That's quite shocking, at a sufficiently advanced level we can make all non-realistic graphics purely out of SVGs, as they'd have good scaling for things like logos and app icons. I know it was technically and theoretically possible before AI but most people weren't spending hours tweaking SVG HTML. I remember making an SVG dark mode toggle icon and it took days to get it right, I assume it's one shottable now.
"Designer" is a very broad term and can mean very different things to different people, not everyone is doing stuff that can be represented nicely by vectors.
That photo looks pretty hilariously stupid, so this appears to be more of a first toe dip rather than some indication we can one-shot a previously difficult process.
The problem is not photorealism. The SVG is outright dumb, its on the wrong side of the table, the table has fucked up geometry (its tilted) and many more minor flaws.
At the bottom it says "Score 98.58", what measure is used for this score? It's kind of horrible, the perspective is all off (legs of the table makes that very obvious), the mouse/hamster has two mouths, a stub for a right paw, looks like left hand holds a melon on a stick or something, and there are pluses in the background for some reason. Not sure it'd call it "close to perfect" which the score seems to want to indicate.
Incredible, I've played table-tennis since I was like 14, and I didn't notice that egregious error yet I noticed all the other small ones! Thanks for pointing that out, should have been very obvious.
Yeah, ranking is for entire model, not only SVG generation. Maybe I remove it entirely and add generation date instead.
I was thinking to manually grade/rank the SVGs, but I decided against it, as it is indeed subjective.
I was thinking it could have at least a simple objective check (hamster doesn't have extra or missing parts, table has 2 sides, and net is in the middle, etc.).
Cool, I started using a RBPi4 at I had purchased 3 years ago and never used. I use it to be able to start my "AI-agent" PC remotely, to send wake-up-on-LAN signal from anywhere. I am also thinking now to add a tasks queue on PI itself, so I can send requests directly to the PI, it stores them, and maybe once or twice a day, it turns on the PC, sends all the tasks, then turns it off.
Yeah, this is also the idea of materialism in a way, that everything that happens is a consequence of what already exists, nothing new is ever created, just a permutation of the current state.
Still a hard philosophical, to know whether we have intelligence/free will, or just really complex algorithms that combine existing knowledge.
It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
From what pros are saying after matches, especially in classical chess, it's almost always preparation and metagaming the opponent vs finding good moves.
It's a lot of mind games involved, going for specific openings, repeating same moves as last match, doing a poor by surprising, move etc.
Many GMs said that to win a match you have to play non-ideal moves many times, otherwise it will likely end in a draw.
Well people will still pay to watch a human player play tennis even if a robot could play infinitely better than that human. Try something like that with an employer and software engineer combo (and no, you don't even have to imagine that).
Well look, the wall is already losing every point by volleying your serve so I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here already. But give me an exact specification for your curved wall and I'll tell you how I'd beat it.
> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.
The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.
My car has offline maps and navigation. I don't really care for navigation, but I find the maps pretty handy. VW releases updates very infrequently, and I don't know for how long they'll keep doing that. Recently I wondered whether I could convert OpenStreetMaps into the format used by the car. Codex took around a week to do that for me, with some light steering. That project would no doubt have taken me months - maybe a whole year to do on my own, and I'm not fully confident I could pull it off as well as Codex did. I can pull the most up to date maps from OSM, edit them as much as I want, and they look great on the car. It's mind boggling to me that we have this tech.
Love that, I have similar desires to be able to control some climate controllers so I can get a more native bluetooth connection to it and override their programming for fine control of devices and have it never phone back home. One of these days I'll have time to throw an LLM at it, but I've been working on a dead project for 4 years ago I dropped because I realized how daunting it was going to be turn it into a product, but now I've made progress that would have taken me a year, in a few weekends.
I'm not sure. To be more specific, my car has a Delphi MIB2 Standard head unit (which uses NDS.Classic maps). I think the keys are likely to work with all MIB2 Standard head units, as that's how VW categorizes the updates, but I don't know about other MIB versions.
Yes, that's cool and useful. Creating stuff for ourselves, for our own use. But we are social animals, we like sharing.
Before it was cool to share an app you made, but now? What's the point of sharing an app, if the other person can make their own, even better suited for their needs, in a few seconds?
