How many times have we heard this? If it wasn't true all the other times why must I believe it now?

It was true the first time somebody said, "Hey, check out this ChatGPT thing." It blew my socks off. I still haven't found them. I guess they're probably behind the dryer or something.

I'm looking around and over the past year or 18mo I'm just not seeing a whole lot of change in software. Maybe increased bugs shipped?

I think you're just demanding too much too soon. Peoples' workflows are still adjusting. As you said yourself, correctly, management is being stupid about this whole thing.

The improvements won't all be visible at once. I will ship my next hardware product sooner than I would have, because Fable routed a board for me. Specifically, it wrote a Python program to solve a nasty routing problem that I just didn't feel like working on.

This morning, I was pissed because the volume shadow copy program I use for backups, Casper, screwed up a 30-hour job because it had scheduled a task behind my back, without my knowledge, that tried to perform the same backup to the same drive at the same time. Fable figured out what happened; all I knew was that the boot sector on the target drive was hosed. I will avoid that problem in the future by telling Fable or Astra to find me a simple command-line shadow copy utility that doesn't suck, and if no such utility exists, write it from scratch. That will not be a problem for Fable or Astra, but I wouldn't have dreamed of relying on an LLM to do that last year.

Will this win be visible to you, as a consumer? No, because LOL at anybody trying to sell something like that from here on out.

The software that I develop to support the hardware? I rarely work on it anymore, as of a few weeks ago. When I want a new feature added, I ask Claude (or, again, Astra, which is now better than Fable in some respects.) Claude could do a lot of that work last year, but it needed extensive babysitting. Now it has taste. It chooses the controls, lays out the dialog box and writes the help text. You won't notice the details as a consumer, you'll just see more rapid incremental improvements coming out for my software and ultimately the hardware as well.

Speaking of my very-obscure hardware, last week I ran into a very obscure firmware bug in some code I wrote. Or, rather, my customer did. Different customers are demanding both new features and bug fixes, and I only have the bandwidth for one of those. So: "Claude, see if you can figure out why the board stopped responding to input X when input Y went away. Here are the component data sheets." Took it about an hour but it would have taken me longer.

I would like to say I used the time it saved me to work in parallel on new features, but in reality I spent it here instead, arguing with Luddites. They say "you are your calendar," so I guess I enjoy that even more than building new stuff. Funny how much the clankers are teaching me about myself!