The AI Vampire

I'm having trouble at 150k, but I'm not sure the issue is that per se, as opposed to the issue of the set of relevant context which is easy to find. The relevant part of the context threatens to bring in disparate parts of the codebase. The easy to find part determines whether a human has to manually curate the context.

Luckily we work for ourselves in our studio, and I have no one to answer to except my business partner and customers, and tech is my domain. But I have concluded "we already build fast enough." Really how much faster do we need to build? Deployments: automated. Tests: automated. Migrations: automated. Frameworks: complete. Stack: stable. Scaling: solved. OKAY so now with AI we can build "MORE!" More of WHAT exactly? What makes our lives better? What makes our customers happier? How about I just directly feed customer support tickets into Claude and let it rip.

I'm increasingly thinking either people were terrible developers, used shit tools to begin with, or are in a mass psychosis. I certainly feel bad for anyone reporting to "the business guy." He never respected you to begin with, and now he literally thinks "why are you so slow? I can build Airbnb in a weekend."

For someone who previously could achieve nothing, these tools are magical, as they can now achieve something. It feels to them like infinity because their base was 0. That alone will create a lot of things they wouldn't have been able to, good for them. However for people who already know what they're doing, I only feel slightly pushed along some asymptote. My bottlenecks simply are not measured in tokens to screen.

> all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete... let’s not quibble about the exact productivity boost from AI

No, that's exactly the purpose of this ending up on HN.

> if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value. For someone.

Nope.

> you decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison.

Pure junior dev fantasy. Nobody cares about how many hours you "really" work, or what you did as long as you meet their original requirements. They're going to ignore the rest no matter how much you try to talk a big game. This has been true since the beginning of employment.

> In that scenario, your employer captures 100% of the value from you adopting AI. You get nothing, or at any rate, it ain’t gonna be 9x your salary. And everyone hates you now.

Again, nobody cares.

> Congrats, you were just drained by a company. I’ve been drained to the point of burnout several times in my career, even at Google once or twice.

Pointless humblebrag that even we the readers don't care about.

> Now let’s look at Scenario B. You decide instead that you will only work for an hour a day, and aim to keep up with your peers using AI. On that heavily reduced workload, you manage to scrape by, and nobody notices.

This isn't a thing unless you were borderline worthless and junior to begin with.

> In this scenario, your company goes out of business. I’m sorry, but your victory over The Man will be pyrrhic, because The Man is about to be kicked in The Balls, since with everyone slacking off, a competitor will take them out pretty fast.

Hard disagree. Author has clearly never worked outside of a startup or silicon valley where the money is more mature.

Flagged for what is at best extreme ignorance, or more likely ragebait and bad faith hype for a ship that sailed several years ago. I don't know what else to do with these blog posts anymore.

You remember glassholes? These days we have gasholes instead.

Another thing I've never got them to generate is any G code. Maybe that'll be in the image/3d generator side indirectly, but I was kind of hoping I could generate some motions since hand coding coordinates is very tedious. That would be a productivity boost for me. A very very niche boost, since I rarely need bespoke G code, but still.