I think the next 2-4 months are the best time ever to build and sell software. But it has to sell now. It will likely be obsolete in 1 year, and no one will care anymore.
I think this is the last easy chance to capture an audience.
I think there is value in an app you can drag/drop or exe you can just click (trust issues aside, maybe get them from some marketplace or walled garden) and that will keep working after the next OS update or get updates for future changes in XYZ.
Oy wey, one might have thought that the AI is to the benefit of the whole humankind, but no, let's all eat the smaller fish before the big one eats us!
indie hacking seems dead-ish because everything can just be cloned instantly, and if you don't have a serious go to market plan with a latent user base you're SOL.
In game dev (weirdly enough) I don't think this is true.
I was thinking about this yesterday and realized that I don't even want to play only my own games (made by LLMs or me), I explicitly want to experience what other people have come up with, what stories they have invented.
And yes, might be it's all made by LLMs in the future, but that's another discussion. In "art" I think it still matters, I care about how it's made, not only that it exists.
EDIT: "And if you don't have a serious go to market plan with a latent user base you're SOL" ths is probably true though :D
Me too! (although I am hoping to release it, but it was primarily for me)
I was thinking about writing something and hopefully starting a community/resource area around hyper-personalized software, it's so easy to make now. I was thinking about how it'd be useful to have a place to share these, for ideation, sharing techniques and the ability for LLMs to riff on something already existing. It's not quite like open source's advantage of having many people contribute to the same project, but rather something that is closer to evolution, giving the next generation a place to start modifying.
Would you have any interest in sharing what you've made?
> Would you have any interest in sharing what you've made?
It's a collaborative mapping app. I hope to release and opensource it one day. Under the hood uses MQTT for users to subscribe to map updates from other users.
The problem with it, like other apps of this nature, is that it requires the "network effect". ie. enough people using it to make it useful. So I'm trying to make it useful for a small group or organisation.
I have a million ideas flying around in my head, and given the capabilities of modern LLMs, they are all within reach. It can be a bit overwhelming sometimes...
I have fun ideas that are kind of complex and I can just experiment and see now with a couple spare hours on the weekend.
Trying to explain to my non software engineering friends that they could build any small app they have an idea for and they’re like I wouldn’t know how, and I’m like, you just ask and you can literally figure it out now so quick.
Maybe software engineers are the most excited and the most cynical.
Exactly!
After years of having running data in one app, walks in another, workout in another, I vibecoded a private and tailored to me app for all things fitness. It has been great.
Has all the features I need and nothing more and it's private by definition.
It's less lack of interest in creating that bothers me, it's my lack of interest in learning – it would surely be crazy for a SWE to care about how some new framework works anymore? Even if someone could reasonably argue that it might be slightly useful today there's almost zero chance it will be useful in 6-12 months times.
But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc...
I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.
And, any time you mentioned getting a bit better at hitting a ball after practicing over your weekend, a bunch of people carrying printouts of generic exponential graphs jumped out to call you a Luddite who should sell his gear ASAP while it still has any value and or else it's "cope".
Is it realistic to keep people working jobs that don’t get anything done in the long term? I know most people will say that’s already happening, but imagine a society where basically every job is just a bullshit job made to keep you occupied, do you think people will continue working in a society like that?
Like you foresaw, I'll say this is the reality for most people. I think that just like now, those who want to do meaningful work will seek opportunities to do so.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
Yes, it's realistic. We're at least a couple of generations into this experiment now. Millions of people travel to and from an office to sit on a chair, doing nothing, all day, every day. This in turns keeps a whole bunch of people employed servicing their cars, preparing their food, sweeping the floor behind them etc.
None of these people question whether their jobs are really necessary for the few things we really need: food, shelter, warmth, health etc.
A couple of generations ago most women were employed in the least bullshit job of all: running a household. But now they're all wage slaves too. So yeah, it does work.
I asked Gemini to list the 10 most popular holiday destinations in the US, and the 10 places with the highest crime. There's only 1 place in the intersection: New Orleans.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
That's a terrible metric, because people going on a vacation probably aren't going there purposefully to commit crimes. What you want to do is look for increases in crime in a given place during holidays
Is that alone really a better metric? At least in Europe a lot of people travel during holidays, so there's less risk breaking into city flats because they're empty.
