First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months.

Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either!

But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable on a smartphone) that we should be seeing something.

> But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable on a smartphone) that we should be seeing something.

I'm definitely seeing indie-sized games that appear to have had significant input from AI, though I'm not sure the balance between AI for coding and AI for assets. My experience attempting this directly suggests that the current level they work at can make very simple games as one-shots, but anything more than trivial will produce outputs only as good as the developer's combined willingness to put in effort tweaking things and taking it all one step at a time, and their taste about what "good" even is.

I'm using spare credits to build and improve an isochrone map renderer, which I otherwise wouldn't have had time for (apart from anything else, I'd have had to become skilled in JS+wasm, somewhat of a pivot from iOS). This also requires taking it all one step at a time, having UX and UI taste.

Having lived through GeoCities since before it was bought by Yahoo!, taste is… well. Most people make things that nobody else actually wants.

I remember people moving the goalposts like that since, let me check... when did AI Dungeon go viral? Wow, 2019.

> Where are the amazing digital products/stuff?

I've done amounts of refactoring and fixes and written tooling that just wouldn't have happened before.

I'm not sure what amazing new stuff y'all expect but the amount of technical debt in my projects is actually going down, cause I can finally get good enough test coverage, including E2E/load tests that actually prove whether the software works and scales or doesn't - just last week I diagnosed issues with SeaweedFS failing under concurrent writes when backing Sentry and could swap it out for Garage in a day, caught by a monitoring tool I slopped together that integrates with the Sentry API, no issues since.

The environment around me has gone from drowning in tech/ops debt to sort of swimming and at least holding above water for now (cause nobody will pay for 5x more tokens).

It's also insanely good for prototyping and being able to actually explore various ideas and shoot the bad ones down quickly instead of handwaving and looking at a loaded calendar, alongside being able to address well bounded tasks in parallel, better than human developers can - like I can give 5 GitHub issues to the slop machine and have it fix all of the annoying bugs. Issue with how some data shows up? Just feed it the DB dump and let it find out what's up.

Some projects have gone from around 500 code tests to around 4000, and before anyone says they're meaningless, at least 5% of those have caught real issues and helped a bunch, alongside linters and other tooling (including some tools I wrote myself). I've also written both native utilities and some web platforms for myself, side projects that I never would have gotten around to.

I'm measurably more productive than I've ever been (since I did measure that, looking at my commits over the last 2 years) but also burnt out. Still, it's the kind of burnout that's the consequence of context switching and lots of work, rather than the kind that I had years ago, where I had to manually untangle deeply nested Spring Boot service logic all over the place at like 2 AM cause the made up deadlines were kicking my butt.

In contrast to others, I don't need to move the goalposts - the productivity for me is here and now. Any future models will just make it better, unless we experience model collapse.

Disclaimer: you do need a LOT of code tests and validations, otherwise it all goes to shit. Maybe I'm just extending how much time it will be until it goes to shit for me as well, but go figure. You also have to babysit the models more than anyone would like or should, most of my work usually has 20-60 minutes of planning before dispatching the agent.