Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

All of them are moving into the direction of "less human involved and agents do more", while what I really want is better tooling for me to work closer with AI and be better at reviewing/steering it, and be more involved. I don't want "Fire one prompt and get somewhat working code", I want a UX tailored for long sessions with back and forth, letting me leverage my skills, rather than agents trying to emulate what I already can do myself.

It was said a long time ago about computing in general, but more fitting than ever, "Augmenting the human intellect" is what we should aim for, not replacing the human intellect. IA ("Intelligence amplification") rather than AI.

But I'm guessing the target market for such tools would be much smaller, basically would require you to already understand software development, and know what you want, while all AI companies seem to target non-developers wanting to build software now. It's no-code all over again essentially.

Is it any surprise that the cocaine cartels really want you to buy more cocaine, so they don't focus on its usefulness in pain relief and they refine it and cut it with the cheapest substances that will work rather than medical-grade reagents?

Same thing.

Of course there are tools focusing on this. It takes a little getting used to how prevalent it is. My editor now can anticipate the next three lines of code I intend to write complete with what values I want to feed to the function I was about to invoke. It all shows up in an autocomplete annotation for me. I just type the first two or three characters and press tab to get everything exactly how I was about to type it in--including an accurate comment worded exactly in my voice.

Is that what you mean by IA?

For example, I type "for" and my editor guesses I want to iterate over the list that is the second argument of the function for which I am currently building the body. So it offers to complete the rest of the loop condition for me. Not only did it anticipate that I am writing a for loop. It figures out what I want to iterate over, and perhaps even that I want to enumerate the iteration so I have the index and the value. Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body. How much better could it augment my intellect?

"All of them are moving into the direction of "less human involved and agents do more", while what I really want is better tooling for me to work closer with AI and be better at reviewing/steering it, and be more involved."

I want less ambitious LLM powered tools than what's being offered. For example, I'd love a tool that can analyse whether comments have been kept up to date with the code they refer to. I don't want it to change anything I just want it to tell me of any problems. A linter basically. I imagine LLMs would be a good foundation for this.

>Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

This is because, regardless of the current state of things, the endgame which will justify all the upfront investment is autonomous, self-improving, self-maintaining systems.

I think it was Steve Jobs who said computers should be like a bicycle for the mind, I tend to agree

> Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

their valuations are replaced on getting rid of you entirely, along with everyone else

the "humans can use it to increase their productivity" is an interim step