AI coding is mid(okay) yes, my main point is people use it and it's a good line of business right now for them. They expected bigger break throughs like gpt-2 to 3 to 4, and that's not happening so they have to lean on the other aspects of the business more.

The fact it is mid is why they are really needing all the other lines of business to work. AKA selling tokens to AI apps the specialize in other mid products, and limit the snakeoil AI products that are littering the market ruining AI's image of being the new catch all solution.

I was a big user of IntelliSense and more heavily, IntelliJ, for most of my career. It truly seemed like magic back then. I recall telling a colleague who preferred Emacs that it felt like having an editor that could read your mind, and would joke that my tab key was getting worn out.

Then I discovered LLMs.

If you think IntelliSense is comparable to what LLMs can do, you really, really need to try giving an AI higher-level problems to solve. Throwaway example I gave in a similar thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892576

I think a big part of simonw's shtick is trying to get people to give LLMs a proper try, and TBH that's what I end up doing a lot too, including right now! The problem is a "proper try" takes dedicated effort, because it's not obvious where the AI will excel or fail for your specific context, and people legitimately don't have enough time for that.

But once you figure it out, it feels like when you first discovered IntelliSense, except you already know IntelliSense, so it's like... IntelliSense raised to the power of IntelliSense.