alt Hacker NewsOr just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party libraries faster. Use it to research new topics. Use it to help draft RFCs and design documents. Use it as a chat buddy when working on hard problems.
I think the AI companies all stink to high heaven and the whole thing being built on copyright infringement still makes me squirm. But the latest models are stupidly smart in some cases. It's starting to feel like I really do have a sci-fi AI assistant that I can just reach for whenever I need it, either to support hard thinking or to speed up or entirely avoid drudgery and toil.
You don't have to buy into the stupid vibecoding hype to get productivity value out of the technology.
You of course don't have to use it at all. And you don't owe your money to any particular company. Heck for non-code tasks the local-capable models are great. But you can't just look at vibecoding and dismiss the entire category of technology.
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> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement
I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests.
1. Is it transformative?
I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that.
2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original?
If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it.
Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably.
But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.
> Or just don't use AI to write code.
Anecdata, but I'm still finding CC to be absolutely outstanding at writing code.
It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting, basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction: like to make sure it tests things in several different ways, for several different cases, including performance, comparing directly to similar implementations (and constantly triple-checking that it actually did what you asked after it said "done").
For $200/mo, I can still run 2-3 clients almost 24/7 pumping out features. I rarely clear my session. I haven't noticed quality declines.
Though, I will say, one random day - I'm not sure if it was dumb luck - or if I was in a test group, CC was literally doing 10x the amount of work / speed that it typically does. I guess strange things are bound to happen if you use it enough?
Related anecdata: IME, there has been a MASSIVE decline in the quality of claude.ai (the chatbot interface). It is so different recently. It feels like a wanna-be crapier version of ChatGPT, instead of what it used to be, which was something that tried to be factual and useful rather than conversational and addictive and sycophantic.