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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

People aren't seeing the forest through the trees.

While lots of developers, journalists, analysts, investors and influencers are bickering about AGI, goalposts, benchmarks, hypes and fears, entire markets are being transformed silently and steadily.

I don't program anymore. (Massive change)

I removed tons of technical debt (Massive change, lol)

I am easily 10x more productive (Massive change)

The quality of 'my' code is easily 10x better and contains less bugs (I was never principled, pedantic or a guru, lol)

I sleep better and I also make more money as a result. I'm constantly amazed by all changes and improvements. There are so many opportunities to profit from this that I can't be bothered with discussions about hypotheticals.

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I have had a very different experience so far. The more code AI writes for me the worse it gets. It gets more complicated and it’s harder to follow and understand. It doesn’t refactor, it layers on top.

Even worse is that it’s hard to do anything about it at this point because reviewing code is very different from writing it, so even if I’ve seen it all I don’t have that same deep level of understanding that I do when I write it myself.

All these AI code bases are ticking time bombs. Either AI gets smart enough that it won’t matter in the future or we’re going to have a huge mess to clean up.

> The more code AI writes for me the worse it gets.

That makes no sense unless you're claiming that the models are getting worse at writing code.

> Either AI gets smart enough that it won’t matter in the future or we’re going to have a huge mess to clean up.

My prediction is that both will happen.

> That makes no sense unless you're claiming that the models are getting worse at writing code.

A hypothetical scenario is it needs to add two numbers so it writes add(x,y).

Later on it needs to add three numbers so it writes add(x, y, z)

Then it needs to add four…

Layers upon layers. A human would likely notice the pattern and refactor so add accepts a list.

My experience is that the LLM offers that approach from the get-go.

Also, I've worked with lots of humans who sadly would not notice the pattern.

> I am easily 10x more productive (Massive change)

Do you get paid 10x or is this a massive loss ? Because I don't know anyone getting paid 10x or working 10x less for the same salary.

Do you get paid 10x more for using an excavator after you upgraded from digging with a spoon?

Stop thinking as an employee. Start selling products and features.

It sounds like you're describing compilers?

I mean, the authors here cannot afford to see the forest, because they staked their careers on forests of trees being an impossibility.

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