The steam engine replaced a lot of jobs. Tractors replaced a lot of jobs. Calculators replaced a lot of jobs. Computer used to be a job description before it was a personal device. There will be new jobs.
And for those who don't get to find a job, there'll be a convenient WWIII to utilize themselves, just like there was WWI after the steam engine replaced a lot of jobs and WWII after tractors replaced even more.
It won't happen overnight. Social change is constrained by integration speed. The average enterprise has many tasks that could be automated by models for several years already, yet they remain stubbornly unautomated. The reasons are primarily social:
• Lots of people aren't aware of what the models can do.
• They also aren't paying attention, and getting their attention is hard.
• Their impression of AI was formed by cheap low quality AI like free ChatGPT as of two years ago, Google AI overviews or Microsoft Copilot. So they think it sucks.
• A LOT of executives got burned by early pilots that overpromised then failed. Enterprise IT is a wasteland of dead AI pilots.
• Their IT systems are difficult to connect to models because they lack proper APIs or auth systems. Note the huge emphasis on fast computer use in the Astra announcement. A lot of work can only be done by clicking things.
• Executives don't want to let employees go, but aren't sure they can find new work for them either.
The last point is worth dwelling on. HN is full of socialists who imagine corporate executives as cigar smoking top hat wearers who chuckle all the way to the bank. The reality is more mundane: most executives don't want to lay people off and will fight hard to avoid doing so.
The average person in a position to make an AI project work either isn't incentivized with stock - this is often the case outside the US even for quite high ranking execs - or they are but don't believe laying people off will raise the share price enough to be worth the pain.
Also, executives often measure their success and self-worth by how many people report to them. Laying off half their department, even if it gets them a monetary bonus, would lead directly to a loss of social status as they can no longer say they manage 1,000 people but only 200, which matters if their social circle are all managers too (and for their wives, girlfriends, etc).
Layoffs suck and people HATE doing them, which is why companies often resort to forced percentage based layoffs to get managers to do it. If the incentives aren't there, the average executive will just sit on obvious AI deployment opportunities and/or deliberately sabotage them because getting rid of people is just all downside for them with no upside.
So institutions have enormous inertia. Model capabilities will run far ahead of what is actually used in reality, and this will continue for decades. It does mean that startups have a better chance than ever of outcompeting much larger incumbents though, as not hiring is far easier than firing.
Also: let's be honest. "I wrote a little app in a few weekends" -- "I built this in a few weeks", "this took me a month instead of a year"
These are productivity increases, sure, but still are $2000, $8000, $14000 of labor.
And doesn't count continued increase build time, more features, maintenance. The $20/mo SaaS isn't going away, and work can't pay you to endlessly tinker on fun internal projects and save $1200 of subscriptions for your $120k/yr salary.
It's fun, but SaaS is going to shift to more feature rich and we're going to see a ton of smaller projects that were pains to get started that can now work in a short amount of time.
Companies are going to get a huge surge of random internal projects and have to debate whether all the upkeep is valid for the pet projects, or if it's people fucking around at an untold scale.
Great point and writing. We have real world data point now which is waymo and how many drivers are still driving taxi in USA. All others are 10-100x time more complex than this, it takes literally decades
I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.
I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.
Even if in the unlikely case UBI gets implemented, there is no way payment will be equal. Why would the rich give up their positions of power? They’ll just get more security and bribe politicians, enough to build private armies and fortresses so the poor and starving can’t touch them, and have no choice but to live out their lives in squalor…we’re seemingly headed that way according to many even without pervasive autonomous machines taking away all work.
> The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
Maybe instead of creating cool stuff try to go and solve real problems? It seems to me that we are lacking in that department since all that LLM fuss has started 3 or so years ago.
I believe the original point was that we shouldn't be wasting our gifts on creating silly toys but rather going back to basics and finding the real problems, whether that involves software or not.
we need to find real solvable problems. Those you listed are mostly not solvable in society with current governance process. AI got lots of abilities suddenly emerged, and can be applied on solving problems and not silly toys.
