> And even then, we still don't have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment!
I would strongly argue that coding assistants are AI’s first killer app. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf etc.
The Generative AI Con
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Re: The Generative AI Con
#12I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10 seconds later. The amount of speed up I see as a very experienced dev is astronomical. And just like 6 months ago it was awful. How great is it gonna be in a year or two? It doesn’t even have access to running unit tests or reading console errors or IDE hints, and it still generates mostly correct code. Once it gets more deeply embedded it’s just going to improve more and more.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#13Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.
Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres.
Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#14Ed occasionally makes good points, but he's very very angry at Big Tech, and his anger often gets in the way of his message.
Reading his latest rant reminds me of Karl Denninger railing against Google around the time of their IPO, claiming they would never make enough money to justify an $85 share price (a $1000 investment then would be worth around $375,000 today).
Re: The Generative AI Con
#15I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#16[deleted]
Re: The Generative AI Con
#17> And even then, we still don't have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment! I would strongly argue that coding assistants are AI’s first killer app. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf etc.
Are they? I find Agentic mode on most editors barely useful. Autocomplete and inline editing is great though.
To use these tools properly, you need to know how to build the same thing precisely.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#18I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…
Unreliable tools are utterly exhausting.
> not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster.
Is there a greater hell than this!?
Re: The Generative AI Con
#19I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…
I think the usefulness is just very domain specific. If you're writing some types of boilerplate or often-tutorialized code it can spit out something very reasonable. Other types of code, like say in game dev, it stumbles around and never produces anything usable.
But like you said, in a few more years we'll see! It does feel like there's some missing pieces yet to be figured out to truly "reason" and generalize.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#20> And even then, we still don't have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment! I would strongly argue that coding assistants are AI’s first killer app. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf etc.
by giving the models durable memory, they become "agentic". in any case, they don't make as much of a mess when their output is getting written into git.