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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

171–180 of 565 posts

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#171
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typing was never the bottleneck.

Based on what I'm using AI for these days, seems like it always was.

It depends on where you're using AI. If you're working on a project for yourself or in a tiny company. Then sure, writing the code probably was your bottleneck. But at mid to large companies writing code is maybe 50% of the job, and the other 50% is the process around it. All those processes are the bottle neck, no matter how fast you can write the code. And this was a bottleneck I was hitting well before AI.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Apple just released a bunch of Agent Skills. I tried it on my macOS apps and I noticed some improvements codewise and updated some deprecations I didn’t know existed in Swift.

Looking forward to that.

Yeah it comes with Xcode 27

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#174
I fear AI is going to be used for everything not because it's the best solution, but because people are inherently lazy and just want to get their thing done, and they don't care so much about the quality.

"low effort and convenient" seems to consistently win over "best quality" and this is going to be a downgrade in everything, for everyone

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#176

Not everyone but most. And I've been having this discussion with people around me a lot lately and everyone that has the ability to think more than half a step ahead sees it(and frankly we are fed up). I previously discussed how a friend admitted that he's never seen the code that powers his project at an S&P 500 company. Yesterday I was talking to another friend and former coworker who complained that when cloudflar…

Embarrassing NPC behavior to throw in the towel on working because you lost your crutch.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some level everything an agent does is through a "programmatic interface" (tool calls). Some people might use skill-based scripts, MCPs, or some kind of raw access to a database. My point is that well designed CLIs are the optimal programmatic interface, for many reasons.

Sorry what other option is there? Is it going to create an API call from scratch every time after reading a page of documentation? Wait raw access to the database? That’s one of the options for issuing a refund?

[deleted]

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#179
One of the reasons is that the free options are generally fairly poor and it’s hard to get people to sign up and actually pay for something. Especially if they assume it’s going to be similar quality.

If I worked in marketing/growth for an AI company I would try to consider some ways of breaking through this gap.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just write it yourself?

Because typing “code” takes time and significant amounts of it. We are slowly waking up to the fact, which was always true, that “coding” is just a fanciful preparatory task in order to appease the spirits properly so that we may invoke the spirit of what we are actually after: a live, running process that does useful things. Code is completely useless when separated from that fact. Typing it is a complete waste of t…

> a live, running process that does useful things

That is one of the things code does. It also communicates the developer's thoughts about how that process should work to others. If the latter is neglected, the code becomes very difficult to collaborate on. Very few lines of code that are written are "write once". Mostly they're changed, repeatedly, over time by many people. The live, running process is a very temporary entity by comparison. Yes, it needs to exist and do useful work. No, it is absolutely not the only thing that matters.

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