This is a perfect example of where the real work and challenges are in software development.
AI makes it worse. This is where people will lose tons of productivity with AI and many people are completely clueless. It'll hit them like a ton of bricks one day.
I think they are good productivity tools in that they essentially shorten the research loop. Imagine having Google and stack overflow right inside your IDE. On top of that, imagine scaffolding/generators for a lot more "boilerplate" code.
If you look at them through that lens then they are less exhausting in my opinion, but I hear ya.
I feel the burn out too. It's because of all the hype and people out there (most of whom have no programming experience at all mind you) believing these tools can do something they cannot. Then everyone seems to intent on doing better here that they start trying to run multiple agents, etc. Ultimately this results in less productivity.
I'm going to be honest. At work, I've seen the team begin to build custom internal apps and dashboards that literally do the same thing as Jira and observability tools that we already pay for. It just happens to...OMG...put the data that used to be on two different browser tabs onto the same one! Woah! Amazing! It only took two weeks to build too! Jira is so cooked! Except. It's not. Because this little reporting app doesn't do anything and it has bugs to maintain. Oh right and it didn't go through the regular SDLC or follow any code review process so it's a violation of SOC 2. But you know what? They get a pat on the back.
This industry is as the kids like to say - cooked.
If I'm being completely honest, I don't think most AI influencers even know the difference between something that is deterministic vs. non-deterministic. The author here probably gives too much credit.
I agree it is a silly debate, but it's simply surprising to me that not enough people ask why. No one wants to think anymore, they just want to be told the answer. That's why there's a "debate" in the first place.
ActionScript, Emscripten, Dart, WebAssembly... All things that perform better and are often better to use than JavaScript (and TypeScript) and the dumb masses chose the crap we have now.
Let's face it. People benefit from complexity and poorly performing apps. Not just for the web, look at video game engines too.
When hardware gets faster and cheaper, people tend to say "meh" to quality and performance concerns. That part gets easier, but that's the slippery slope that introduces poor quality and complexity - especially when pressured top down by companies to go faster.
Basically the need for, forget about reward in, quality is completely removed.
So congratulations Internet. We have most web apps powered by a language spec dreamt up in a weekend. With patches on top of patches and abstraction on top of abstraction since.
It's been great job security of course... gatekeeping and all...but I don't know. I kinda hope AI does come and just replaces it all or something.
Man I wanted to use WebAssembly more. For Dart I made a Photoshop PSD to JPG converter that was super fast too. Much faster than any JavaScript image convert and resize was. Bummer.
No they wouldn't. They have tons of funding. They absolutely can and do absorb costs like this. Don't think anyone is ever gonna tell you precise numbers (and it also varies based on workload of course)...but this is literally the business model of AI providers.
They're goal (similar to Uber, DoorDash, Robin Hood, etc.) is to get mass adoption. Their business models only work at this kind of scale.
It's completely impossible to have consumers pay $20-60/mo and be a profitable business without mass adoption where some are not using it as much as others...and, perhaps more importantly, the masses put pressure on their employers to pay for their tooling. This is why pricing does not need to come down.
Quite literally I have engineers spending over $1,000/mo on Opus. That's the goal.
I wouldn't be so sure about the courts overturning it. This is yet another opportunity for this administration to test its power. Even if the courts do, it'll be very time consuming and expensive.
Unfortunately this is really bad for Anthropic. Given how quickly the other providers jumped on the opportunity, you can tell how fast things move here and ultimately that could mean the difference between survival in this industry.
I hope something changes, but it can get a lot worse. Individual developers signing up won't help Anthropic. If things get worse, you can rule out Anthropic in most enterprise situations. Supply chain risk means you can't even build software with the thing. Forget about using AI as part of the product, as a user facing feature - people won't be able to build with it as it's part of the supply chain.
Should make one for skills. I'm curious how effective this ends up being though. The model does need to know something about the tools (or skills) after all.
AI makes it worse. This is where people will lose tons of productivity with AI and many people are completely clueless. It'll hit them like a ton of bricks one day.
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