Everyone in the world has figured out that you keep screens rectangular so you don't paint yourself into a software design dead end.
Expect some car makers, like BMW.
The equation is fairly straightforward:
Competent employees x AI tokens = Accelerating business & market share gain
Incompetent employees x AI tokens = slop
Companies are now realizing they have a lot of shitty employees.
They aren’t going to permanently cut spend on tokens. They can’t afford to because of game theory.
So instead they will fire the employees they believe are incompetent to make room for higher token budgets for those that are competent.
Lots of orgs however have a managerial class that doesn’t optimize for share gain and winning in general.
Thats fine. A wave of startups and existing platforms who can effectively leverage AI to expand scope of their business will crush the incompetent at a rate that will leave analysts and managers dizzy.
Change is coming. Fast. And reflexively the faster the change the higher the panic the lower the ROI threshold the more revenue and capital accrues to the labs the faster the models improve. And so on.
Why do you see this as a binary? It's not.
The best engineers will make the best things, and they'll obviously figure out the best method for making them. That's what engineering is.
When your engineer finishes a session with a coding agent, they have more code than they started with and exactly the same amount of skill.
The agent produced output. It did not produce understanding.
You paid frontier prices to make your codebase bigger and your engineer no smarter. That is not an accident. It is a design choice, and it is worth remebering who it serves.
The biggest problem with "everyone will build their own software" is you don't just get to done and stop.
Your tools will start to look really bad as dedicated builders make their versions of the same thing so much better.
You need at minimum one full time attention stream per use-case!
You know why I don’t buy the “everyone will build their own software” take?
I can build this. I have the tools. I know how (probably). But I don't want to.
I want someone else to to build it maintain it, and charge me for it.
I’m actually struggling to decide if I should spend meaningful time to solve this problem or not. I have some good, novel ideas to help humans improve understanding of AI generated code. But the elephant in the room is: does this problem matter? Or is it a fool’s errand.
@gfodor You didn't build the computer, and it's doing a lot of work that you're standing on top of as a programmer, but you don't feel the need to credit it?
You're not a manager, you're something new.
I want the following in Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode...
1. Pinned Messages: Let me pin assistant messages to the sidebar for things I want to keep track of but am not ready to address yet. Render as a checklist & jump navigation.
2. Notes: Give me a scratchpad for thoughts while working.
Did we just forget about Covid? We told massive segments of the population that they couldn't work, came up with rudimentary ways to pay for that, and did it all in weeks.
Runaway concentration is a real problem that is centuries older than AI. It was always a tax-and-policy fight, never a technology one.
If AI accelerates the pain, the response also accelerates. The doom prediction is tiring and wrong even if the worst case happens.
https://t.co/vP98wu8SSU
i have seen enough proof now that using a coding agent is a deep skill
it's confusing because the people you see heavily using them produce horrible results
but that's because it's a skill! you can get better and the ceiling seems pretty high - this is very exciting to me
The Ferrari Luce is near on perfect. If you're heading out for dinner at a fancy restaurant, and you're the driver, that's the car you want to pull up in.
Italian 'going to town' vibes.
Possibly the last great car statement about being a driver - before that era ends to self driving. Contrarian take based on what I'm seeing on the internet.
why do people (including me) have an aversion to AI writing but not as much to AI code? if a piece of text smells AI i stop reading it but i use things coded entirely with AI every day