Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/yYVus

Opinion:

I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”. Yes, 60% developers use AI because the previous glorious Google/Bing has drowned in slop and now my search for documentation of a particular library or an arcane question returns 100% SEO spam, so I need to ask claude(or my local llama running on ollama) and get a decent enough(albeit outdated) valuable result from which I can pursue more from somewhere. At no time does it mean that, AI is doing a significant part of my work, and no my IDE already generates all the code I need and no I am not going to blindly use the rote replication of the example from StackOverflow that the AI just generated when I said it to generate a particular function, because these examples are often not the best implementations.

The AI hype and the desperate lobbying is doing a lot of harm to our industry as a whole. We should see it for what it is, some rich naive dudes invested a lot of money because they feel FOMO from last gold mind rush if AirBnB/Uber/Netflix/Spotify era and is freshly burned from crypto dud hype, so they want to kill the industry by scaring away new folks and make everyone as lazy so we get slow frog boiled to accept garbage from these AI crop.

Also, the market and macro economy is unstable for almost 5 years now due to ZIRP expiring, random war, uncertain geopolitical power struggle, failed regulatory keep up allowing a handful of tech predators to acquire and extinguish new ideas and competitions and so many factors. It is just an uncertain time, money now flows on hype and not so much on good ideas because previous good hype has paved way to too much greed, and of course certain giants built too big of a moat and raised the bar and now the new management is milking the cows until the cows collapse in next few years when the new competition rise once the macro settles a bit.

I am optimistic, from next year, we will see a massive improvement in prospects(despite trump happened). We just need to hold on a bit.

Or, you can look at the positive contribution that AI is adding for developers. This is true even for curmudgeons like me that tried it early on and had bad experiences. Using AI to look up documentation, and asking the AI to summarize alternatives takes many fewer clicks than searching Google. I also find it generates good code if you ask the right questions. That is, as an experienced programmer, I'm able to generate much better, iterative prompts than a nontechnical person or a junior programmer. With tools and the AI evolving, making iterative changes across your app using an AI is clearly part of the future of programming. Heck, it even chooses good variable names, and that's been the bane of programmers since the dawn of programming.

Reminds me of quote Sussman gave when asked about MIT switching away from Scheme:

"Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course."

>I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”.

I don't even believe that is accurate unless you're considering things like IDE autocomplete to be AI or assuming everyone using visual studio user is using copilot.