There was something someone said in a comment here, years and years ago (pre AI), which has stuck with me.

Paraphrased, "There's basically no business in the Western world that wouldn't come out ahead with a competent software engineer working for $15 an hour".

Once agents, or now claws I guess, get another year of development under them they will be everywhere. People will have the novelty of "make me a website. Make it look like this. Make it so the customer gets notifications based on X Y and Z. Use my security cam footage to track the customer's object to give them status updates." And so on.

AI may or may not push the frontier of knowledge, TBD, but what it will absolutely do is pull up the baseline floor for everybody to a higher level of technical implementation.

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tcoff91 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the explosion in software produced with AI by lay-people will mean that those with offensive security skills, who can crack and exploit software systems, will have incredible power over others.

	▲	jpadkins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		are you sure that AI generated code will be more vulnerable than a median software engineer? Why?

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rockskon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's always a year® away. The amazing AI capability is "just around the corner"©. It will replace jobs soon™.

How much longer do we have to put up with people saying this? It's been four years now.

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margalabargala 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The things that people were saying were a year away a year or two ago are now here.

The things I am saying are now a year away, are not the things people were saying were a year away two years ago.

And you're going to have to put up with it forever, because "a year in the future" has always and will always be a year away.

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rockskon 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And yet it's never "now". The promised results are never here.

I understand one of the chief innovations the AI industry produces is rhetoric and hype, but it's insufferable and repetitive.

A better AI isn't good enough. "Closer" to a stated goal isn't good enough.

Deliver results that have value to more than just enthusiasts and academics.

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GeoAtreides 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>The promised results are never here.

Today I fed to Opus 4.6 five screenshots with annotations from the client and told it to implement the changes. Then told it to generate real specs, which it did. I never even looked at the screenshots, I just checked and tested against the generated specs. Client was happy.

I don't know what it means.

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margalabargala 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure it is. AI software development is here. It's not good enough for everything, but it's good enough for a majority of the changes made by most software engineers.

That's now. Right now, the tooling exists so that for >80% of software devs, 80% of the code they produce could be created by AI rather than by hand.

You can always find some person saying that it'll destroy all jobs in a year, or make us all rich in a year, or whatever, but your cynicism blinds you to the actual advances being made. There is an endless supply of new goalpost positions, they will never all be met, and an endless supply of chartalans claiming unrealistic futures. Don't confuse that with "and therefore results do not exist".

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rockskon an hour ago | parent [-]

No, it isn't. There is a gigantic chasm of difference between "80% of code they produce could be created by AI" and "80% of commits they produce could be created by AI".

Mixing the two up is how we get a massive company like Microsoft to continually produce such atrocious software updates that destroy hardware or cause BSODs for their flagship Operating System.

That's not replacing software development. That's dysfunction masquerading as capability.

And none of what I said is goalpost moving. They are the goalposts constantly made by the AI industry and their hype-men. The very premise of replacing a significant amount of human labor underlies the exorbitant valuation AI has been given in the market.

	▲	margalabargala an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We'll just have to agree to disagree. It appears that your understanding of AI code generation reflects the state of 1-2 years ago. In which case of course it seems like what people are describing as reality, feels 1-2 years away. > There is a gigantic chasm of difference between "80% of code they produce could be created by AI" and "80% of commits they produce could be created by AI". This is exactly the goalpost moving I am talking about. I said 80% of code could be AI-written, you agreed, and followed up with "oh but it doesn't matter because now we're measuring by % of commits".