Programming

Genuinely a bit shocked to see the number of robolovers in these comments. Very weird, very disheartening. No wonder so much shit online doesn't work properly lol

The funny thing is that if AI coding were that good, we would already see widespread adoption in open source projects. But we haven't, because it sucks. Of course commercial software development companies are free to lie about how much they use AI, or get creative with their metrics so they can get their KPI bonuses. So we can't really believe anything they say. But we can believe in transparency.

As always, there are so many people selling snake oil by saying the word AI without actually telling you what they mean. Quite obviously there are a great many tools that one could call AI that can be and are and have been used to help do a ton of things, with many of those technologies going back decades. That's different from using ChatGPT to write your project. Whenever you hear someone write about AI and not give clear definitions, there's a good chance they're full of s***.

Also is substack the new meduim? I cant keep up with these freemium wordpress/blog clones.

Even if AI is an actual tool that improves the software development speed of human developers (rather than something that ends up taking away in time spending reviewing, correcting and debugging the AI generated code, the time savings it gives in automatically writing the code), it's been my experience in almost 30 years of my career as a Software Engineer that every single tooling improvements that makes us capable of doing more in the same amount of time is eaten up by increasing demands on the capabilities of the software we make.

Thirty years ago user interfaces were either CLI or pretty simple with no animations. A Software Systems was just a software application - it ran on a single machine with inputs and outputs on that machine - not a multi-tiered octopus involving a bunch of back end data stores, then control and data retrieval middle tiers, then another tier doing UI generation using a bunch of intermediate page definition languages and a frontends rendering those pages to a user and getting user input, probably with some local code thrown into the mix. Ditto for how cars are now mostly multiple programs running of various microcontrollers with one or more microprocessors in the mix all talking over a dedicated protocol. Ditto for how your frigging "smart" washing machine talking to your dedicated smartphone app for it probably involves a 3rd machine in the form of some server from the manufacturer and the whole thing is running over TCP/IP and using the Internet (hence depending on a lot more machines with their dedicated software such as Routers and DNS servers) rather than some point-to-point direct protocol (such as Serial) like in the old days.

Anyways, the point being that even if AI actually delivers more upsides than downsides as a tool to improve programmer output, that stuff is going to be eaten up by increasing demands on the complexity of the software we do, same as the benefits of better programming languages were, the benefits of better IDEs were, of the widespread availability of pre-made libraries for just about everything were, of templating were, of the easiness to find solutions for the problem one is facing from other people on the Internet were, of better software development processes were, of source control were, of colaborative development tools were and so on.

Funnily enough, for all those things there were always people claiming it would make the life of programmers easier, when in fact all it did was make the expectations on the software being implemented go up, often just in terms of bullshit that's not really useful (the "smart" washing machine using networking to talk to a smartphone app so that the machine manufacturers can save a few dollars by not putting as many physical controllers in it, is probably a good example)

I'm 90% sure it's something to do with the stock market, buy backs and companies having to do cryptic shit to keep up with a fake value to their shares

Its not that dumb as you think, its way dumber.

This assumes it is about output. 20 years of experience tell me it's not about output, but about profits and those can be increased without touching output at all. 🤷‍♂️

AI-assisted coding […] means more ambitious, higher-quality products

I'm skeptical. From my own (limited) experience, my use-cases and projects, and the risks of using code that may include hallucinations.

there are roughly 29 million software developers worldwide serving over 5.4 billion internet users. That's one developer for every 186 users,

That's an interesting way to look at it, and that would be a far better relation than I would have expected. Not every software developer serves internet users though.

What do you expect? Half of these decision makers are complete idiots that are just good at making money and think that that means they are smarter than anyone who makes less than them. They then see some new hyped up tech, they chat with ChatGPT and they are dump enough to be floored by it's "intelligence" and now they think it can replace workers but since it's still early, they assume that it will quickly surpass the workers. So in their mind, firing ten programmers and saving like two million a year, while only spending maybe a few tens of thousands a year on AI will be a crazy success that will show how smart they are. And as time goes on and the AI gets better, they will save even more money. So why spend more money to help the programmers improve, when you can just fire them and spend a fraction of it on AI?