I’m not comparing anything blindly; that is in fact the exact opposite of my advice. Nor am I saying all big hypes are equivalent, just that there’s always a big hype about something, and you need a strategy to stay levelheaded about them despite the irrational polarized yelling you hear.

I use LLMs every day in my work (both to help write code and as a component of the thing I’m coding). They’re pretty cool. But as an engineer you need to make decisions based on what they actually do, in your empirical observation, not what people tell you they will do, eventually, in their fantasies. Speculating about that is just noise. The engineer’s job is to find the signal.

In my observation, I can trust an LLM to write code way more than last year, but I still have to keep it on a very short leash. Will it be better next year? I don’t know. Nobody does.

Yes, agreed on basically everything.