So is human coding.

Come on now. I pull the slot machine every time I ask my coworker Digbert to work on a ticket.

Will Digbert be able to handle it or will he pretend to handle it? Or will he handle it in a way that it will break again in six weeks and will evolve into his full time job for a year?

If this is gambling, middle management has been gambling for too long.

I think somebody like Nate Silver might say “everything is gambling” if you really pressed them.

A big theme of software development for me has been finishing things other people couldn’t finish and the key to that is “control variance and the mean will take care of itself”

Alternately the junior dev thinks he has a mean of 5 min but the variance is really 5 weeks. The senior dev has mean of 5 hours and a variance of 5 hours.

I was just thinking about this. I was reading those tweets about the SV party were people were going home early to “check on their agents” or the “token anxiety” people are having over whether they are optimizing their agent usage. This is all giving me addiction vibes. Especially at the end of the day it seems like there is not much to show for it.

> But now either the AI can handle it or it can pretend to handle it. Frankly it's pretending both times, but often it's enough to get the result we need.

This has been how I think about it, too. The success rates are going up, but I still view the AI as an adversary that is trying to trick me into thinking it's being useful. Often the act is good enough to be actually useful, too.

Sometimes I feel that subsidising these packages (vs cost via API) is meant to make more and more people increasingly addicted

The problem with AI coding is that you no longer own the foundational tools.

Background image makes the website fairly hard/unpleasant to read (in mobile view)

> But this doesn't really resemble coding. An act that requires a lot of thinking and writing long detailed code.

Does it? It did in the past. Now it doesn't. Maybe "add a button to display a colour selector" really is the canonical way to code that feature, and the 100+ lines of generated code are just a machine language artifact like binary.

> But it robs me of the part that’s best for the soul. Figuring out how this works for me, finding the clever fix or conversion and getting it working. My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

Skill issue. Two nights ago, I used Claude to write an iOS app to convert Live Photos into gifs. No other app does it well. I'm going to publish it as my first app. I wouldn't have bothered to do it without AI, and my soul feels a lot better with it.

It's only "gambling" for now...

The odds of success feel like gambling. 60%, or 40%, or worse. This is downstream of model quality.

Soon, 80%, 95%, 99%, 99.99%. Then, it won't be "gambling" anymore.