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> Not one killer app has emerged. I'll say that I pretty firmly disagree with this. I've been using Github Copilot for about six months for my own work and it has fundamentally changed how I write code. Ignoring the ethics of Copilot, if I just need to read a file with some data, parse it, and render that data on screen, Copilot just _does_ most of that for me. I write a chunky comment explaining what I want, it writes a blob of code that I tab through, and I'm left with a nicely-documented, functioning piece of software. A one-off script that took me 30 minutes to write previously now takes me maybe a minute on a bad day. For ages we've had Text Expander and key mappings and shortcuts and macros that render templates of pre-built code. Now I can just say what I'm trying to do, the language model considers the other code on the page, and it gets done. If this isn't a "killer app" then I'm not sure what is. In my entire career I can think of maybe two things that I've come upon that have affected my workflow this much: source control and continuous integration. Which, frankly, is wild. Separately, I use LLMs to generate marketing copy for my side hustle. I suck at marketing, but I can tell the damn thing what I want to market and it gives me a list of tweets back that sound like the extroverted CMO that I don't have. I can outsource creative tasks like brainstorming lists of names for products, or coming up with text categories for user feedback from a spreadsheet. I don't know if I'd call either of those things "killer apps" but I have a tool which can do thinking for me at a nominal cost, quickly, and with a high-enough quality bar that it's usually not a waste of my time. |
We don't think of rails as the second coming though.
same with code editors. of course a rails for all of code is cool. but iono, it's a code editor. i still use sublime.