask about approaches to specific problems and find apis and techniques I wouldn’t necessarily have found before. It still hallucinates an api more than once a day for me, but as long as you check it that’s something.
I still don’t think the revolution is here. It only feels like it could be because it’s been subsidized to hell and back, and I am terrified of the human cost: insane data center use, the economic toll of bubble popping (which of course will be felt by the masses), all the layoffs, and what happens to humans when we offset thinking rather than just memory to computers. There’s gonna be a lot of pain in the coming years
Definitely one of the weaknesses is: what about maintenance? Ai has been poor at maintaining existing code, and we all know that maintenance is much more expensive than development. Will it be able to maintain its own code? What if there are no longer enough developers to do it manually? Where is our future then?
I’ve definitely been adding priority to refactoring. It was always a good idea for maintainability, for new developers to get up to speed and be able to contribute, but now we have the idiot developer that is LLMs. Perhaps more refactoring is meeting it halfway