Versus other threads (here on HN, and especially on places like LinkedIn) where it's "I set up a pipeline and some agents and now I type two sentences and amazing technology comes out in 5 minutes that would have taken 3 devs 6 months to do".
I just recently added in Codex, since it comes with my $20/mo subscription to GPT and that's lowering my Claude credit usage significantly... until I hit those limits at some point.
2012 + 300 + 5~200... so about $1500-$1600/year.
It is 100% worth it for what I'm building right now, but my fear is that I'll take a break from coding and then I'm paying for something I'm not using with the subscriptions.
I'd prefer to move to a model where I'm paying for compute time as I use it, instead of worrying about tokens/credits.
LOL, been there, done that. It is much less frustrating and demoralizing than babysitting your kind of stupid colleague though. (Thankfully, I don't have any of those anymore. But at previous big companies? Oh man, if only their commits were ONLY as bad as a bad AI commit.)
> 1) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work.
> 2) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems do not speed up individuals or groups in domains other than software development. Clarification: We only study software development.
> 3) We do NOT provide evidence that AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting. Clarification: Progress is difficult to predict, and there has been substantial AI progress over the past five years [3].
> 4) We do NOT provide evidence that there are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting. Clarification: Cursor does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive speedup.
Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you are doing him a disservice with these kinds of comments.
Some of us enjoy learning how systems work, and derive satisfaction from the feeling of doing something hard, and feel that AI removes that satisfaction. If I wanted to have something else write the code, I would focus on becoming a product manager, or a technical lead. But as is, this is a craft, and I very much enjoy the autonomy that comes with being able to use this skill and grow it.
I consider myself a craftsman as well. AI gives me the ability to focus on the parts I both enjoy working on and that demand the most craftsmanship. A lot of what I use AI for and show in the blog isn’t coding at all, but a way to allow me to spend more time coding.
This reads like you maybe didn’t read the blog post, so I’ll mention there many examples there.
Well, yes, they are, some folks don't think "here's how I use AI" and "I'm a craftsman!" are consistent. Seems like maybe OP should consider whether "AI is a tool, why can't you use it right" isn't begging the question.
Is this going to be the new rhetorical trick, to say "oh hey surely we can all agree I have reasonable goals! And to the extent they're reasonable you are unreasonable for not adopting them"?
I think one of the more frustrating aspects of this whole debate is this idea that software development pre-AI was too "slow", despite the fact that no other kind of engineering has nearly the same turn around time as software engineering does (nor does they have the same return on investment!).
I just end up rolling my eyes when people use this argument. To me it feels like favoring productivity over everything else.
"Don't be snarky."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
Which is why I like this article. It's realistic in terms of describing the value-propositio of LLM-based coding assist tools (aka, AI agents).
The fact that it's underwhelming compared to the hype we see every day is a very, very good sign that it's practical.