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Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is a large part of the enormous hype train is investors thinking they can replace talented engineers w/ AI. That's fundamentally doomed for failure.

What AI can really do well is take an already competent engineer and suddenly get rid of a lot of the annoying tedium they had to deal with. Whether it's writing boilerplate, doing basic project management, organizing brain dumps/brainstorming, etc.

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I do think workspace by GitHub is a smart move. What is clear as day is, we don't have enough data to model how developers think and iterate to solve problems. With workspace, I see it as a way to capture structured data on how developers think.

This is certainly a long game though. I think GitHub with MS money can continue to lose money on Copilot for the next 5 years to gather data. For other VC ventures, I don't think they can wait that long.

Pretty much this. I worry that we might face an AI winter soon as investors in 2029 suddenly realise that LLMs are not going to replace anyone anytime soon and that they won't be able to obtain the fantasied cash out of replacing millions of workers with LLMs.

Looking at the sad fate of Deep Mind (R.I.P), I feel that the shortermism generated by LLMs is going to be really painful

Yes. And they've also introduced a new kind of tedium in going round in circles while it doesn't understand you, then you give up and go back to SO.

It’s pretty good at completing relatively simple code. If you already know what exactly you write and have a consistent and simple coding style it will typically recognize what you are doing and complete whole blocks.

It takes an experienced eye to fix the code after, but overall it makes you a bit faster at those kinds of tasks.

But if you’re in thinking and exploration mode then turn it off. It’s a massive distraction then.

These AI coding assistants already do what you are describing. At some point in the future, AI should be capable enough to do the job of a competent developer. This is not a short-term milestone, IMHO.

Bingo.

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