> In fact, with Astra and Fable I feel like not only are the costs astronomical, but the models are also just not for me as a software engineer.
This is how I’m feeling as well. The models are so happy to run and implement that they forget to keep me in the loop or make it understandable.
If I want to magic something into existence or one shot an analysis, the model is happy. But if I want to direct, understand, and manage they fall completely flat and are unable to explain things for me.
It’s even hard to discuss planning because Claude will run off and start pulling data and analyzing my projects and spend 5 minutes on something not needed, when I need a rubber duck that can sanity check things and push back.
My non technical colleagues love it, but I’m fighting the thing all the time.
It’s time to stop complaining about “shitty code” written by AI. If there are problems in functionality sure, but I personally don’t care about a good directory structure or short, single-purpose functions or short files or whatever else we have been taught about good engineering practices. Why? Because if the code was generated by AI then it will be maintained by AI. I’m not reading it, and I don’t care about it.
The code generated by AI is often not maintainable by AI. It's mostly trained on one-shot tasks still, not on growing a small system into a large one. AI is not immune to tech debt.
> It is absolutely impressive; these types of models are going to change the world in one form or another.
> But at least for the moment I don’t know how to work with it for actual software engineering.
These two statements seem contradictory.
It’s not contradictory if it can change the world without being something software engineers specifically can work with.