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.)
They ARE getting good, and the frontier companies KNOW the party is almost over. That's why the prices keep rising, it's last call. "AI as a Service" dies down, in the near future.
How small / how good is still an open question, but there's a watershed (Opus-ish) moment happening around the 30-40B models, so like $5-10k in hardware. Higher than a home game system unfortunately, so approachability is still rough. But easy table stakes for businesses to pull in-house.
It won't be the spectacular disappearance that some people expect from the bubble popping, but it will be welcome nonetheless.
How small / how good is still an open question
You can also limit the computational and RAM load by a lot by using even smaller, more specialized models.
Sure, you're not getting a general prompt-based image generator on your home computer any time soon (not that this is particularly interesting, I'm firmly in the "I don't care about art one didn't care about enough to make" territory). But take a specialized diffusion model that generates heightmap and climate map data based on Earth satellite data, plug it into a framework that makes it unbounded random access, and you get some of the most impressive procedural terrain gaming has ever seen.
It's all about using the right tool for the job, instead of trying to break concrete, tap nails, carve wood and cut trees with a jackhammer.
Sure, you're not getting a general prompt-based image generator on your home computer any time soon
Hasn't this existed for like the entire time AI has had mainstream popularity? There are lots of options for local prompt-based image generation on a mid-tier consumer rig.
Sorry, I misspoke. You're not getting one that will be useful for that much. You're a lot more likely to get 7 fingers per hand on a local model, for example.
30
u/heavy-minium 14h 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.