After many decades of coding, probably 1M+ LOC*, for real, I am purposely doing most of my work through coding agents to understand their capabilities. No stupid demand that I take a day off from AI is remotely helpful here.
But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so:
1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.
2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.
3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.
4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.
5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.
I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.
*No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird by the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?
But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so:
1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.
2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.
3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.
4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.
5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.
I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.
*No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird by the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?