I geniuinely don't see what I could make with this new tech, my brain immediately goes to "this app idea is worthless, anybody can make it now".
It's like having extra copies of yourself that you can just fork and get stuff done. E.g. the other day I was in a meeting and there were some heavy discussions about a few gnarly issues. I fired off a few prompts in parallel while the AI researches options, approaches, made a prototype etc all while I was present and paying attention still in the face to face meeting. I am so much so much more efficient as an engineer now - getting better feedback, more bonuses etc. It's never been better - I handle thinking about the requirements, the computer science and software engineering big picture etc, and the AI handles the syntax trivia for implementation.
The models are really really good now.
The only downside is that as a result of more stuff getting done, we need to have more meetings to discuss what actually needs to be worked on.
I've seen developers use Claude to make suggestions for infrastructure design that made absolutely no sense and did not consider our environment. I've seen people write English that grammatically made sense but logically did not.
I don't see enough complaints about this and it can't be just my company.
Is anyone else seeing really severe Dunning-Kruger?
I always check what AI says to me, and I use my own words. I think the average engineer is not.
They call this "slop" - I think it is well known at this point?
That it's a degradation in some environments? There's not a lot being said about this. The laments are usually developers sad that they're prompting instead of coding. My lament isn't about the art of it, it's the human reasoning that seems to have gone away in my workplace when it comes to engineers.
You are a consumer, so you naturally think like the consumer you are. But consumers want cheap stuff and only big big businesses are able to provide cheap stuff at massive scale. So stop thinking in b2c. For us little businesses the money is in b2b. Businesses pay lots of money to have problems solved. They want to focus on their core business and outsource the rest.
Consumers hate paying subscriptions. Businesses love paying subscriptions. Because then they can make their problems someone else's problem and focus on what their actual business is.
Maybe it’s 1% or 10% today, but a decade ago, having/assembling the technical chops to know how to build something was a huge part of the meat / barrier to entry.
If code becomes cheaper that may change the business fundamentals but it also means capturing customers becomes way harder.
Now that opportunity cost is much lower so experimentation is more practical than before.
I also do repairs and so I recently added a job management system into the POS, which has been really useful so far. Next step is to sort out the online store/eBay integration aspect!
I've found it very liberating that I can handle some of the tedious parts of a project to AI. In the end, I spend perhaps the same amount of time on a project, but more of it goes to important work and less gets wasted on plumbing.
I am however worried that for the kind of work that the majority of the worlds tech workers do, this is a direct replacement for.
I guess we'll have to live to see.