>the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter...

I think it would start to matter once again. People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are...and once some threshold is crossed, the business won't dare to use AI generated assets/designs.

Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content.

I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain.

Handling highway driving with lane changes was great when it got there years ago, but just in the last year or so it has gone from a nice to have to “from now on I will never buy a car that can’t do this”.

AI has hit some milestones for replacing work as well. There’s still many more to go and maybe some of them will never get hit (much like I don’t think a coast to coast drive with zero interventions during winter conditions is ever going to happen) but there are points at which it forever meaningfully changes some field of work. I think it’s there for writing code.

I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.

You heard it from someone with no experience developing software. A lot of AI hype comes from that, even (or especially) from people in the actual business of developing software - a surprising amount of managers and adjacent or supporting roles in the field actually have very little clue about software development.

It's cool that 'regular' people can now create solutions to many small problems, and automate stuff - genuinely a step forward. Like Excel, only vastly better. But for bigger projects, real software engineers know that what LLMs do today is only a tiny part of development. And it solves it in a way that might well make the rest of the lifecycle a lot harder. It's like that saying about tools that make easy things easier and hard things impossible.

Then it just becomes a new baseline (everyone have access to the same LLMs), and recruiting moves up the philosophical ladder where human can add more value. What will it be? I don't know, I'm not a recruiter.

Again I've heard this since 2022 when gpt3.5 came out.

This is like microprocessors in the 80s. Sure they double in capability every 18 months but the start is so pathetic it will be 30 years before they are good enough for everyday tasks.

Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of <insert any model>

“But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years.

This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change. Just yesterday I had gpt 5.3 generate completely awful code for the Cinema 4D Python API. Also an anecdote. But for all of the people saying they are truly intelligent and truly reason, they still make obvious mistakes, write around problems, fail entirely at architectural decisions, fail at random, generate FAR too much code.

And no amount of harnesses, methodologies, loops make much of a difference. If you listen to people on the internet they say it’s all working. You listen to people on the job and they mostly say it’s creating tech debt and a review bottleneck. Also burnout, so much burnout.

I think LLMs are mediocre. I think it’s fine they’re mediocre. You can work with low expectations. But the hype cycles are so tiresome.

If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?

I wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is people just being worn down by the hype to the point they can't fight it anymore

Very smart people aren't immune to being worn down over time

I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have

University of Edinburgh is a good school.

The „you will be left behind if you don’t fully embrace the whole thing right now“ is a 1:1 match with cryptocurrency hype

This is the opposite of my experience since about February of this year.

"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.

What kind of work are you doing and what do you consider to be quality or not?

Of course don’t let me assume, maybe you have a higher quality disproof for the Jacobian conjecture you could share with the class.