As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right. We’ve been repeatedly told that AI will write 100% of the code by the end of the year. Whether that’s true or not, this may not be the best time to sit back.
Yeah, I’ve already seen how it’s affected SDEs first hand (since I am unfortunately in the same industry). They generally don’t know how to maintain or create code anymore. Management told them to not use their brain and instead use the slop generator, and now that skill has atrophied.
A silver lining is that some preliminary research shows that after a few weeks to months of not relying on the slop generators, skills can come back with a little effort. I hope the bubble pops and everyone is forced to relearn the skills they lost.
Also, to your point, the article claims models are getting better. A better way to frame this is that models are getting more expensive. LLM giants, at least the US-based ones, have been giving the appearance of improving models by using more resources, which one of the primary reasons they had to move to a pay-per-token system for the latest models. They aren’t all that much better for how expensive they are to operate and use.