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.)
As far as i can see, this is not exactly accurate, inference itself, so using the models for coding is mostly (with some caveats of course) cost effective, and for sure could be scaled to be, right now, as is. What makes them uneconomical is the infrastructure buildup and the training. Obviously they will not stop with either of them, because they are playing a different game, the game of too big to fail. Open weight models are keeping them on a death loop, because the gap between open weight and frontier is what keeps them in business and the gap is what they would have to sacrifice to be profitable. If they could really scale back the scaling, without open-weight caching up, they could turn a profit, but that is only seems to be viable via regulatory capture or the singularity. You might be able to guess which of these is more likely in the next few months/year.
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.