The difference is that over the years while tooling and process have dramatically improved, SDE's have not improved much, junior engineers still make the same mistakes. The assumption is that (not yet proven, but the whole bubble is based on this) that models will continue to improve - eventually leaving behind human SDEs (or other domain people, lawyers, doctors, etc) - if this happens these arguments I keep seeing on HN about AI slop will all be moot.

Assuming AI continues to improve, the cost and speed of software development will dramatically drop. I saw a comment yesterday that predicted that AI will just plateau and everyone will go back to vim and Makefiles (paraphrasing).

Maybe, I don't know, but all these people saying AI is slop, Ra Ra Humans is just wishful thinking. Let's admit it, we don't know how it will play out. There's people like Dario and Sam who naturally are cheerleading for AI, then there's the HN collective who hate every new release of MacOS and every AI model, just on principle! I understand the fear, anyone who's ever read Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford will see the parallels, things are changing, AI is the plough, the railway, the transistor...

I'm tired on the debate, my experience is that AI (Gemini for me) is awesome, we all have gaps in our knowledge/skills (but not Gemini), AI helps hardcore backend engineers throw together a Gradio demo in minutes to make their point, helps junior devs review their code before making a PR, helps Product put together presentations. I could go on and on, those that don't see value in AI are doing it wrong.

As Taylor Swift said "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me" - take that to heart and learn to leverage the tools, stop whining please, it's embarrassing to the whole software industry.

There's an old idiom about this but I'm really getting tired of people here being against everything AI. It was the same when IDEs came out. Everyone banging on about their emacs setup or whatever, meanwhile the rest of us just got on with doing the things we love with the right tools for the job without any nostalgic dogma getting in the way.

AI is here to stay, you need to get used to it or you'll be left behind.

A laptop is more than the sum of its parts. Your phone overlaps with it on a technical level, but format is important.