I am strictly talking about the coding capabilities of the LLM, and not their core LLM capabilities, which they genuinely excel at.
I see 2 things happening in parallel.
1) Tools on existing LLMs continue to improve (cursor -> claude code).
2) The LLMs themselves improve which makes existing tooling better and results in new tooling to take advantage of the improvements.
I'm not sure when I see either of these slowing down and they've been accelerating at a very rapid pace. Perhaps when the funding dries up.
I think that's the question but I believe if we don't have any more LLM improvements that we still have a couple years of tooling improvements using what's there today.
I'm sort of surprised that coding is a leading use case but do not see any reason it would not spread to other industries (what the OP is saying).
I use Opus 4.6 all day long and this is not my experience at all. Maybe if you're writing standard CRUD apps or other projects well-represented in the training data. Anyone who has written "real" software knows that it's lots of iterating, ambiguity and shifting/opposing requirements.
The article seems to be written in order to feed into some combination of hype/anxiety. If the author wants to make a more compelling case for their stance I would suggest they build and deploy some of this software they're supposedly getting the LLM to perfectly create.
Yes, it's a very useful tool, but these sort of technically-light puff pieces are pretty tiresome and reflect poorly on the people who author and promote them. Also, didn't this guy previously make up some benchmarks that turned out to be bogus? https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1fd75nm/out_of_...
https://www.newsweek.com/i-couldnt-play-rules-so-i-became-en...
It's kind of a sad read. He would benefit a lot from getting outside the startup bubble and talking to some people who do useful work for a living instead of riding internet fads and growthmaxxing via viral social media posts.
It's not the experience of anyone who uses AI. People have put these AI through freshman level college CS courses and the results weren't impressive at all.
> these sort of technically-light puff pieces are pretty tiresome and reflect poorly on the people who author and promote them.
These people tend to be invested heavily in AI. That's the commonality tying them all together - AI grift. They'll say anything for more money.
So for AI appears to be a useful tool that requires a bit of hand holding. Nothing more. Maybe things will change and AGI is right around the corner.
I also think we can't be too breathlessly optimistic about where this can go. Producing feasible text was apparently easy. Producing code that meets a prose specification took longer, but we're basically there. But you can know something about the quality of that output by reading it, or reading and running it. But some stuff will be limited by slow real-world processes.
> The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious disease, aging itself...
You can't really do medical research on aging dramatically faster than people age. Maybe there's a metabolic process which, if you started intervening before people hit 60, would help more of them live to 100+ -- but more and smarter AI may still require 40+ years to run the experiment.
I would like to read more from people who have other jobs about what they see when they use AI. Did they see a similar change?
It translates PDFs for me and gives me a good enough text dump in the console to understand what I’m being told to do. If the PDF is simple enough (a letter, for example). It doesn’t give me a structured English recreation of the PDF.
I’ll give it credit that it’s probably underpinning improved translation in e.g. google translate when I dump a paragraph of English and then copy the Chinese into an email. But that’s not really in the same ballpark.
The only other professional interaction I’ve had with it was when a colleague saw an industry-slang term and asked AI what it meant. The answer, predictably, was incredibly wrong but to his completely naive eyes seemed plausible enough to put in an email. As in, it was a term relating to a metallurgical phenomena observed by a fault and AI found an unrelated industry widget that contained the same term and suggested it was due to the use of said widget.
I don’t even really see the telltale AI writing signs of people using it to summarise documents or whatnot. Nor could I think how I could take what I do and use it to do it faster or more efficiently. So I don’t even think it’s being used to ingest and summarise stuff either.
Of course, there was a longer timeline of incremental improvements on the loom over years, so the industry was not transformed overnight. But that's what's worrying people this time. We might not have time to reskill or retrain before financial hardship strikes. Especially in the current political climate. The middle of WWIII is one of the last periods I'd have asked for this automation revolution to take place.
In my experience, it’s far less useful outside of that. To the point where if AI disappeared tomorrow, it’d make approximately 0 difference to my overall life. I simply don’t find it useful, neither in my professional life nor my personal.
The only repeated use case I’ve found is throwing a PDF at it and asking it to translate the PDF. To its credit, it’s able to now OCR handwriting prior to translating which is nice.
It still doesn’t make a translated PDF. Yes, I know PDF is a shitty proprietary mess of undocumented functions. I don’t care - this is the vaunted AI, it’s apparently eating the entire jobs of programmers. Have it go create and A/B test an entire clean room implementation of the PDF format then.
Now it may be an underlying shim in a feature pipeline with which i interact but thats chasms apart from this “AI is about to eat all of our jobs”. It’s a tuned feature, such as improved translation, in that instance.
My experience from very sporadic use and observation of my colleagues is that, outside of tech, AI is much more of a “go and find the info, summarise it and give me the results” layer to the internet. It’s a slightly more convenient search engine. That’s it.
Edit: Summary for anyone who didn't follow this saga at the time: https://www.ignorance.ai/p/the-fable-of-reflection-70b
Shumer is at best a fool and at worst a con artist.
twitter is useless haha
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
Its a pretty good article but tldr is that AI is getting pretty good according to the author, and he believes it will impact employment etc because a couple of the latest models are really good. I have to agree and the thing is that many folks are writing that these AIs have to replace or automate a really significant number of jobs for the financials to make sense.
Personally I think these giant models are the wrong tech for the wrong time but there's no denying these things are getting very good at what they do.
I was thoroughly impressed as well by Claude but quickly disenchanted. It often creates bloated, slightly missing the mark code.
Don’t get me wrong, this is all insanely impressive considering 5 years ago LLMs were basically nonexistent in our workflow. Regardless of the overhyped sentiment in this tweet, I really do think something big is happening as well…
I think there's a gap in the market: it's people who know how to just interact with AI in a healthy way and avoid circles that are obsessed with warning people about how they're ushering in a dystopian, broken world (purposefully) and why you should celebrate their prognostication and efforts to destroy you.
Sure, if your dream is to see a bunch of text with your name on the front. The reason people might dream of writing a book is because writing a book is hard. They want the feeling of accomplishing something hard. If it becomes easy, then it's no longer a dream.
We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. So unless you can explain how AI is going to give me more time in the garden, to play music or to paint, then I am not closer to any of my dreams.
I know this isn't a fad. The tulip breeding works, it improves predictably, and the richest institutions in history are committing billions to it.