The solutions is simple: stop running these things autonomously without supervision, stop advertising them as safe to use for long running task automation.
So, so tired of these doom posts. Almost always these feel like they are from developers that felt like they were superior to others because of their ability to code or simply identified too deeply with writing code instead of solving problems with code. As for the issues listed here, I can't relate to any of them - I've been creating scripts, skills, improving user experiences, creating monitoring dashboards etc. for many of my co-workers that have given me more appreciation than I ever experienced in my career and trust me, nobody gives a damn that I used AI or thinks my knowledge has been "obsoleted", most people are just happy these solutions exist and make their lives easier. Edit: imo, this is the real "fuck it, make it anyway" approach to agentic coding.
Why? AI is enriching my life and letting me focus on solving hard problems. I don't believe in the sentience crap and am just using it at face value for what it is, a useful productivity tool. Every software developer's main purpose is to automate and reduce the amount of boring manual labour required. By this logic, should people in the past have "resisted the software development department"?
And then after a few years the moralists have to fight a world-spanning war to keep the pragmatists from completely eliminating people groups they don't like from the planet.
No, no, you don't get it - soon Joe Sixpack will be prompting AGI "solve me {super difficult problem researchers couldn't solved for centuries}" and releasing their own research papers!
I'm a backend engineer working closely with a single frontend guy on an internal app and after creating a pr in his repo, it was immediately clear that AI can build some nice brochure sites, but UI state management, clean UX, good performance and API dispatch handling still require you to know what your doing for things to work well.
I think that frontend devs merely have to move from debating their frameworks to focusing more on user problems, maintainability, performance etc. but that is every dev right now...
I agree that Zitron is not honest and a denialist regarding the usefulness of AI, but the "profit" chart is just completely misleading as most of these companies have made large investments in OpenAI/Anthropic and list the gains in their share price as "profits" - so yes, while the asset prices are rising, that's typical in any financial bubble. Google is actually cash flow negative for the first time in history (which imo should be what measures profitability: income from products and services - costs to produce them) so Zitron's core thesis that there are no returns in AI is playing out as far as I can tell...
Also, Google's recent profits are boosted from including SpaceX. $94.18 billion.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/google-par...: On Aug. 6, Alphabet filed its 13F with regulators covering its second-quarter trading activity. Given that SpaceX went public on June 12, Google's parent company is now required to include its SpaceX holdings in its quarterly 13F.
Now that there are many models on par for most day to day coding tasks, I think this will prove to be a complete fallacy. If anything, since LLMs, my tolerance for bad software has gone down.
Example- I'm no longer a Claude subscriber, but in the past it was the only game in town. Not any more: I'm simply done dealing with the countless issues in their client. With Pi, I'm no longer sitting there like an idiot slamming the enter key because ask_user_questions is broken again and I have to force quit the application (just to mention one of the countless issues). Hoping my org switches away from Claude too...
They are only talking about production, productivity, quantity, nothing else. The amount of produced content hasn't been in short supply. There is no talk about consumption. Who is going to consume all this content, _even_ if it somehow turns out good? If it's cheap and easily producible, then it's worthless as consumption item.
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