You can find an illustrator anywhere in the world for the budget you'd like to spend (The Consensus is bootstrapped, a shoe-string budget). Would love to stop seeing tech companies using AI illustrations.
For me there is almost nothing more grating than obvious AI illustrations. It makes it near impossible for me to take the content seriously. I'm wondering: do these people just have no taste? Or do they think nobody cares? Or they just don't care themselves?
Old UNIX habit.
Had no idea it was a new "in-crowd" signal.
Pretty challenging once the codebase gets large, but also a lot of fun to take a big mess and bring it under control.
I'm asking because I have read these comments here and there about fixing the mess AI made. I know what mess it usually creates and it doesn't get better with the new models. But I also know that whatever is created by AI kind of works more often than not, and once something breaks, it's just one prompt away to fixing it.
So what I do is mostly use the AI to understand things like architecture, encapsulation, deployment pipelines, types, migration structure, etc.
It's a lot of "Audit the callers of X and give me a report" as well as reading code. I'm looking for stuff that doesn't pass my smell test, especially relating type types/interfaces. I look at the AI recommendations, but they're only useful once I've scoped them down to more granular questions, such as assessing the interfaces between specific layers of a pipeline.
That process is about understanding the shape of the solution that exists and then trying to formulate what shape it should have.
Then it's a lot of identifying a very boring, vanilla architectural target and moving towards it in phases, using the strangler fig pattern pretty aggressively. I review every PR, but mostly at the level of architecture rather than every specific line.
There's also a well documented phenomena [1] where LLMs struggle to recall information in the middle of the context.
[1] https://charlesanthonybrowne.medium.com/how-llms-end-up-igno...
Previously, I'd be contracted to clean up messes from cut-rate dev shops. Now, there's plenty of opportunity for me to clean up messes from AI-driven development.
Writing, illustration, and tech support seem to be the categories people handle themselves most often via AI, according to the first graphic... But then the second graphic suggests that the number of freelance postings for a top 'do-it-yourself-with-AI' category like writing is only down about 0.5% year over year. That almost suggests there isn't really an effect. Even the largest-changing category in that graphic, web development, is down only about 2%.
I think I conceptually can agree with their implication that AI allows freelancers to take on more breadth on their own, but the data/graphics they're presenting are confusing me. I'm not sure I get it.
I'm just real tired of these companies inserting themselves everywhere. I look forward to when investors realise that their money was just yeeted into the furnace and the budget for this sort of thing evaporates.