Thought this was going to be more about programmers, but it was actually about non technical users and Microsoft’s product development failure.
One tidbit I’d disagree with is that only those using the bleeding edge AI tools are reaping the benefits. There seem to be a lot of highly specialized tools and a lot of specific configurations (and mystical incantations) to get them to work, and those are constantly changing and being updated. The bleeding edge is a dangerous place to be if you value your time (and sanity).
Personally, as someone working on moderate-to-highly complex software (live inference of industrial IoT data), I can’t really open a merge / pull request for my colleagues to review unless I 100% understand what I’ve pushed, and can explain to them as well.
My killer app for AI would just be a CLI that gets me to a commit based on moderately technical input:
“Add this configuration variable for this entry point; split this class into two classes, one for each of the responsibilities that are currently crammed together; update the unit tests to reflect these changes, including splitting the tests for the old class into two different test classes; etc”
But, all the hype of the bleeding edge is around abstracting away the entire coding process until you don’t even understand what code is being generated? Hard to see it as anything but a pipe dream. AI is useful, but it’s not a panacea - you can’t fire it and replace it when it fucks up.
“Add this configuration variable for this entry point; split this class into two classes, one for each of the responsibilities that are currently crammed together; update the unit tests to reflect these changes, including splitting the tests for the old class into two different test classes; etc”
Granted I'm way behind the curve, but is this not how actual engineers (and not influencers) are using it? I heavily micro-manage the implementation because my manager still expects me to know the code
You could hardly believe that this is how actual engineers are using it if you only browsed HN. Maybe HN is only influencers?
Maybe Anthropic has a social media team and internet forums like HN are easily manipulable?
> “Add this configuration variable for this entry point; split this class into two classes, one for each of the responsibilities that are currently crammed together; update the unit tests to reflect these changes, including splitting the tests for the old class into two different test classes; etc”
That's the type of input I give to Claude / Codex. Works for me.
Yes, but then you’re not the bleeding edge of agentic coding as described in this article, then. The bleeding edge is “Hey agent, turn this 30 sheet excel workbook into a Python script” and all of the AGENTS.md required to make that happen.
> all the hype of the bleeding edge is around abstracting away the entire coding process until you don’t even understand what code is being generated?
The less you understood about code to start with, the quicker you achieve this goal... and the less prepared you are for the consequences.