thanks for the article, it's a good one
I'd rather use it the other way, I'm the one in charge, and the AI reviews any logical flaw or things that I would have missed. I don't even have to think about context window since it'll only look at my new code logic.
So yeah, 3 years after the first ChatGPT and Copilot, I don't feel huge changes regarding "automated" AI programming, and I don't have any AI tool in my IDE, I pefer to have a chat using their website, to brainstorm, or occasionally find a solution to something I'm stuck on.
yes, just as was said each and every previous time OpenAI/anthropic shit out a new model
"now it doesn't suck!"
They know that its a significant, but not revolutionary improvement.
If you supervise and manage your agents closely on well scoped (small) tasks they are pretty handy.
If you need a prototype and don't care about code quality or maintenance, they are great.
Anyone claiming 2x, 5x, 10x etc is absolutely kidding themselves for any non-trivial software.
Impressively, it recognized the structure of the code and correctly identified it as a component of an audio codec library, and provided a reasonably complete description of many minute details specific to this codec and the work that the function was doing.
Rather less impressively, it decided to ignore my request and write a function that used C++ features throughout, such as type inference and lambdas, or should I say "lambdas" because it was actually just a function-defined-within-a-function that tried to access and mutate variables outside of its own function scope, like we were writing Javascript or something.
I can see why people would be wowed by this on its face. I wouldn't expect any average developer to have such a depth of knowledge and breadth of pattern-matching ability to be able to identify the specific task that this specific function in this specific audio codec was performing.
At the same time, this is clearly not a tool that's suitable for letting loose on a codebase without EXTREME supervision.
At the end of the day, I got the code working by editing it manually, but in an honest retrospective I would have to admit that the overall process actually didn't save me any time at all.
It’s amazing at reviewing code. It will identify what you fear, the horrors that lie within the codebase, and it’ll bring them out into the sunlight and give you a 7 step plan for fixing them. And the coding model is good, it can write a function. But it can’t follow a plan worth shit. And if I have to be extremely detailed at the function by function level, then I should be in the editor coding. Claude code is an amazing niche tool for code reviews and dialogue and debugging and coping with new technologies and tools, but it is not a productivity enhancement for daily coding.
This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow.
> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today
Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.
For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.
datadrivenangel•1h ago