I think that a lot of the issue behind AI is profit motive. If that was removed from the equation, AI could be a really useful tool for development. But the fact that the main usecase at every company is "go faster so line goes up" gets in the way of that.

The other issue is efficiency. Burning down a rainforest to make a stupid banking app isn't very appealing to me. But if we could work to make generative AI more efficient at what it does, and transition to consumer ownership of compute/hardware, it might be more feasible. That's a long ways off, and I don't think the powers that be want that future.

I use AI every day at work. We built an entire orchestration framework on top of Claude Code. It features skills that can pull in a jira ticket with well defined acceptance criteria and complete it without very much human intervention at all. We've built out entire epics and our QA team has not seen an uptick in defects. This is because we all still do manual code reviews in addition to AI reviews. We even have a skill that checks AC against the PR diff to make sure we're meeting AC before it gets to QA. AI does make our team more efficient.

But at what cost? None of us are learning anything about coding. I feel more burnt out than I ever have. It's an environment nightmare. It is a moral/ethical nightmare. Finally, none of us are seeing any additional compensation for improving efficiency. That compensation is going to Anthropic.

There is a world where AI can be a net benefit to the world, but it isn't our current one.

I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they're building

TL;DR I basically agree lol

I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about real world examples rather than the mechanics at play.

Let’s said you have the best engineer in the world. They are fantastic as describing nuanced, complex ideas. The fastest they can write is about 300 words per minute. The fastest they can read is 1200 words per minute.

Put them up against an AI model. They write at 6000 wpm & read at like 11 mil or something ridiculous.

Now, you’re making the argument, “Speed isn’t everything!” and that’s true. Which would rather you have, though: the same engineer, the AI, or the same engineer using the AI? I’d argue you’d rather have them both, because you have someone who can describe what they want in depth, they can point it towards heuristics or targets, and they can setup evals or governance strategies to better control the output.

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I work with competent, smart people. My experiences have been the opposite. 🤷