[geysersam]

I'll take a stab at changing your mind.

AIs are not able to write Redis. That's not their job. AIs should not write complex high performance code that millions of users rely on. If the code does something valuable for a large number of people you can afford humans to write it.

AIs should write low value code that just repeats what's been done before but with some variations. Generic parts of CRUD apps, some fraction of typical frontends, common CI setups. That's what they're good at because they've seen it a million times already. That category constitutes most code written.

This relieves human developers of ballpark 20% of their workload and that's already worth a lot of money.

[photonthug]

> I'll take a stab at changing your mind.

Not the parent but this doesn’t seem mind changing, because what you describe is the normal/boring route to slightly better productivity using new tools without the breathless hype. And the 20% increase you mention of course depends a lot on what you’re doing, so for many types of work you’d be much closer to zero.

I’m curious about the claims of “power users” that are talking very excitedly about a brave new world. Are they fooling themselves, or trying to fool others, or working at jobs where 90% of their work is boilerplate drudgery, or what exactly? Inevitably it’s all of the above.. and some small percentage of real power users that could probably teach the rest of us cool stuff about their unique workflows. Not sure how to find the signal in all the noise though.

So personally, if I were to write “change my mind”, what I’d really mean is something like “convince me there are real power users already out there in the wild, using tools that are open to the public today”.

GP mentioned machine assisted translation of a huge code base being almost completely hands-off. If that were true and as easy as advertised then one might expect, for example, that it were trivial to just rewrite media wiki or Wordpress in rails or Django with a few people in a week. This is on the easier side of what I’d confidently label as a game-changingly huge productivity boost btw, and is a soft problem chosen because of the availability of existing code examples, mere translation over original work, etc. Not sure we’re there yet.

[lucianbr]

> Are they fooling themselves, or trying to fool others, or working at jobs where 90% of their work is boilerplate drudgery, or what exactly?

I wonder about this also. Maybe it's just some of each? Clearly some people fool themselves, the AI companies are doing marketing, some people do have boring jobs...

[skywhopper]

I have to disagree. If there’s that much boilerplate floating around then the tooling should be improved. Pasting over inefficiency with sloppier inefficiency is just a pure waste.

[geysersam]

It's not boilerplate, it's just uncomplicated but necessary specifications.

AI is the improved tooling.

[takeda]

So maybe that's the issue I'm having.

I spent may entire career trying to eliminate such code as much as I can, so then having copilot write code that I have to fix on almost every step. I frequently have to look for subtle issues and few times they sneaked through, when it produces correct code it frequently is often more verbose than my code.

[hitradostava]

In a couple of years time I don't see why AI based tooling couldn't write Redis? Would you get a complete Redis produced with a single prompt? Of course not. but if extreme speed is what you want to optimize for, then the tooling needs to be given the right feedback loop to optimize for that.

I think the question to ask is what do I do as a software engineer that couldn't be done by an AI based tool in a few years time? The answer is scary, but exciting.

[0xFACEFEED]

I can definitely see the value in letting AI generate low stakes code. I'm a daily CoPilot user and, while I don't let it generate implementations, the suggestions it gives for boilerplate-y things is top notch. Love it as a tool.

My major issue with your position is that, at least in my experience, good software is the sum of even the seemingly low risk parts. When I think of real world software that people rely on (the only type I care about in this context) then it's hard to point a finger at some part of it and go "eh, this part doesn't matter". It all matters.

The alternative, I fear, is 90% of the software we use exhibiting subtle goofy behavior and just being overall unpleasant to use.

I guess an analogy for my concern is what it would look like if 60% of every film was AI generated using the models we have today. Some might argue that 60% of all films are low stakes scenes with simple exposition or whatever. And then remaining 40% are the climax or other important moments. But many people believe that 100% of the film matters - even the opening credits.

And even if none of that were an issue: in my experience it's very difficult to assess what part of an application will/won't be low/high stakes. Imagine being a tech startup that needs to pivot your focus toward the low stakes part of the application that the LLM wrote.

[Aeolun]

I think your concept of ‘what the AI wrote’ is too large. There is zero chance my one line copilot or three line cursor tab completions are going to have an effect on the overall quality of my codebase.

What it is useful for is doing exactly the things I already know need to happen, but don’t want to spend the effort to write out (at least, not having to do it is great).

Since my brain and focus aren’t killed by writing crud, I get to spend that on more useful stuff. If it doesn’t make me more effective, at least it makes my job more enjoyable.

[0xFACEFEED]

I'm with you. I use Copilot every day in the way you're describing and I love it. The person I was responding to is claiming to code "hands off" and let the AI write the majority of the software.

[SoftTalker]

> The alternative, I fear, is 90% of the software we use exhibiting subtle goofy behavior and just being overall unpleasant to use.

This sounds like most software honestly.

[0xFACEFEED]

And that's what LLMs are trained on.

Hahaha