Really the one thing that conclusively has changed is that the 'ask it on stackoverflow' has become 'ask it an LLM'. Around 95% of the stackoverflow questions can be answered by an LLM with access to the documentation, not sure what will happen to the other 5%. I don't think stackoverflow will survive a 20-fold reduction in size, if only because their stance on not allowing repeat questions means that exponential growth was the main thing preventing them from becoming stale.
Right.
I don't think you even need cynicism or whatever you felt you were having impolite thoughts about:
I'd expect the top mature libraries to be the most resistant to AI tool use for various reasons. They already have established processes, they don't accept drive-by PR spam, the developers working on them might be the least likely to be early adopters, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the todo list of those projects might need the most human comms, like directional planning rather than the sort of yolo feature impl you can do in a one-man greenfield.
All to further bury signals you might find elsewhere in broader ecosystems.
curl 'https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/1020000/1020964-blank-754.png' \
-H 'Origin: https://www.statista.com' \
-H 'Referer: https://www.statista.com/' \
--output chart.png
Relevant! If the maximalist interpretation of AI capabilities were close to real, and if people tend to point their new super powers at their biggest pain points.. wouldn't it be a big blow for all things advertising / attention economy? "Create a driver or wrapper app that skips all ads on Youtube/Spotify" or "Make a browser plugin that de-emphasizes and unlinks all attention-grabbing references to pay-walled content".
If we're supposed to be in awe of how AI can do anything, and we notice repeatedly that nope, it isn't really empowering users yet, then we may need to reconsider the premise.
The amount of useless slop in the app store doesn't matter. There are no new and useful apps made with AI - apps that contribute to productivity of the economy as whole. The trade and fiscal deficits are both high and growing as is corporate indebtedness - these are the true measures for economic failure and they all agree on it.
AI is a debt and energy guzzling endeavor which sucks the capital juice out of the economy in return for meager benefits.
I can't think of a reason for the present unjustified AI rush and hype other than war, but any success towards that goal is a total loss for the economy and environment - that's the relation between economics and deadly destruction in a connected world, reality is the proof.
I get that people are upset that making a cool six figures off of stitching together React components is maybe not a viable long-term career path anymore. For those of us on the user side, the value is tremendous. I’m starting to replace what were paid enterprise software and plug-ins and tailoring them to my own taste. Our subject matter experts are translating their knowledge and work flows, which usually aren’t that complicated, into working products on their own. They didn’t have to spend six months or a year negotiating an agreement to build the software or have to beg our existing software vendors, who could not possibly care less, for the functionality to be added to software we are, for some reason, expected to pay for every single year, despite the absence of any operating cost to justify this practice.
This is flat-earther level. It's like an environmentalist saying that nothing made with fossil fuels contributes to productivity. But they don't say that because they know it's not true.
There are so many valid gripes to have with LLMs, pick literally any of them. The idea that a single line of generated code can't possibly be productivity net positive is nonsensical. And if one line can, then so can many lines.
Ok, so do you have a counterexample?
The AI wouldn't have been able to do it by itself, but I wouldn't have been arsed to do it alone either.
If that would be true then all these AIs are useless. Who needs them to built something that already exists?
Ah my favorite, entirely made up quote.
Apocraphyly attributed to the U.S. Patent Office Commissioner in 1899.
Seems like the rest of the whole AI business, the only things going to the top are the AI tools themselves but not the things they are supposed to built.