Summarizer

in 3-5years, sure, just like we are all currently using crypto to pay for groceries and smart contracts for all legal matters.

... no one ever used crypto to buy things. most engineers are currently already using AI. such a dumb comparison that really just doesnt pass the sniff test.

Boy this smells a lot like early days of blogging about block chains, specifically ethereum and friends. It's not that there's nothing useful, maybe even important, in there, it's just so far it's all just the easy parts: playing around inside a computer. I've noticed a certain trend over the years where you get certain types of projects that get lots of hype and excitement and much progress seems to be made, but when you dig deep enough you find out that it's all just the fun, easy sort of progress. The fun progress, which not at all coincidentallly tends to also be the easy progress, is the type that happens solely inside a computer. What do I mean by that? I mean programs who only operate at the level of artificial computer abstractions. The hard part is always dealing with "the real world": hardware that returns "impossible" results to your nicely abstract api functions, things that stop working in places they really shouldn't be able to, or even, and this is the really tricky bit, dealing with humans. Databases are a good example of this kind of thing. It's easy to start off a database writing all the clever (and fun) bits like btrees and hash maps and chained hashes that spill to disk to optimize certain types of tables and so on, but I'd wager that at least half of the code in a "real" database like sqlite or postgresql is devoted to dealing with strange hardware errors or leaky api abstractions across multiple platforms or the various ways a human can send nonsensical input into the system and really screw things up. I'd also bet that this type of code is a lot less fun to write and took much longer than the rest (which incidentally is why I always get annoyes when programming language demos show code with only a happy path, but that's another rant and this comment is already excessive). Anyways, this AI thing is definitely a gold rush and it's important to keep in mind that there was in fact a lot of gold that got dug up but, as everyone constantly repeats, the more consistent way to benefit is sell the shovels and this is very definitely an ad for a shovel.

I love this take. I think what you're describing is very much happened with the Industrial Revolution. It was just a bunch of powerful, dangerous machines at first, doing small jobs faster. Scaling it up took the whole planet and a long time. I think we are at the beginning of the second such journey. Lots of people will get hurt while we learn how to scale it up. It's why I've gone with dangerous sounding theming and lots of caution with Gas Town. I only think it takes 2 years this time though.

This is either a meme or the way everyone will code in 2 years, in both cases, it terrifies me.

It's a sales pitch. Hype, sell it to faang for many billions.

Someone here has lost the plot and at this point I wonder if it is me. Is software supposed to be deterministic anymore? Are incremental steps expected to be upgrades and not regressions? Is stability of behavior and dependability desirable? Should we culturally reward striving to get more done with less. ...no, I haven't lost the plot. I'm seeing another fad of the intoxicated parting with their money bending a useful tool into a golden hammer of a caricature. I dread seeing the eventual wreckage and self-realization from the inevitable hangover.