I'd really like to know the parameters are. I hear claims like, "it saves me an hour a day," or, "I'm 30% more productive with AI." What do these figures mean? They seem like proxies for fuzzy feelings.

When I see boring, repetitive code that I don't want to look at my instinct isn't to ignore it and keep adding more boring, repetitive code. It's like seeing that the dog left a mess on your carpet and pretending you didn't see it. It's easier than training the dog and someone else will clean it... right?

My instinct is to fix the problem causing there to be boring, repetitive code. Too much of that stuff and you end up with a great surface area for security errors, performance problems, etc. And the fewer programmers that read that code and try to understand it the more likely it becomes that nobody will understand it and why it's there.

The idea that we should just generate more code on top of the code until the problem goes away is alien to me.

Although it makes a lot more sense when I probe into why developers feel like they need to adopt AI -- they're afraid they won't be competitive in the job market in X years.

So really, is AI a tool to make us more productive or a tool to remove our bargaining power?

> So really, is AI a tool to make us more productive or a tool to remove our bargaining power?

Don't you notice how it makes you more productive, that you can solve problems faster? It would be really odd if not.

And regarding the bargaining power: that's not the other side of the scale, it's a different problem. If your code monkey now gets as good as your average developer, the average developer will have lost some relative value, unless he also upped his game by using AI.

If everyone gets better, why would you see this as something bad, which makes us lose "bargaining power"? Because you no longer can put the least effort which your employer expects from you? Even then: it's not like AI makes things harder, it makes them better. At least for me software development has become more enjoyable.

While 5 years ago I was asking myself if I really want to do this for the rest of my career, I now know that I want to do this, with this added help, which takes away much of the tedious stuff like looking up solution-snippets on Stack Overflow. Plus, I know that I will have to deal less and less with writing code, and more and more with managing code solutions offered to me.

>it makes a lot more sense when I probe into why developers feel like they need to adopt AI -- they're afraid they won't be competitive in the job market in X years.

Amazing. You think that the only reason people are using AI is because it's being forced on them?

I honestly feel kinda bad for some people in this thread who don't see the freight train coming.

Well to give to a concrete example. I use it to write test cases for the CRUD applications that I sometimes have to work on. Some test cases already exist and I feed the tests and actually code including additional instructions into a model and get relatively decent output. We also use a code review bot that we feed repository relevant instructions to and get decent basic PR comments. It even caught an edge case that 3 other developers didn't consider.

I think AI can be yet another tool that takes some repetitive tasks off my hands. I still obviously check all the code it generated.