In this case the evidence is literally first-hand experience. There is nothing that will change my mind on this because it's my direct personal experience from actual use.

I honestly don't care what marketing says, and if other people have different experiences then that's just them. In my personal actual real-world experience I found that they let me get tons more done and their quality of work is perfectly fine as long as you're using the right tools and giving them the right instructions.

The article says that developers are disagreeing with that in situations where they are "forced" to use AI, and that's fair, it doesn't make sense to force a tool to be used for something it's not good at. They might be using it wrong. I use it whenever it's better than not using it, and that ends up being quite often in my workflow.

The Doctor's my favourite character from that show, but I think the episode you're probably referring to (Author, Author) went a little too on the nose with its allegory when it had a bunch of holographic doctors literally swinging pickaxes in a mineshaft inside an asteroid. The technological contrast was too jarring for me.

The US will become an increasingly isolated market, and thus increasingly irrelevant. Big enough to continue supporting some of its domestic manufacturers at a smaller scale, but the rest of the world can move on without them.

This benchmark is presenting AI with a challenge that's greater than what human devs normally face. It's supposed to be really hard, it's not surprising that current models get 0%.

The point is that over time models will continue to improve and this benchmark will measure that improvement. A lot of current benchmarks have been saturated, once models are getting near 100% scores there's no point to them any more.

If so, it was project-wide across hundreds of devs.

Since you brought up the notion that we might be doing different styles of development, I was giving you context as to the kinds of development that I do. Sounds like we might not be doing such different scales of development after all, but I couldn't have known that until you gave that information just now.

This isn't supposed to be some kind of duel or argument, I don't see the point of that. I'm just explaining my usage of coding agents and specifically unit tests in that context. Since that's what you were questioning.

Could be. I'm a professional programmer whose usage runs the whole gamut - large applications with hundreds of programmers working on them for years, smaller apps that I make for my own use, and one-off scripts to do some particular task and then generally throw away afterwards.

I don't do unit tests for that last category, of course. I don't even use coding agents for those, generally speaking - a bit of back-and-forth in a chat interface is usually enough there.

No, I've used them plenty before. I just found them to generally be a huge hassle of minimal benefit. They became much more useful in the context of agentic coding, where you want the agent to be able to immediately realize "oh, this change I made causes these specific problems when it's run." The hassle is all on the agent, not on me.

Have you tried giving it coding standards and other such preferences about how you like your code to be organized? I've found that coding agents can be quite adaptable to various styles, you can put stuff like "try to keep functions less than 100 lines long" or "include assertions validating all function inputs" into your coding agent's general instructions and it'll follow them.

For me, one of the things that's a huge fundamental improvement is telling the agent to create and run unit tests for everything. That way when it does mess up accidentally it can immediately catch the problem and usually fixes it in the same session without further intervention. Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.

Of the 24 stories currently on my front page for this community, 13 of them are stories about how AI is awful in some way or another.

Social media excels at creating bubbles. I'm not sure whether this "backlash" is really all that widespread.

You'd think that the holodeck, of all places, would be something that could be cleaned by a dedicated holographic synthetic serviceman.

Holojanitor: "What is my purpose?"

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story.

Well there's the problem.

I'm a software developer and I say that AI is the greatest force-multiplier that's been introduced into the field since the compiler. I love using it, it handles the most tedious and annoying parts of the process. But there are situations I don't want to use it in, and of course being forced to use would give me a more negative opinion of it. Obviously.