I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs.

A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

I think it depends on the sort of work you do. We had some hubspot integration which hadn't been touched for three years break. Probably because someone at hubspot sunset their v1 api a few weeks too early... Our internal AI tool that I've build my own agents on updated our data transfer service to use the v3 api. It also added typing, but kept the rather insane way of delivering the data since... well... since it's worked fine for 3 years. It's still not a great piece of software that runs for us. It's better now than it was yesterday though and it'll now go back to just delivering business value in it's extremely imperfect form.

All I had to do was a two line prompt, and accept the pull request. It probably took 10 minutes out of my day, which was mostly the people I was helping explaining what they thought was wrong. I think it might've taken me all day if I had to go through all the code and the documentation and fixed it. It might have taken me a couple of days because I probably would've made it less insane.

For other tasks, like when I'm working on embedded software using AI would slow me down significantly. Except when the specifications are in German.

I thought you were going to point how this phrase (and others) make it painfully obvious this article was written by AI.

Well you should be surprised by the number of people who do not know this. Klarna is probably the most popular example where the CEO was all about creating more code, then fired everyone before regretting

At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic.

Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy.

Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

Lots of people have good judgement but don't know the arcane spells to cast to get a computer to do what they want.

I don't understand this thinking.

How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do?

Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?

But the engineers can do it because they have written lots of code before. Where will these engineers get their experience in the future.

And what about vibe coding? The whole point and selling point of many AI companies is that you don’t need experience as a programmer.

So they sell something that isn’t true, it’s not FSD for coding but driving assistance.

I mean, it smells an AI slop article, so it's hard to expect much coherence.

Does it?

I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doesn’t exist so we need to do X”…

Has it made me faster? Yes. Had it changed engineering - not even close. There’s absolutely no world where I would trust what I’ve seen out of these tools to run in the real world even with supervision.

> but it will certainly feel like it if labor demand is reduced enough

All the last productivity multipliers in programming led to increased demand. Do you really think the market is saturated now? And what saturated it is one of the least impactful "revolutionary" tools we got in our profession?

Keep in mind that looking at statistics won't lead to any real answer, everything is manipulated beyond recognition right now.

I learned that phrase from one of the bold sentences in this article.

Can anyone tell me the leading theory explaining the acquisition?

I can’t see how buying a runtime for the sake of Claude Code makes sense.

An Anthropic engineer was getting some attention for saying six months: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1p771rb/anthropic...

I assume this is at least partially a response to that. They wouldn't buy a company now if it would actually happen that fast.

> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better.

That's not what asymptote means. Presumably what you mean is the curve levelling off, which it already is.

> This argument requires us to believe that AI will just asymptote and not get materially better.

It hasn't gotten materially better in the last three years. Why would it do so in the next three or five years?