It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly.
Quoting obama, "reality has a way of catching up with you".
I see a lot of talk, but iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release. Literally no one does, if anything people are complaining that existing functionality is breaking down. So it can't be true that we're at 10x productivity, and this fact will eventually catch up with us.
Let's be human, and remember that many people are emotionally invested. Juniors want this to be a chance to shine in a market that otherwise rejected them. CEOs placed their bet on AI and don't want to walk that back. Seniors want to signal that they are not obsolete. AI companies will poison discourse. But all this smoke will eventually clear.
It's quite hard to quantify, but I think it's one shot nature really makes it hard to gauge it's capability
Friends have spoken of good days and bad coding days with me, and I find it odd nodding along, it's a strange new normal
At times it feels like we're just coding with one-armed bandits, trying to carefully line them up for a jackpot and just discarding and retrying if we don't hit
I think about some of the more complex systems I've built and I wonder how well we can build them like this
And over engineering, there seems to be over engineering everywhere, and yet, more fragility to our systems
It's all a little surreal
I actually am training 2 trainees (Azubi in German) and 1 working student. All three are somewhat anxious about the future but also all are learning in a significantly increased pace, compared to the ones I worked with 1.5 years ago.
They don't have to wait for random senior to answer questions, so they get stuck way less often. They aren't allowed to use AI to generate code though, so not sure how that'd look like learning-wise if we/they went all-in on AI.
It’s been enormously alienating talking to laypeople about the apocalyptic atmosphere in the tech world, while for them ChatGPT is a cool piece of software but the world still hasn’t changed very much. They look at me bug eyed when I tell them how dramatically software engineering has changed in the matter of a couple years. We are in a bubble, or we’re just, as you say, in the eye of the cyclone which still has to hit the rest of the world.
This is insinuating that code was the bottleneck in the first place, or that every line of code is to build a new feature and not fixing existing bugs, or that apple didn't lay off enough engineers and reallocate resources to other departments to make up for the productivity boost.
I do think that companies with poor AI practices will eventually pay the piper in the form of technical debt or debilitating bugs. But let's not equate a productivity boost with a boost in releasing features, because there's plenty of business reasons to not release thousands of new features every year.
I agree with you on the rest of your points. Eventually the smoke will clear. What awaits to be seen is who is left standing when it does? I don't think I like the answer to that question.
I wish I could be so optimistic. Our lives are ruled by distorted, irrational, inefficient, failed markets, and the markets can remain distorted, irrational, inefficient, and failed for longer than we as individuals can remain solvent. "In the long term the market is a weighing machine", for term lengths that include the heat death of the universe.
But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.
Reality will catch-up with that too, once the other smoke clears.