We will recover when we realize the valuable workers in a field are the ones who want to be there and actively increase their knowledge rather than offload work.

It's not a bad time to take a break from it. Keep yourself from cognitive decline, then in 2 or 3 years when the industry has come to its senses you'll be able to impress in a sensible interview. Compared to the slop addicts that won't know how to tie their own shoes without asking Claude each time.

This is the kind of thing that spreads. If you have to deal with it all the time you're going to start dissociating out of necessity.

It was/is a struggle to get them to recognize and balance tech dept, we must now push to balance cognitive dept as well.

Some employers will eventually get it as they have with tech dept. And those will be the ones we see succeed.

They aren't, not even if we forget about the capable Chinese models.

I suspect Anthropic will implode soon when employees are unable to get the cash-out that they expected. Having so much compensation locked up in company stock is risky on a good day.

We should really be studying AI related cognitive and/or skill decline more heavily.

There's no definitive conclusion about productivity that can be drawn from the followup. However I think it's reasonable to argue that AI use overtime has made devs worse without AI.

I find the exact opposite. Typically the AI will make too many mistakes (even with latest advanced models), they usually aren't major/program breaking mistakes, but they still require fixing if I want to keep the code quality good enough, and make future changes possible without a falling house of cards. In order to describe the correct approach I have to write more English to describe the problem than the amount of code I could write myself. I could maybe see it working by writing rough pseudo code and having the AI translate, but then I loose out on any code analysis or tab completion as I write. It's also just innately frustrating to have to babysit and correct somethings work all the time. This all may be in part caused by the nature of my current work for the last couple years, which has mostly been on library code rather than application code.

I suspect I'd have a very different experience if I was working on CRUD related tasks like making new API endpoints, interfacing with a DB, or writing FE components. Not to make light of those tasks, I enjoy that work, though it is much more repetitive.

I agree with the parts about using AI to ask questions and gain better understanding though. I do that constantly for APIs and languages that I don't have a clear mental model of. It's like an interactive search.

Also agree on POCs, sometimes there are small tools, demos, or prototype features that I don't need to care deeply about.

Edit: There are some rare competent managers who will stop the enquiry before even asking the engineers.

That feels like a very generous framing. There's very little opportunity between the extremes that would paint a convincing outlook of survival for either company.

Perhaps if they were able to scale down their spending drastically they could survive, but that requires acknowledging their current valuations are BS. Doing so is a major risk, that will piss off all share holders. There's also the employees they would need to fire or reduce salary. The shift of focus internally to sustainability would be a major challenge.

It's the subtle topics that we should be concerned about, and double so with closed models where even if oddities are identified they are harder to research further and impossible to fix.

On mobile it's rare for apps other than web browsers to allow multiple tabs/windows and the ones that do (Ex: Gmail allows a draft to be a second window) have many multi window related bugs.

However I do think there is reason to use Java or Python (as much as I loathe both) they have GC, and it'd be a lot easier for AI to fuck up memory safety in something like assembly or C.

They get lock-in, and through that lock-in are more effectively able to inflate token usage.

They wouldn't even need to make something equivalent to the latest hardware. A Chinese RTX 3090 equivalent would be enough.