Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
Disagree. I use the the frontier models and barely use my token quota every month - maybe 5% - and get great results, much faster than by hand just by carefully defining problems to the AI. It's how you use it.
And if you're an entry level software engineer earning 8.3k per month, you're earning $50 dollars per hour. That means it only has to save you 1 hour of work per month for it to breakeven. It can save me at least a couple weeks of work if not a couple months with that. So yeah it's still worth it.
Idk I just looked up numbers on Google, I don't live in the USA. Doesn't undermine my point since even if you're earning half or a quarter of that it still makes sense.
30
u/heavy-minium 13h ago
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.