Do you actually think a person using an llm is going to start curing diseases and solve the obesity epidemic (in America) in lieu of creating fun personal software projects?? Or as another commenter said solve climate change? Surely you don’t actually believe this right? Am I missing something?
It is a subset of something of a value to somebody else and enough so that they are willing to pay you for it, a product, a service. Preferably to pay enough to justify your spent time of course, maybe not right away but at least long term. Even better if not purely digital as it seems we have quite enough of those already.
For some reason, I feel much less excited about creating things myself just knowing that ai can do it in 1/10th of the time. Even if I know it wouldn’t turn into a business or make me money. I don’t know why that is, but I was much more motivated to build anything (even things just for myself) before ai. Kinda depressing
At least for me, I think half the value in building to learn was that the knowledge and skills acquired in the process, especially cursory skills and knowledge, might be useful in the future, even if there was no obvious path to application at the time.
I built several projects at home, many involving learning e.g. graphics programming and rendering, that would never be useful in my professional work, but which were intrinsically interesting and enabled me to build other, more useful projects later on. It also gave me greater confidence in my abilities as an engineer, and cursory skills I learned in the process did help in my professional work.
Now it feels like what’s the point. The machines can or will be able to build anything I could want, useful or not, faster and with less frustration. I probably won’t be able to be employed as an engineer long enough to build a career on said skills. And I can’t mentally justify not spending that time with friends and family, when the expected return is basically zero.
I still find math, science, and engineering interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but in a closer sense to how one might feel about playing video games. The information is or will eventually be useless, so it isn’t worth spending a significant amount of time on.
Wow thank you this was actually very helpful for me in understanding why I’m feeling so demotivated by ai. Gaining knowledge, even if not immediately useful, to become a better overall developer was a huge part of why I enjoyed spending so much time building things in my free time. Now it seems pointless, because with ai, will that knowledge really make a difference? Probably not. Bummer, anyways I appreciate the comment.
I've felt the same for a while now. On my free time I have completely stopped building projects where the main motivation is professional learning. I now only build stuff I want or am genuinely interested in, and utilize AI in the process to save time.
Eventually I plan on learning some physical skills, like renovating, working with electronics and plumbing. I doubt robotics will render that useless very quickly.
That's fair, I guess I just enjoy the craft of building stuff rather than the outcome/product itself. Which I know I can still do, but for some reason just doesn't feel the same now. Hard to explain I guess.
You're not being ambitious enough! Spend your tokens now building the primitives and foundations of much larger, complex systems. No matter how much faster and more efficient models get, eliminating the gruntwork will always pay dividends.
That's what I am doing and usually telling others to: don't prompt the AI to do something, prompt the AI to create a system that does that something.
It's true, it's fun to have those systems, maybe I care more about them than the product, because the promise is "better, cheaper results in the future". But those systems are software too, and only tools, and will likely too be obsolete in 1 year from now.
I think it's a bit better when creating stuff now with a very short-term view: create something that is useful NOW, it doesn't matter it won't be useful tomorrow. Create it now and get it into the hands of people now.
The point is to inject something into the process that these AIs can't do for you.
People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.
Every piece of software you have interacted with that's run by a company and has been updated within the last 6 months? You'd be hard pressed to find a company not using AI to develop software.
I am a software dev and use LLMs daily but that’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about vibe coded products built new. I find LLMs much less useful at things that are not already built. I’ve watched initiative after initiative fail because of too much dogmatic AI usage and leaning on it to do design which then falls over on its face.
Fast at first especially to a PoC but then you hit a time when the arch just gets so grimy it falls over, you ship the wrong thing and you end up in rework hell. This isn’t guaranteed but when it’s teams of people slinging slop it gets worse and worse, the best devs burn out from trying to manage the ones who believe AI will save them.
My optimistic take on this is that they are still in process. One or two man team might be able to code as fast as 6 or 10 man team in some cases, but the design process takes just as long. GTA6 has a crazy amount of resources and programmers on it, but still takes years to come out-- because they have to balance, develop content, playtest and find bugs, etc. even if bug fixing was instantaneous and thinking of something made it happen, it would still take a lot of time. So someone making something great as a solo developer is still going to take as long as a small team of people making something great before. Which is years.
