One of them writes better by default. One of them doesn't. That's the thing.

With enough steering, I can get a cheap low-capability model to do things correctly in most cases as well. But why bother?

You can tell it to write high quality code, to test things, and to come up with a proper rollout plan of a feature. Or it could just do it by default.

I know where I'm putting my money in that case.

I haven't written a line of code myself in 6 months, but the point is that _you shouldn't be able to tell_

What I tell people at work: Using AI is good. AI can help you do things that you otherwise wouldn't have. It shouldn't be a crutch for thinking.

In that sense, people shouldn't be able to tell that you're using AI unless the tell is that it's _higher quality_ than if you had implemented it by hand.

A good example here is a well-written document that has a _ton_ of deep research behind it. Or code that has extensive tests that would have taken too long to write by hand for the task at hand.

It's bad when it's just "do this thing and post a PR" but I write my code with AI, look at it as a reviewer, offer suggestions, put those into my steering if needed, and I refine it. The way I see it, I'm the first reviewer on everything now before passing it off to another human for review.

There have been points where having AI rewrite something was slower than me doing it, but I'm already in the harness. The cost of waiting is almost zero. What stops me from contributing to the JVM using AI written code that I understand and spent time manicuring? Can a human really tell that it's AI written?

Isn't MCP _an API_?

This also isn't targeting the waste that comes from temu. This is targeting luxury brands that create artificial scarcity and destroy items rather than sell them at a discount. Think Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage is a top 5 all time book for me.

│ When he saw the three men he stepped back and a look of disbelief came over his face. For a long moment he stood shocked and silent before he spoke.

│

│ "Who the hell are you?" he said at last.

│

│ The man in the center stepped forward.

│

│ "My name is Shackleton," he replied in a quiet voice.

│

│ Again there was silence. Some said that Sørlle turned away and wept.

Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.

I agree with you, it's more that... it is performative in itself.

I'd agree with all of this from what I've seen though. The problems that some of my buddies solved straight out of college, while very different than 'hard problems' at bigcorp, are... hard.

One buddy ended up moving to the worst of both worlds... backend infra for a large video game and ended up getting video game salary for bigcorp distributed systems problems.

I think "good enough" ends up being okay. I _like_ driving. I would do manual mode often still just because I enjoy it. But I'd be completely fine with the option of autopilot in good conditions. Reality is that 99% of the time, my commute is boring and in good conditions. I don't need a self driving mode that can handle a blizzard when I'm in stop and go traffic and it's 20c outside.

This is much harder for Waymo since there isn't as easy of a manual override mode... But in my car? rip it.

Luckily I basically already have it. Adaptive cruise covers most of my cases well enough, but I wouldn't mind something with a bit more control (turning, etc.)