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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

I don't think AI has any real value for software development, personally. The quality just isn't there, unless you invest so much effort that you may as well have written it yourself. But the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and even though I think the industry will get over the idiocy of having LLMs write software, there's no telling how long that will take. So it's a scary time to work in tech even if I think the trend will ultimately reverse.

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As of ~8 months ago the quality is most definitely there, for almost every form of programming I've experienced.

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.

> So it's a scary time to work in tech even if I think the trend will ultimately reverse.

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 envy you. For me, AI is faster than the code I write myself in many, many cases. It might replace the average developer, but a talented developer like you probably won't be replaced

I was not hired to write code, but to solve problems (where often the end result is code, but it’s not the whole process). But the message from management is that our bottleneck was coding, and by using AI to code, we’ll be 10x faster and all the company problem will be solved. Essentially 1. Use AI everywhere 2. ??? 3. Profit.

Where I work, the CTO drank a whole bunch of AI kool-aid recently, so now we're expected to "10x" our output with AI. I don't think he realizes this also means 10x more problems of all kinds. But I fully expect him to double-down and when AI costs skyrocket, he'd lay off more developers to pay for more AI.

I am constantly looking for a new job, but all of them are also require AI coding experience.

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