My philosophical take is that there are different types of coders, the ones who did it because they wanted to see their design be implemented and those who love the technical puzzle (with obvious overlap). The technical puzzle is taking a hit currently, but I think it will still exist in some form; the designer trying to get something implemented still loves the design work primarily which is sorely lacking in current LLMs, but if they don't have enough technical knowledge they will still get slapped in the face by technical gaps and bugs that LLMs make.
For corporate stuff, I think bureaucracy and issues with churn reduce the effectiveness of using an LLM because the most effective way might be anathema to corporate fiefdoms and structure. The churn is a problem for everyone though...
I don't think they are here yet, but they will come.
People will get "starter" projects that they can tweak themselves, and that come with AI instructions for development.
Imagine wanting to create a high quality RPG game. You could spend days prompting and hundreds of dollars in tokens, or you can buy a "RPG starter kit" that contains all the systems already impmemented and tested and markdown files on how the AI can add features, test, deploy, etc.
A project I've just started is to follow the Roguelikedev tutorial on a 32-year-old PC, using the period dev tools. I'm going to have to write everything myself, and I'm currently researching how to poke the graphics adaptor.
Why bother doing that when it would be vastly easier on a modern computer?
So this what a deflation economy is like. People don't want to do anything because they feel like whatever they do will be worthless in the near future.
I've retreated to doing stuff with my hands. Wokdwork, DIY, that kind of thing. At least for now and the foreseeable future that doesn't seem pointless. Only problem is it's hard work yet nobody would pay me for it.
Yeah, I think if you're a nice person that people enjoy being around then there will be plenty of opportunities.
Funnily enough, I used to work on pre-LLM natural language processing at an insurance company about 10 years ago. One of the call centre staff quipped about us taking their jobs. I hadn't given it a moment's thought beforehand, but I said something then that I think still stands today. I said that what we are trying to do is automate the boring parts of your job so that you have more time to do the part that really matters: being there, being human, for someone in their time of need.
When my mum died at home this year, my dad called the local GP practice to let someone know and was greeted by a chatbot. This is someone who has just lost their wife of 40 years and doesn't really know what to do. Imagine having to deal with a chatbot in this time. It didn't work and he got frustrated and gave up, exasperated.
I took over but instead called a local hospice charity that had been involved and got straight through to a person. In no more than 60 seconds I had said everything that needed to be said, it was acknowledged with genuine sympathy and the wheels were in motion for the next steps.
This is what we need society to be like. We should use computers for the things they are good at, but we don't need them to be like people, because we have people for that.
I agree, some things should be automated, something should never be. I think it will take us quite some time to realize which is which, and the consequences involved.
The problem with AI now is that it seems to be taking over all the things nice, and making it harder to appreciate human-made things. It's like being in a museum with 99 AI-generated paintings, and 1 human-made one. Whould would enjoy visiting that museum? You don't even know which one is the human-made one. This is how it feels now, what's the point of creating "hand-made" stuff when it gets lost in a sea of slop? Both parties are upset (creator for not getting attention, viewer for not knowing anymore what is real or not, or what was made and curated by a human or not).
I made a random tweet yesterday, that "the future is offline". I do think we will get fatigue from having access to infinite, hyper-personalized content, so much that we will completely disregard ALL content.
I also lost my 31yo partner to cancer last year, and the only thing she cared most about was being remembered and knowing that she had done something meaningful in her life, that she left some impact on this world. AI is taking many of those opportunities, to make impact.
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Well, for the same reason playing chess vs a person is more fun than doing chess puzzles, if we follow that analogy.
Also, creating something with AI doesn't really feel like you made it yourself.
And, if you make it without AI, most of the times it feels pointless, why spend 30 days on working on something that can be done faster and better in 1 hour?
I am not saying about doing things for fun, but about creating useful things.
Yes, you can do "hand-crafted" things, and people appreciate that, but for code, people aren't able to see the craft anyway.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we are social animals, we get most joy by sharing what we have created. And the problem now is that it's getting very hard to share and discover genuine creations vs AI-generated ones.
It is, if you are trying to sell all of them in the same market, so 99 stalls with mass produced stuff, one with handcrafted stuff, but you don't know which is which.
