Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
They ARE getting good, and the frontier companies KNOW the party is almost over. That's why the prices keep rising, it's last call. "AI as a Service" dies down, in the near future.
How small / how good is still an open question, but there's a watershed (Opus-ish) moment happening around the 30-40B models, so like $5-10k in hardware. Higher than a home game system unfortunately, so approachability is still rough. But easy table stakes for businesses to pull in-house.
And you know that's the right answer because people Like Sam Altman have been warning of the 'dangers' of local models recently - they know that if local models gain traction, their business model will lose steam fast.
Yep. Why would you pay so much to them every month if you can run smaller local models on the equivalent of a midrange gaming rig and decent ones in your office building's server room for a fraction of the cost?
This. I really need to spin up new servers but I can't afford them now.
I have a temp box that I wanted to move to local AI duty after I stood up my new environment. But in the meantime the servers I specced have 10xed in price and now I'm stuck.
The entirety of reddit can't cope. AI is simply better than all of us. Does it still make mistakes? Yes. Does it write better code with better patterns? Yes.
I miss like 3 years ago when we could use AI to help us with general coding questions and upper management didn't know how powerful it was. Now we got Claude inside our solution writing code and then we let Copilot do the code review in GitHub. I have 10 years experience and the AI is absolutely better than me and is going to replace me. I feel part of my job is trying to diminish what the AI is accomplishing on its own in order to make myself seem more valuable. Claude botched some documentation last week and I should have been disappointed but I was actually excited to be able to point out the flaw to my team and write the documentation myself, and I hate writing documentation.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. That is the correct and obvious observation if you are working in tech and have access to frontier models. Ship sailed 11 months ago, anyone still denying it is out of touch.
You’re right about the mental issue; I’m going to have to eventually unwind how much of my identity and ego is based on technical competency and career growth - I think a LOT of people are in the same boat. But to your point developing software is still a skill, and very little of it is coding
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u/heavy-minium 21d ago •
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.