I had two thoughts this morning about "AI" and I kinda hate that I can't stop thinking and talking about this stuff, but here we are.
1. I think it would be easier for me to take the tech more seriously if the financial side would look less like circular investment scams and increasingly unrealistic bets on a future that seems increasingly more unlikely (see NVIDIA, OPEN AI), and if the hype men would sound a lot less like being part of a mass psychosis (See Gastown, moltbook, openclawd)
2. I think the handful of people I know who are "AI" enthusiasts and seem to get good results with coding agents seem to miss that they have something very similar to survivorship bias or "works-for-me" syndrome that leads them to dismiss or ignore all of the negatives that would occur in wider contexts (for example in a larger organisation).
(And this is before thinking about the ethical, environment and social externalities, which I personally cannot ignore but many people obviously can)
@kerrick I think there is a particular sweet spot for agentic coding stuff right now (I'm an observer, not a user, so grain of salt etc etc) which is 1. Experienced dev, 2. Working solo 3. On projects with limited scope.
In almost every other context (again my somewhat informed interpretation) the individual productivity gains are more or less meaningless because coding productivity is not the deciding bottleneck.
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@kerrick the downsides are that agentic coding more or less stops knowledge propagation in organisations (for example: no pair programming). Less experienced devs don't even get the productivity boost and probably produce worse code, so codebases deteriorate, this in turn then destroy any meaningful productivity gains the experienced devs might have because they need to mop up the slop.
My Post was partially triggered by this thread, with some good thoughts:
https://mastodon.social/@nobsagile/115995138042782971
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Kerrick Long (code)