[thefaux]

This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more problems than it is solving and that the friction of manual coding may ultimately prove to be a great virtue.

[Difwif]

This statement feels like a farmer making a case for using their hands to tend the land instead of a tractor because it produces too many crops. Modern farming requires you to have an ecosystem of supporting tools to handle the scale and you need to learn new skills like being a diesel mechanic.

How we work changes and the extra complexity buys us productivity. The vast majority of software will be AI generated, tools will exist to continuously test/refine it, and hand written code will be for artists, hobbyists, and an ever shrinking set of hard problems where a human still wins.

[Kbelicius]

> This statement feels like a farmer making a case for using their hands to tend the land instead of a tractor because it produces too many crops. Modern farming requires you to have an ecosystem of supporting tools to handle the scale and you need to learn new skills like being a diesel mechanic.

This to me looks like an analogy that would support what GP is saying. With modern farming practices you get problems like increased topsoil loss and decreased nutritional value of produce. It also leads to a loss of knowledge for those that practice those techniques of least resistance in short term.

This is not me saying big farming bad or something like that, just that your analogy, to me, seems perfectly in sync with what the GP is saying.

[Talanes]

And those trade-offs can only pay off if the extra food produced can be utilized. If the farm is producing more food than can be preserved and/or distributed, then the surplus is deadweight.

[hluska]

I’ll be honest with you pal - this statement sounds like you’ve bought the hype. The truth is likely between the poles - at least that’s where it’s been for the last 35 years that I’ve been obsessed with this field.

[paulcole]

They may be early but they’re not wrong.

[taco_emoji]

self-driving cars are only 5 years away, just like 10 years ago

[pixl97]

"Airplanes are only 5 years away, just like 10 years ago" --Some guy in 1891.

Never use your phrase to say something is impossible. I mean there are driverless Waymo's on the street in my area so your statement is already partially incorrect.

[taco_emoji]

"Flying cars are only 5 years away, just like 10 years ago" --Some guy in 1985

[taco_emoji]

absolutely no one said that in 1891

[HumblyTossed]

Nobody is saying it isn't possible. Just saying nobody wants to pay as much money as it's going to take to get there. At some point investors will say, meh, good 'nuff.

[lazide]

That could be said about hover cars too.

[HumblyTossed]

The Moller car is just weeks away, haven't you heard?

[HumblyTossed]

I feel like we are at the crescendo point with "AI". Happens with every tech pushed here. 3DTV? You have those people who will shout you down and say every movie from now on will be 3D. Oh yeah? Hmmm... Or the people who see Apple's goggles and yell that everyone will be wearing them and that's just going to be the new norm now. Oh yeah? Hmmm...

Truth is, for "AI" to get markedly better than it is now (0) will take vastly more money than anyone is willing to put into it.

(0) Markedly, meaning it will truly take over the majority of dev (and other "thought worker") roles.

[teeray]

This is a false equivalence. If the farmer had some processing step which had to be done by hand, having mountains of unprocessed crops instead of a small pile doesn’t improve their throughput.

[mcpar-land]

This is the classic mistake all AI hypemen make by assuming code is an asset, like crops. Code is a liability and you must produce as little of it as possible to solve your problem.

[vidarh]

As an "AI hypeman" I 100% agree that code is a liability, which is exactly why I relish being able to increasingly treat code as disposable or even unnecessary for projects that'd before require a multiple developers a huge amount of time to produce a mountain of code.

[vidarh]

I measure what I do by output.

Just about a week ago I launched a 100% AI generated project that shortcircuits a bunch of manual tasks. What before took 3+ weeks of manual work to produce, now takes us 1-2 days to verify instead. It generates revenue. It solved the problem of taking a workflow that was barely profitable and cutting costs by more than 90%. Half the remaining time is ongoing process optimization - we hope to fully automate away the reaming 1-2 days.

This was a problem that wasn't even tractable without AI, and there's no "explosion of AI generated code".

I fully agree that some places will drown in a deluge of AI generated code of poor quality, but that is an operator fault. In fact, one of my current clients retained me specifically to clean up after someone who dove head first into "AI first" without an understanding of proper guardrails.

[bendmorris]

>This was a problem that wasn't even tractable without AI, and there's no "explosion of AI generated code".

People often say this when giving examples, but what specifically made the problem intractable?

Sometimes before beginning work on a problem, I dramatically overestimate how hard it will be (or underestimate how capable I am of solving it.)