There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.
The rate of progress in the last 3 years has been over my expectations. The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane. No idea how people can say "no improvement".
I wonder is there are parallel realities. What I remember from the last year is a resounding yawn at the latest models landing, and even people being actively annoyed in e.g. ChatGPT 4.1 vs 4 for being nerfed. Same for 5, big fanfare, and not that excited reception. And same for Claude. And nothing special in the last 2 months either. Nobody considers Claude 4.6 some big improvement over 4.5.
Sorry for closing this comment early, I need to leave my car at the house and walk to the car wash.
There was some improvement in terms of the ability of some models to understand and generate code. It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.
I still think that any claims that it can operate at a human level are complete bullshit.
It can speed things up well in some contexts though.
It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. There's no way that your comment can be taken seriously. It's 99.9% a troll comment, or simply delusional. 3 years ago the model (gpt3.5, the only one out there basically) was not able to output correct code at all. It looked like python if you squinted, but it made no sense. To compare that to what we have today and say "a bit more useful" is not a serious comment. Cannot be a serious comment.
It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice.
And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.
My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work.
That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me.
It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you hate it.
But you're sort of doing the same thing I did - "second coming of Christ"?!
I have no intention of changing your mind. I don't think of the people I reply to highly enough to believe they can change their minds.
I reply to these comments for other people to read. Think of it as me adding ky point of view for neutral readers.
Either way, I could use AI for some coding tasks back in GPT 3.5 days. It was unreliable, but not completely useless (far from it in fact)
Nowadays it is a little more reliable, and it can do more complex coding tasks with less detailed prompts. AI now can handle a larger context, and the "thinking" steps it adds to itself while generating output were a nice trick to improve its capabilities.
While it makes me more productive on certain tasks, it is the sort of the improvements I expected in 3 years of it being a massive money black hole. Anything less would actually be embarrassing all things considered.
Perhaps if your job is just writing code day in an out you would find it more useful than I do? As a software engineer I do quite a bit more than that, even if coding is the bit of work I used to enjoy the most.
What developments have been "staggering"? Claude 4.6 vs 4.5? ChatGPT 5.2 vs 5? The Gemini update?
Only the hype has been staggering, and bs non-stories like the "AI agents conspire and invent their own religion".
Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later
The case where it's not obvious is when the effect is <1.5x. I think that's clearly where we're at