Programming

This article / talk is quite illuminating. I’ve seen studies indicating that AI coding agents improve productivity by 15-20% in the aggregate, which tracks with my own experience. It’s a solid productivity boost when used correctly, clearly falling in the “centaur”category in my own experience at least. However, all the hate around it, my own included, stems from the “reverse-centaur” aspirations around it. The companies developing these tools aren’t in it to make a reasonable profit while delivering modest productivity gains. They are in it to spin a false narrative that these tools can replace 9/10 engineers in order to drive their own overly inflated valuations, knowing damn well this is not the case, but not caring because they don’t plan to be the ones holding the bag in the end (taxpayers will be the bag-holders when they get bailed out).