[socalgal2]

Isn't this a temporary situation though.

Today: Ask AI to "do the thing", manual review because don't trust the AI

Tomorrow: Ask AI to "do the thing"

I'm just getting started on my AI journey. It didn't take long before I upgraded from the $17 a month claude plan to the $100 a month plan and I can see myself picking the $200 a month plan soon. This is for hobby projects.

At the moment I'm reviewing most of the code for what I'm working on, and I have tests and review those too. But, seeing how good it is (sometimes), I can imagine a future where the AI itself has both the tech chops and the taste and I can just say "Maybe me an app to edit photos" and it will spit out a user friendly clone of photoshop with good UX.

We already kind of see this with music - it's able to spit out "Bangers". How long until it can spit out hit rom-coms, crime shows, recipes, apps? I don't think the answer is "never". I think more likely the answer is in N years where N is probably a single digit.

[danielvaughn]

No, I don't think it is temporary. As AI becomes more powerful, we'll simply ask it to do more difficult things. There's a level of complexity where "do the thing" is insufficient. We'll never be at a place where AI can infer vast amounts of nuance from simple human requests, which means that humans will always need to be able to describe precisely what they want. This has always been the core skill for software developers, and I just don't see that changing.

[drivebyhooting]

Do you believe a junior developer now will never surpass you?

Why couldn’t AI do the same?

[danielvaughn]

It's not a matter of whether it surpasses me. In some respects it already has - I watch Claude Code spitting out long terminal commands that I've never even seen in my 15 year career.

The question is whether AI will ever become good enough to magically infer information where none is provided.

For instance, I've had this startup idea for an itemized physical storage company. We'll never reach a point where I can simply say "Hey AI, create all the software necessary for an itemized physical storage company". It's not because AI won't continue to improve, it's because there's literally not enough detail in that statement to understand what I mean. It's too vague. I'm sure the AI of tomorrow could do a pretty good job in guessing what I mean by it, but the chance of it capturing my vision is literally 0%.

[drivebyhooting]

It might have a better vision than you and pursue that vision instead. Why should the AI wait for your impetus when countless founders and CEOs didn’t?

[danielvaughn]

AI has no intrinsic way to align its efforts to solve human problems. In order to solve that problem, you'd need an enormous amount of nearly real-time data feeding into the model. Then the model would need to routinely look for patterns and identify ways to improve human life in some way. It would make today's models look tiny by comparison.

What we're building today isn't even remotely close to that.

[guzfip]

> We already kind of see this with music - it's able to spit out "Bangers"

“Bangers” being roughly equivalent to garbage mass marketed radio pop? Or “We are Charlie Kirk” lol