There's a lot of value in skipping months of familiarizing oneself with a certain framework/language and immediately being productive but it doesn't read like the output of someone like Fabrice Bellard (a 100x in my book).
ps. Not 100x if you are a professional. Probably 100x for a beginner. Great all the same.
And then the rest of the post describes the most tedious hand-holding of software that I can imagine. I'm glad I don't spend much time on boilerplate, so I get to skip this.
Cursor.sh is a pretty good alternate but I find it a bit buggy at times. I think for me right now AI is great at:
- Quickly rolling an implementation of something in a completely unfamiliar API/language
- Debugging “conceptual” errors, where the problem is me not understanding something
- Playing “spot the typo”.
- Writing boilerplate you know must have already been done a million times.
It’s not so good at:
- Zero shot a conceptually elegant data schema or project structure
- Debugging obscure errors
- Debugging errors with misleading context provided by the user (aka, your hunch and supplied context is completely wrong and the AI gets confused as well)
If code behaves anything like games, we're going to knock humans out of developing entirely. I'm forecasting that "developer" will disappear as a job title and become a function of what we currently recognise as product. I would be a lot more comfortable in my career prospects if I thought being a 10x developer is good enough.
Once these models become good enough that human review of the code reduces the quality - which will probably take a little while, but looks like it is incoming - then we can probably engineer out the monkey in the middle copy-pasting code.