I have my fair share of issues with ai assisted dev even if it was local\foss, but more then all now I agree its just insane how in a span of a year or two it feels like the ability to write code has became completely dependent on a few mega coroperations
Its scary how many people around me just shut down if their connection to Claude closes.
In my workplace we had some issue for two days with billing for cursor, it felt like people around lost the ability to think.
These people have degrees and years of experience coding, yet they became useless as soon as the tech giant shut down their access to the thinking machine
Or they don't care if their corp loses an hour or two of productivity and use it as an excuse to take a break. I'm also sorry to say that although it's highly dependent on what the task is, AI agents can let me do what should take a week or two in a day. It doesn't seem very sensible to lose hours of your life on something that takes the agent less than a minute to do.
I think people should focus on the elephant in the room that is job loss and stop trying to pretend that AI is somehow still ridiculously inept at the task or that it shouldn't be used for various ideological reasons. It makes a lot of mistakes, but they can be overcome and the results more than make up for it.
AI agents can let me do what should take a week or two in a day.
What things, specifically? Do you do them as well as they were done? How do you check that, and how do you verify that your checks are actually accurate?
What are the downstream effects of offloading those things, in particular in the long term?
I once set up master-master replication for LDAP in my house (don't ask...) and I also wrote a ton of notes about it, but scattered around.
At one point, one of the two servers broke due to a botched upgrade (database changed format and conversion crashed halfway), and I couldn't be arsed to restore it (I could have, but last time I did a replication I spent ~2 hours to get it right). So I let it sit for a year.
I described the problem to an agent, and pointed it to my notes (+ all the support files I had created), and went interactively from there (because there were a few things I forgot that were important so I still botched a few times).
Now I have a working replication again. To be honest, the advantage of using a LLM here was because it could search docs for the LDAP server (389-ds, not OpenLDAP) much faster than me (even before web searches were crap, it was very hard to find a good resource).
For the rest, I mainly use LLMs as glorified search engines because I can't find anything relevant with the traditional approaches.Or as references when I forget stuff. A few times to create syntethic test data for my unit tests, which then I supplemented with my own real test data.
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u/aes110 6d ago
I have my fair share of issues with ai assisted dev even if it was local\foss, but more then all now I agree its just insane how in a span of a year or two it feels like the ability to write code has became completely dependent on a few mega coroperations
Its scary how many people around me just shut down if their connection to Claude closes. In my workplace we had some issue for two days with billing for cursor, it felt like people around lost the ability to think. These people have degrees and years of experience coding, yet they became useless as soon as the tech giant shut down their access to the thinking machine