The AI Investment Boom

> AI products are used ubiquitously to generate code, text, and images, analyze data, automate tasks, enhance online platforms, and much, much, much more—with usage expected only to increase going forward.

Why does every hype article start with this. Personally my copilot usage has gone down while coding. I tried and tried but it always gets lost and starts spitting out subtle bugs that takes me more time to debug than if i had written it myself.

I always have this feeling of 'this might fail in production in unknown ways' because i might have missed checking the code throughly . I know i am not the only one, my coworkers and friends have expressed similar feelings.

I even tried the new 'chain of thought' model, which for some reason seems to be even worse.

Well I have the exact opposite experience. I don't know why people struggle to get good results with llms.

Seriously though, what are you doing? Every single example everywhere throughout the internet that tries to show how good AI is at programming shows so mindbogglingly simplistic examples that it's getting annoying. It sure is a great learning tool when you're trying to do something experimental in a new stack or completely new project, I'll give you that, but once you reach the skill level where someone would hire you to be an X developer (which most developers disagreeing with you are, mid+ developers of some stack X) the thing becomes a barely useful autocomplete. Maybe that's the problem? It's just not a tool for professional developers?

I mean, let me just throw in an example here: I am currently working on https://guesspage.github.io , which is basically https://getguesstimate.com but for flowtext instead of a spreadsheet. The site is ... 99.9% Claude Sonnet written. I have literally only been debugging and speccing.

Sonnet can absolutely get very confused and break things. And there were tasks where I had a really hard time getting it to do the right thing, or understand what I wanted. But I need you to understand: Sonnet made this thing for me in two and a half days of part-time prompting. That is probably ten times faster than it would have taken me on my own, especially as I have absolutely no design ability.

Now, is this a big project? No, it's like 2kloc. But I don't think you can call it "simple" exactly. It's potentially useful technology. This sort of "just make this small tool exist for me" is where I see most of the value for AI in the next year. And the definition of "small tool" can stretch surprisingly far.

This is a simple project. Nobody is disputing that GenAI can automate a large chunk of the initial setup work, which dominates the time spent on small projects like this. But 99.999% of professional, paid software development is not working on the basic React infrastructure for a 2,000 loc javascript app.

Also your Google Drive API key is easily discoverable with about 15 seconds of looking at the JS source code -- this is something a professional software developer would (hopefully) have picked up without you asking, but an LLM isn't going to tell you that you shouldn't ship the `const API_KEY = ...` code as a file to the client, because you didn't ask.

> This is a simple project.

I mean, it would have taken me a lot longer on my own. Sure it's not a huge project, I agree; I wouldn't call it entirely trivial.

> Also your Google Drive API key is easily discoverable with about 15 seconds of looking at the JS source code

No, I'm aware of that. That's deliberate. There's no way to avoid it for a serverless webapp. (Note that Guesspage is entirely hosted on Github Pages.) All the data stored is public anyways, the key is limited to only have permission to access the stored data, and you still have to log in and grab a token that is only stored in your browser and cannot be accessed from other sites. Literally the only unique thing you can do with it is trigger a login request on your own site that looks like it comes from Guesspage; and you can do that just as easily by creating a new API key and setting its name to "Guesspage".

The AI actually told me that was unsafe, and I corrected it. To the best of my understanding, the only thing that you can do with the API key is do Google Drive uploads to your own drive or that of someone who lets you that look to Google as if my app is triggering them. If there's a danger that can arise from that, and I don't think there is, then it's on me, not on Sonnet.

(It's also referer domain limited, but that's worthless. If only there was a way to cryptographically sign a referer...)