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.

From my experience, it is getting better over time, and I believe that there's still a lot of relatively low hanging fruit, particularly in terms of integrating the LLM with the language server protocol and other tooling. But having said that, at this point in time, it's just not good enough for independent work, so I would suggest using it only as you would pair-program with a mid-level human developer who doesn't have much context on the project, and has a short attention span. In particular, I generally only have the AI help me with one function/refactoring at a time, and in a way that is easy for me to test as we go, and am finding immense value.

I think some of the consternation we see from the anti LLM crowd (of which I'm one) is this line of reasoning. These LLMs produce fine code when the code you are asking for is in its training set. So they can be better than a mid level dev and much faster in narrow, unknown contexts. But with no feedback to warn you, if you ask it for code that it has no or only a bit of data on, it is much worse than a rubber duck.

That and tech's status inflation means when we are talking about "mid level" engineers, really we are talking about engineers with a couple years of experience who have just graduated to the training wheels phase of producing production code. LLMs are still broadly aimed at removing the need for what I would just call junior engineers.