I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look.
In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.
I think there is going to be a long time before all of the obscure knowledge of a decent software developer can be completely replaced by AI. Though the job is going to change beyond recognition. It already has in many ways.
Technical debt is a indefinable quantity which makes it very prone to be abused to mean "I wish I could rewrite this in [insert some fashionable language, framework or coding style]".
AI slop is an easier concept to quantify. It's basically the code for which insufficient people in the organisation have a meaningful understanding of how it works or what it does.
The crocodile tears of companies who've hoovered up everything possible, regardless of permissions or legality, now crying that someone else is stealing their hard work is comical.
I don't even think they can believe it themselves, it's in reality they are just trying to throw fear, uncertainty and doubt about potentially cheaper offerings.
Crocodile tears "is a colloquial term used to describe a false, insincere display of emotion" [1]. Defending yourself against an attack vector you just exploited is between savvy and hypocritical.
I think his use of crocodile tears is appropriate, anthropic is feigning a false sense of concern for safety when really it is anticompetitive behavior, and I think that selfish entitlement is related to the original act of intellectual property theft to use the worlds training data, most of which was not public domain, to distill the wisdom for their models. So why do they get to cry about people distilling the knowledge from their models that they themselves distilled from the worlds knowledge?
I think we're all past the "bet-money-can-buy" stage. The most expensive models are an order of magnitude more expensive than the middle ground ones, so you need to be selective about what you run where.
And with a bit of careful routing - there isn't a lot stopping you sending the hard stuff to a cloud model and the average stuff to an on prem model.
I'd think for most companies the pace of change is too high at the moment. Give it a few years, a bit of a plateau in the improvements in frontier models and I can't see how many of these companies don't implode under the weight of competition on inference prices.
As a consumer you are often sending deposits or even the full cost of goods to companies some time before you receive those goods (in effect you become a creditor). You are also dependent upon some of those companies for service and repairs. It seems reasonable that you can check the finances of a company you are creating a business relationship with, I know in the past I've checked company statements.
You are unlikely to have significant enough sway to force that kind of disclosure. Small businesses as consumers have less legal protection and are similarly unlikely to be able to make disclosure a precondition of a deal.
So what. As a customer you can insist on seeing audited financial statements as a condition of purchasing, or purchase from another vendor, or do without. No problem.
I don't know if you can claim one is more straightforward. Sure a Cessna flies slower and has relatively simple aerodynamics. However, you could also be operating it out of a 400m sloping grass strip with a mountain off one end.
An A320 might be flying 3 times faster but is generally flying between relatively flat, straight runaways several miles long with approaches typically flown on a stable instrument approach from several nautical miles away. It's control laws mean flying straight or maintaining a particular bank is as simple as letting go of the control stick. If anything the stick and rudder skills in normal circumstances are much less involved. Systems management, obviously the autopilot, but also environmental, hydraulic, navigation an the operational concerns are obviously vastly more complex.
Interesting, I didn't know that Cessna had a STOL conversion kit, nor that people I know locally (second hand) had done a few - they still look under performant compared to the PAC STOL family and have to wonder if they can handle short strips at high altitudes in thin air fully loaded.
I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
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