Technology

Bloomberg actually had a good article on this if you ignore the biases. Basically, DeepSeek and other Chinese companies are starting to get used by African companies to build stuff on top of. And since API costs are a fraction of what US companies charge, they're far more popular. On top of that, some companies in Africa are starting to run self hosted models too.

I've been using AI coding tools for the past half a year and I can definitively tell you that they are beneficial. There's no question about that. What we see is that people are still learning to use these tools effectively, and that they're not magic. But once you spend enough time with them, they really do work well.

I've seen the studies you refer to and the problem is that they often have low sample sizes, and that a lot of experienced devs don't really want to use these tools. So, when you have a situation of people who are already biased against this tech, they're obviously not going to be effective at using it. However, that doesn't mean this tech isn't effective.

Personally, I haven't seen much evidence to support the arguments that the code is harder to read and reason about either. The code LLMs produce is often a lot better than the code I've seen written by hand.

All that said, these tools absolutely cannot replace senior devs in their current state. The one thing I've consistently noticed is that you have to be very specific with instructing the model on how the problem should be solved. If you just tell it to do something in a general way, it will almost certainly produce a poor solution. However, if you tell it the steps you want, then it can follow instruction well. And developing the intuition on how to approach a particular type of problem is precisely what makes an experienced dev. A junior who doesn't have enough experience to understand what the correct solution should look like will not be able to instruct the LLM on what needs to be done.