I'm pretty good at what I do, at least according to myself and the people I work with, and I'm comparing its capabilities (the latest version of Claude used as an agent inside Cursor) to myself. It can't fully do things on its own and makes mistakes, but it can do a lot.

But suppose you're right, it's 60% as good as "stackoverflow copy-pasting programmers". Isn't that a pretty insanely impressive milestone to just dismiss?

And why would it just get to this point, and then stop? Like, we can all see AIs continuously beating the benchmarks, and the progress feels very fast in terms of experience of using it as a user.

I'd need to hear a pretty compelling argument to believe that it'll suddenly stop, something more compelling than "well, it's not very good yet, therefore it won't be any better", or "Sam Altman is lying to us because incentives".

Sure, it can slow down somewhat because of the exponentially increasing compute costs, but that's assuming no more algorithmic progress, no more compute progress, and no more increases in the capital that flows into this field (I find that hard to believe).

I appreciate your reply. My tone was a little dismissive; I'm currently deep deep in the trenches trying to unwind a tremendous amount of LLM slop in my team's codebase so I'm a little sensitive.

I use Claude every day. It is definitely impressive, but in my experience only marginally more impressive than ChatGPT was a few years ago. It hallucinates less and compiles more reliably, but still produces really poor designs. It really is an overconfident junior developer.

The real risk, and what I am seeing daily, is colleagues falling for the "if you aren't using Cursor you're going to be left behind" FUD. So they learn Cursor, discover that it's an easy way to close tickets without using your brain, and end up polluting the codebase with very questionable designs.