Tell me you're not using a frontier model without telling me you're not using a frontier model

The only real updates I've seen to anything have been AI features... so all this AI is only being used to add AI to stuff. Most of which the average person doesn't seem to want or use.

Number of git pushes in GH is way up. 320M in Q1 this year vs 80M in Q1 or 2020.

https://innovationgraph.github.com/global-metrics/git-pushes

Just because you haven't installed new software doesn't mean that new software doesn't exist.

This is exactly what I've seen.

For example, I recently got brought in to help with quality on a large-scale system that had been ported to a new platform with the help of coding agents. The project was completed and declared operational in record time, but soon after the business discovered that:

1. The promised scalability improvements did not materialize. Instead, it got worse.

2. Observability had been lost. The telemetry was no longer trustworthy.

3. Users stopped trusting it because it was producing incorrect outputs.

What I ended up discovering was that, while it scrupulously kept existing automated tests passing, any behavior that wasn't explicitly covered by a test was free to change any which way. And there were plenty of small things that weren't explicitly covered. Perhaps because the original authors thought they were so obvious and commonsense that they didn't need one, perhaps because mistakes happen. The why doesn't matter. The point is that reality is messy and imperfect, so giving someone a chance to look at things and think, "Huh, that's funny..." is an essential part of defense in depth.

The real worst part was, this whole replatforming was a huge waste of time, anyway. The improvements they were looking for could easily have been accomplished with some controlled incremental changes to the original system. Mostly just removing a few basic and well-known performance antipatterns.

But way back at the outset, the person in charge of the project asked their agent, "What's the best way to X," and the agent gave them a trendslop answer about how Y alternative technology is more scalable and we should just port to that. It was convincing and they were under intense time pressure to just ship some code because leadership is bought into the AI hype and now has the patience of a 4 year old, so they just went with it.

So far I mostly see a metric sh.. ton of meta- and meta-meta-projects re-wrapping AI wrapper tools, with sloppy slogans like "One Model, Five Harnesses. Combined." or "You run in the park. Rrrunnnrr.ai runs your AI." Looking inside, out of 250k it's often 200k of verbally incontinent self-explaining comments; or "smart" redesign of builtins.

No new browser, no new iOS clone than runs on Android, no new easy to use DaVinci, no new CAD suite, no $5 SolidWorks clone, no redesigned K8s, no 10x performance speedup in Linux kernel.