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 ludicrously simple app and also - the code[0] is of very poor quality.

[0] https://github.com/Guesspage/guesspage.github.io/blob/master...

Eh, it's a bit hacked together sure. I find it easy to read?

Good code isn't just easy to read, it's easy to change. The code in this app is brittle, tightly coupled and likely to break if the app is changed.