alt Hacker NewsI think the issue is folks talk past each other. People who find coding agents useful or enjoyable are labeled “on the hype train” and folks for which coding agents don’t work for them or their workflow are considered luddites. There are an incredible number of contradicting claims and predictions out there as well, and I believe what we see is folks projecting their reaction to some amalgamation of them onto others. I see a lot of “they” language, and a lot of viral articles about business leadership “shoving AI down our throats” and it becomes a divisive issue like American political scene with really no one having a real conversation
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Hard to have a conversation when often the critics of LLM output receive replies like "What, you used last week's model?! No, no, no, this one is a generational leap"
Too many people are invested into AI's success to have a balanced conversation. Things will return to normal after a market shakedown of a few larger AI companies.
Its all a hype train though. People still believe in the AI gonna bring utopia bullshit while the current infra is being built on debt. The only reason it still exists is that all these AI companies believe in some kind of revenue outside of subscriptions. So its all about:
Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough products are based on AI.
Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.
I think the reason for the varying claims and predictions is because developers have wildly different standards for what constitutes working code. For the developers with a lower threshold, AI is like crack to them because gen ai's output is similar to what they would produce, and it really is a 10x speedup. For others, especially those who have to fix and maintain that code, it's more like a 10x slowdown.
Hence why you have in the same thread, some developer who claims that Claude writes 99% of their code and another developer who finds it totally useless. And of course others who are somewhere in the middle.