Like I see people say this, and yet the teams that are AI maxing produce worse code than ever. Software has rapidly gotten more unstable and unsustainable over the past three or so years than I've experienced in the past 20.

It’s even more powerful with large data and knowledge sources connected.

Takes a lot of work to set up effectively, but when connected to Slack _properly_ (not their MCP; but API which is more powerful), a database of your repo’s PRs/comments, data warehouses including analytics/telemetry and logs; and in a strong harness (including using multiple models simultaneously; like the OMP advisor pattern), what AI can achieve combined your domain expertise and human intelligence is just mind bogglingly crazy.

The larger your codebase / product / volume is; the more powerful it gets. AI has found many needles in haystacks that’s just impossible for a single person or team in large companies; because nobody has all the context.

I’ve embraced it too now. Initially I felt a bit disempowered and just somewhat uncomfortable.

Over time, I realised that I’m still doing serious and interesting engineering: just at a higher level of abstraction.

And for the craft and passion of software engineering, I have a couple of pet projects where I use ‘limited AI’. Good to still keep your wits sharp.

I really can’t imagine what would happen if I didn’t manually intervene sometimes and just kept prompting it for the new behavior I wanted.

On one hand I think, I want to be proud of it, I want to be able to explain it, if it breaks I want to be able to figure out why.

On the other hand, AI can do all of that with badly written code, so who cares.

Edit: however, it still feels like an amazing power tool, but it has taken me months to figure out how to use it.

I have the opposite experience of everyone else I follow online, I find it terrible at green field and great at brownfield. Green field it makes horrible choices as it has nothing to follow.

I'm in no way a very good programmer, or very smart, but the code I saw most of my co-workers writing was about the same quality as AI, not very good.

Let's assume for a moment that you're correct. That AI is already better than most developers, for whatever definition of "better" you like, and they will very soon be better than any person. (I think this is a total fantasy and you've failed to recognise the limitations as the article points out, but I digress.)

In that case the end goal of these companies is to replace all software engineers. Do you not see that? They've not been hiding this fact. It's a good thing for you and I that these models don't work, because if they did the "golden age" is not coming for us, it's coming for people who own compute capacity and the rest of us will become labourers.

From where I snipe, I see a big divide between those...

1) that try to surrender to AI, aiming to fully replace value-added intellectual effort and often also to augment enterprise value-mask slop busywork...

...they fail, and succeed, and the collective suffers.

2) those that ride AI to get more challenged, more feedback if any kind, to tread further but with attention to the right details

...they succeed

And even if the AI is better than most humans, the speed means that you get more defects and issues! If a human developer has a change failure rate of say 10%, (1 in 10 changes causes a defect or issue), and AI is twice as good and only introduces bugs 5% of the time, but submits 10x as many changes, then you go from 1 bug per unit of time to 5 bugs per unit of time, so your velocity is up 10x but your defect rate is up 5x...

It's widely reported on and discussed. You'll find plenty of people saying it isn't one, but I'm sure you can find an economist willing to take any position you like if you look hard enough. Not to mention everyone who's financially incentivised to continue to claim that there isn't a bubble.

> Even the most skeptical investors to bubbles like Buffet and Burry, have large stakes in Google and Microsoft, front line bets on AI.

Burry has been warning about an AI bubble for years.

> There is essentially nothing magical about being human. Our primitive brains were trained on logic, reasoning and processes. An LLM is simply this on less efficient hardware, but, improving at a speed faster than human evolution.

There is no basis for this claim. There is no evidence that human brains and the process of evolution that led to modern humans is at all similar to how LLMs function. If you're going to evaluate an LLM then evaluate an LLM, you can't say "Humans can do X, LLMs are like humans, therefore LLMs can/will do X" because there is no evidence to connect them.