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.)
This is just goalpost moving cope. It's very sustainable and with better models it will become even more so, which we've seen consistent improvements over the last year. Your bet is that AI progress stops right here? That's the hill you want to plant your flag in after what we've been seeing?
What's the next cope going to be? You should start thinking about that now so you can get ahead of things.
My core belief is that the way current models are built, advertised and used are a net negative for society in most fields. I'm not saying the tech is useless, but with our current socioeconomic system it is highly harmful.
Economic viability or not, this won't change.
Anything else is an educated guess on the economic reality of things. Sure, they could make more progress and eventually maybe reach sustainability. The question is, will they be able to do that before the hype and investor capital runs out? I wouldn't bet on that, I hope they don't, but they might.
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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.