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Some thoughts on AI (I'm resisting writing a blog post because I have nothing of great value tbh, but it is a hard force to resist): I understand a bit better people who say it's fun to use. It kind of is if you have something you want to build and if there is a lot of boring code to get there.

I still don't get how people are vibe coding or even letting the AI go off and write code based on a loose design. I find I have to spec the work carefully, generate small-ish chunks of changes and interact a lot, and spend a lot of time reviewing.

It's getting better so quickly! Even compared to a few months ago, it is significantly better at coding. It is surprising how good it can be and occasionally surprising how stupid it can be. It seems hard to have a good intuition for when it will do well and do badly.

It makes the 'fuck around' stage of software development much quicker, but makes the 'find out' phase much slower (although it does help there too a bit). Overall, I think it makes development quicker, but not as much as it feels, especially if you value quality of the output.

I'm more worried than ever about the junior to senior engineer pipeline. It seems clear to me that SWE with AI still requires a lot of experience to do well, and I don't see how new engineers are going to get that experience in industry.

I hate reviewing AI-generated code (including the code I prompted). I still get annoyed waiting for the AI to 'think'. Too short to context switch, too long to stare.

Finding reasonable best practices and general advice is hard, I guess because AI is moving fast, controversial, and there's a lot of crank stuff it gets a lot of attention. Also the Claude docs are kinda bad for that.

I still think using AI to generate art or design work or most prose is unethical (and produces rubbish too). I think code is a bit different because of open source, but there are still ethical questions that shouldn't be ignored. (Also resource use, but water use seems to be a red herring).

The worst part of AI is the change in balance between labour and capital, and that is terrifying.

I still wish it didn't exist (for personal and political reasons), but it does and it is not going to disappear. (Everything is impermanent and attachment to the past leads to suffering). For better or worse, it is causing massive changes in our industry and will cause even bigger ones.