A small group of developers at my company have set up volumes of skill.md and other instructions for the AI to write Jira tickets, then take action on those Jira tickets by writing the code. The AI submits a pull request. Then there's another AI to review the code. They've written the game plan for the AI to do all of this. All the human does now is click "approve" without even reading the PR, and then someone clicks "merge". There's no coding, no critical thinking by a human anymore except for telling the AI what to do... which really anyone at the company could do. I doubt I'll have a job at this company much longer after 8 years employed there.
If you're working in some vanishingly rare domain then maybe it's not yet, but most coding challenges are very much in the wheelhouse of the current frontier models.
I honestly can't see things going back to what it was 5 years ago. We will probably not have the future that Anthropic hopes for, but I think every developer will be required to chat with AI as part of the planning process to reduce a companies "bus factor" risk.
I am constantly looking for a new job, but all of them are also require AI coding experience.
"low effort and convenient" seems to consistently win over "best quality" and this is going to be a downgrade in everything, for everyone
Contrast that to the last 10 years in Linux where things have become immensely better.
Still haven't tried it
"followed up by someone with 5k karma"
Incorrect. Maybe the reply was made in haste
Anytime a comment of mine receives lots of upvoites thare will always be some snarky replies. It's almost guaranteed
These will sometimes include personal attacks
Note all I did here was relate a personal anecdote: I'm not using "AI". HN commenters do this every day, many times off-topic
I expressed no opinion. I did not make any argument, prediction or "recommendation". All I did was state a fact, 100% on-topic
*there
At least use AI to know your enemy...
Actually anything that is about 90% great and 10% disastrously wrong is utter crap given the way people want and do use AI models.
They are great tools in the right hands and awful in the wrong.
the tech is pretty good at helping identify simple bugs when they happen and to write short sections of code given very explicit instructions but yeah I have yet to see good examples of short one sentence ideas turned into a working product that looks better than anything that could be a UDemy tutorial app.
- I'm getting my roof replaced due to hail damage. Insurance originally covered only $5k due to depreciation. I fed the insurance policy to AI. I learned about the appraisal clause and invoked it. At the end, I got another $6,500 back.
- I was having issues with plumbing. Four different plumbers came, they all said the cast iron pipes under the house need to change. Quotes ranged from $35k to $55k. I had AI walk me through the process. It taught me about the yard line vs. under-slab distinction, and suggested getting just the yard line replaced first because it's much cheaper and can fix the issue. I did that and spent $6k. The issue was fixed. I "saved" $30k for now by deferring that massive month-long project. (For brevity, I'm omitting a ton of boring technical stuff I learned about plumbing that helped me make the optimal decision - none of the contractors bothered explaining any of it.)
- My 2010 Hyundai Santa Fe is starting to show its age. I've taken it to multiple different repair shops, then fed their diagnoses and recommendations to AI and figured out which ones are trying to fleece me and which ones are being more careful and conservative with their repair recommendations. Probably saved several thousand dollars there. Learned a lot about cars too!
- My partner and I are converting the backyard to a wildlife sanctuary. The AI helped us plan what to plant where (depending on lots of factors like sunlight location, irrigation access, etc.) and it has been going really well. Also planned out a dragonfly pond to deal with mosquitoes. AI created a project plan, including schematics, material purchase list and step-by-step instructions.
- I've been wanting to do various other home improvement projects, but only ones that make financial sense. I took photos of my house, both inside and outside, and fed them to AI, and said "give me a list of projects I can do that will have high ROI for when I decide to sell this house". It spent 15 mins doing deep research, then came back with a long, prioritized list. If I do all the projects, I'd be spending about $40k and it would improve the house valuation by about $90k.
I can go on. There's probably dozens of stuff that I've used it for over the past year that led to massive time and money savings, and I've learned a ton as well about topics I normally would not have been exposed to or bothered to research myself. And I'm not even including all the work-related usage, both for my employer and my side business. That would be its own very long list.
