alt Hacker NewsThe pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort."
It's also what we see in the wild. There are so many things going on, so many news about "AI". Are things getting better in any meaningful way? Why are we getting so much from "AI" yet things keep getting worse? The only real, objective and verifiable gain has been the stock price of a handful of companies, most of them heavily into infrastructure and manufacturing hardware.
Seems like a pretty clear pattern. There's so much output, but everything is worse. And the only argument we hear for why this is actually a good thing is just how much more output there is. Hmmm
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> The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort."
For me, it's "I can do this now; yesterday I could not."
I am not a developer - I am a hack with some experience in a smattering of languages who hits very real obstacles very quickly. AI has allowed me to overcome those obstacles and build things that literally I could not do before.
Yesterday I could not differentiate quake 3 matches within a single demo file.
Today I can split them into separate files and have the server stream them to me so I can watch them on demand.
I'm doing better, with less effort.
I mostly work on UI (for an internal, science-focused app) and it used be that features would take a sprint or two to grind out, and would always be an MVP to meet just the most essential user requirements, because that's all we could afford, time-wise, to do. And if I figured out while implementing there could be a nicer UI approach to something, it was often too late to change the approach.
Now, I can get to that MVP in under a day. And I can experiment with ten radically different approaches, or change my mind about something significant at any stage in the implementation. I can afford to add refinements and user-pleasing extras that I could never have done before. I'm not delivering features at 10x the speed. There's a limit to the amount of code I can (and should) be submitting for review. But the features I'm building are _better_, and the effort is less. I'm not wasting mental bandwidth typing out a dozen React components full of the same-old state management, form processing code, etc. I'm not trawling through charting library docs, looking for the precise combination of settings to make my chart's x-axis ticks labels rotate 45 degrees. My mental energy is focussed on figuring out what solution is actually _right_, not the minutiae of how to persuade the computer to do it.