There is a vast gap between casual AI usage (chatbots, meme images) and AI-based coding / agentic engineering. There’s also nuances between “vibe coding” and using AI as a tool to write code.

Most engineers I know are basically not writing code. They know good code practice, they understand software architecture, and the core drive for coding environments / IDEs has been “help programmers type less / be more efficient.” AI in coding is a big evolution of that, especially because of the mechanisms humans use to read & write. We cannot read faster than we write, so it’s faster to read. The AI can write much faster than we can. Therefore, you use the AI to write & execute the plan, with engineers reviewing the output.

For my own industry (game development), AI has been kinda nuts the last few months in terms of rapid acceleration of development. It’s amazing for prototyping concepts that won’t go to market in their prototype form, and that cuts down on risk, downstream impacts to actual engineering requests, art, etc.

This creates the potential for a captured market (software development) with AI-usage seen as human speedups. It’s unclear whether people are in fact more productive right now, but it’s humans fumbling around with new tools. I’m kind of afraid how far AI could advance in a very short period of time. Many of my friends are using recursive techniques to improve their AI workflows (asking the AI “how could we do this better?”).

C- & D- level have massive amounts of their portfolio in AI tech while spurring on employees, “you must use this!” That part is an ouroboros / inflationary bubble.

This is putting aside all the ethics for stealing literally everyone’s stuff, the water usage, problems with capitalism, and so on. Please don’t take what I say as, “AI is good!” It’s just more complicated than that.

This gap is so hard to explain. A lot of common folks are seeing chatbots screw up counting R’s in strawberry, but I can talk to a rock & a game comes out built on web frameworks I barely know because knowing the language isn’t super important compared to what comes out.