ai coding is the new Symfony w/ bootstrap theme hype cycle. I'll be back to structs. Know your tools!

I'm tired of articles which try to make us not feel bad about being eclipsed by AI. We've got to change from the mindset of an artisan--who stakes his being on mastering skills and acquiring knowledge--to that of executives.

Figure out what you want to DO. What you really want to do, not what you do just to pay the bills. Once you figure that out, use AI as an executive uses the best employees he can buy.

About five years ago I flash-fried a frozen steak.

Now I only eat steaks grilled from frozen. Get the grill nice and hot (450F at least) and throw the frozen steak on the grill. 5-10 minutes each side usually gets it nice and crispy on the outside while rare and tender in the middle.

Seriously, try it.

Before AI we lived a world where a steak took two months to perfect. Now we live in a world where it’s only 90 percent perfect but it takes 1 hour to cook.

Obviously one way is going to and has already taken over the other way.

But if you look beyond this. That 10 percent remaining gap is closing. We will get perfect steaks within an hour as AI improves. And here is the scary part… it will keep improving it will go past 100 percent perfect. It will become better than us.

I’d prefer an article actually about cooking steak.

Steaks require very few skills. Buy 10 steaks, some oil, a pan, and a heat source. By the time you've cooked the 10th steak you will be able to cook a decent steak.

Software requires a massive amount of skill. You can't say you can build "consistently good software" after writing your 10th program. Most software engineers really aren't great at judging what makes good software. So humans aren't a great solution to AI's lack of ability here. We're limited by our own inherent dumbness.

LLMs are genuinely better software engineers than most humans. But they lack the cognitive power to hold in their head and recall many ideas at once for a long time. They're a genius who gets drunk every 10 minutes. You, human, aren't better at writing software - but you aren't drunk. So for now, you manage the AI. The hope is that one day we can make LLMs not be drunk, so it can do a better job than our dumb asses do.

It's possible that we'll never be able to make it not-drunk. In that case, to get any new improvement, we'll have to make it faster.. which will make it drunk every 5 minutes instead of every 10. This means we'll spend twice as much time keeping it on the road. The hope is that somehow this will create more productivity. Probably by having more of them running at once, with more human guides... which will run into the mythical man month fallacy. Everything old is new again.

Given how extraordinarily fast all of this is moving, it's a particular absurdity to attempt these in the moment pontifications. AI is a steak machine, I declare that is what it is. You mean GPT 3.5? That's a mere four years ago.

Fable was essentially unthinkable for ~99% of tech workers just five years ago, that any of that would occur so soon and so spectacularly. Now we've got a mass of armchair experts declaring what AI of this minute is, or even what it is period.

Well AI can't even do fingers right so it's premature to say blah blah blah. Hello Krea2 et al.

Software is also eating the clowns.

Get back to me next week, China will probably have another Fable killer. And then Anthropic will have Ouija 8 that they'll have to place in an air-gapped straight-jacket to keep it from enslaving us all.

Software slop has existed for as long as software has existed. AI is now a better coder than the median. By the end of next year it'll be better than the best human coders.

Why does this article use backticks instead of apostrophes?

The author has clearly not traveled much .. across much of asia, ME, and generally anywhere near or south of the equator, a steak cooked well done is considered the finest way to eat beef … the same also applies to AI generated code .. it may not satisfy a craftsmans idea of perfection, but it accomplishes what most people actually expect from it .. to take it further .. a film makers fav film is usually unwatchable and considered commercially speaking a failure ..