Maybe. I'm actually a big fan of Claude/Codex and use them extensively. The author of the article says the same.
> To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless.
It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless."
My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.
Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand.
Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story.
The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three.
The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
Rather than making a good product that’s useful to the world, the goal of current startups seems to be milking VCs who are desperately searching for the new version of the mobile phone revolution that will make this all ok… so it seems like they’re accomplishing their goal?
I reckon the reason the VC rhetoric has reached running-hair-dye-Giuliani-speech level absurdity isn’t because they’re trying to convince other people— it’s because they’re trying to convince themselves. I’d think it was funny as hell if my IRA wasn’t on the line.
It's worse than a meme economy, it's a gambling economy. The entire VC business model is gambling (fund 10 hope 1 pays for the losers). Crypto is all gambling. The stock market is gambling. TV ads are all gambling ads. Even dating is gambling.
Its always been like this but for awhile you had people like Steve Jobs to hold people like Bill Gates accountable. He long referred to MSFT as being mcdonalds in relation to the stuff they produced - very pedestrian.
Yep, all that accountability gates has faced in his life.
Is he facing charges yet for sneaking drugs into his wife's food, or did he only ever discuss that with his buddy Jeff E and never actually follow through with it
AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes.
I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly.
As soon as you let it do more though, it will invariably tie itself into a knot - all the while confidently ascertaining that it knows what it’s doing.
On localised context stuff, yeah no. I spent a couple of hours rewriting something Claude did terribly a couple of weeks back. Sure it solved the problem, a relatively simple regression analysis, but it was so slow that it crapped out under load. Cue emergency rewrite by hand. 20s latency down to 18ms. Yeah it was that bad.
For me it's just wildly unpredictable. Sometimes it gets a small task perfectly right in one shot, sometimes it invents an absurd new way to be completely wrong.
Anyone trusting it to just "do its own thing" is out if their mind
For me I would ask it to do a simple thing and it would give me the tutorial code you could find anywhere on the Internet. Then you ask it to modify it in a way that you can't find in any example online, it will tell you it's fixed everything, but actually nothing has changed at all or it's completely broken.
I think if someone's goal was just the tutorial code, it would have been very impressive to them the AI can summon it.
I found that unpredictability to be interesting. I'm doing super simple projects with these models and a year, or even six months ago, it would give me a block of code and as soon as you ran it, it would fail. And you'd have to paste the error in and keep going until it was smoothed out.
The other day though I asked for something simple and it one-shotted the problem. To me, that's new.
I know this success was a statistical outlier, however. I grok how to use it and to not trust it. I'm just shocked so many people smart people fail to understand it.
This is a straw man. I don't know anybody who sincerely claims this, even online. However if you dare question people claiming to be solving impossible problems with 15 AI agents (they just can't show you what they're building quite yet, but soon, soon you'll see!), then you will be treated as if you said this.
AI is a superior solution to the problem Stack Overflow attempted to solve, and really great at quickly building bespoke, but fragile, tools for some niche problem you solve. However I have yet to see a single instance of it being used to sustainably maintain a production code base in any truly automated fashion. I have however, personally seen my team slowed down because code review is clogged with terribly long, often incorrect, PRs that are largely AI generated.
Many AI initiatives have had massive ROI though. The implementation problems are similar to any pre-AI tech rollout and hugely expensive non-AI tech implementations fail all the time.
Name one that has at least $200mn ROI over capital investment. Show me the balance sheet for it as well. And make sure that ROI isn't from suddenly not paying salaries.
After spending nearly 5 years building software which uses AI agents on the back end I've come to the conclusion it's the PC revolution part 2.
Productivity gains won't show up on economic data and companies trying to automate everything will fail.
But the average office worker will end up with a much more pleasant job and will need to know how to use the models, just like who they needed to learn to use a PC.
There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it.
The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.
Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of these. The entire world of open image/video generation is pretty much ignored by all but a very narrow niche of people, but has so much potential for creating interesting stuff. Even restricting yourself only to an API endpoint, isn't there something more clever we can be doing than re-implementing code that already exists on github badly through vibe coding?
But nobody in the hype-fueled mind rot part of this space remotely cares about anything real being done with gen AI. Vague posting about your billion agent setup and how you've almost entered a new reality is all that matters.
Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze.
You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad.
The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services.
I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people).
Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me".
As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".
>As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create
I'm hoping that the already full of slop centralized platforms now with LLM fueled implosion will overflow and lead to a renaissance of sorts for small and open web, niche communities and decoupling from big tech.
It's already gaining traction among the young, as far as I can see.
> The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.
I think we all do???
Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.
AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.
Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.
Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.
A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.
> To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless.
It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless."
My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.