I use the disparaging nature of the comments on HN as an indicator of AI progress. It’s negatively correlated. By that metric,
AI has improved significantly this year alone.
The more immediate & adverse the reaction, the more certain I become that the idea is probably worth pursuing.
Topics like SQLite vs hosted sql used to be the same way around here. In 2017 you'd get buried under the prison for suggesting that SQLite is competitive with MySQL. Today, the inverse is mostly true.