You can play PvP in those games. Not really the same with developing software. In fact, not using ai would probably make you lose if there was some “software PvP” mode or development.
IMO there has been a regime shift to building things for yourself and what is cool is the output of the tools you make.
I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.
This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
> This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
This sounds more like the opposite of what you're saying. Music is one of my main hobbies too but I enjoy using a DAW to ... play and write music. Writing out specs and testing a new custom DAW seems closer to writing code in an IDE than playing music.
Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.
> Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.
There's got to be someone to listen to your music in order for that secret sauce to have any meaning.
What's the use of any "secret sauce" in something that only you listen to, because everyone else is either content with AI slop "music", or better yet "create" it for themselves just like you "create" your secret DAW?
Don't worry, like with every revolutionary technology before this, it takes 5-10 years for people to find new and creative ways to use it. It will be considered its own medium in many spaces (e.g. film is now different to theatre)
The process was for you, the product was for the world.
Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways.
It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.
Have you ever worked directly with customers? Even those paying huge amounts of money for custom software usually don't know what they really need. They usually know their problems, but even then it can still require a lot of exploration to get to the core of it all, and then design an appropriate solution; not to mention having a good awareness of how software actually intersects with real life rather than how a non-technical customer imagines it does.
I know we're getting closer to robots that can do all that but I don't believe we're there yet.
Can it? Last I checked, all my free software operating systems and browsers were still hacked together trash. I can't wait for AI to actually be good so I can spam a bunch of AGPL code with it.
I used GPT 5.6 Sol Extra High (Fast) for the last month, around 4-5h per day, and it managed to acomplished most of the tasks it had. It didn't really impress and often the end result needed one or two tweaks/fixes, but it did work and could create e2e solutions.
Yes, many projects, used in production at various scales.
Some even for large clients, and they work well in production, clients are happy, yet I feel no connection to the work. If the client says something, I just copy-paste it to the AI and it fixes it/implements it.
There is too much code and complexity to check if the changes are ok, apart from seeing it if it seems visually ok and if the problem is fixed live. It almost always works, but it definitely doesn't have the same feeling as thinking of the problem, finding a solution, and implementing it, part which most developers enjoy in their work.
> There is too much code and complexity to check if the changes are ok
To me, the challenge in software is to reduce this complexity to keep it manageable. Probably AI can manage more complexity than a human being, but it seems to be difficult to prevent or reduce that complexity in the first place. How is your experience once the complexity is too hard for a frontier LLM to handle, or for you to prompt the correct direction towards it?
I don't think AI can build anything blind that is production ready. Whatever results it gives initially are just a starting point for future iterations.
Almost all my projects are continously updated almost daily, based on my feedback and some automated systems (i.e. SEO feedback loops)
It's like telling a painter who polished their craft and every brush stroke for 20 years, that now got access to a robot that does the painting, to be more creative in what it tells the robot to paint.
Imagine Bob Ross prompting a robot what to paint...
There’s nothing stopping Bob Ross from painting and obviously nobody is suggesting him using a robot to paint. I think he’d be clearheaded enough to welcome new forms of creativity, unlike some of his less open minded fans.
I think it takes ~1 year of heavy usage for this feeling to set in, it's like the 5 stages of grief, there's different phases.
Now a big overwhelm come from the fact that the AI can work a lot faster than I can verify/check manually. Combined with the fact that not using the 100% usage of the subscription feels like wasting money/potential, leads to a feeling that I should always be doing more, where at the same time, it's getting hard to remember what am I even doing, when working on 3-4 projects at once.
And I do work in multiple projects at once, because that's how AI works best nowadays, if you have two threads running for the same project, it gets buggy or wasted tokens (like two people working in the same file at the same time, merge conflicts ,etc.)
So the solution is to have the AI work on many, independent tasks at once, but it gets overwhelming for a single person to keep track of all...
Leaving unused subscription percentage is getting rarer, however. I am about to bump up my plan, which is starting to feel like a drug addict's tolerance.
That's quite common with many models, after "High" reasoning, over-thinking starts occurring and the model skips over the right solution by convincing itself otherwise.
All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.
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