> I would honestly go so far as to say the overhype is detrimental to actual measured adoption.
I think you are a bit dishonest about how objectively you are measuring. From where I'm sitting, I don't know a lot of developers that still artisanally code like they did a few years ago. The question is no longer if they are using AI for coding but how much they are still coding manually. I myself barely use IDEs at this point. I won't be renewing my Intellij license. I haven't touched it in weeks. It doesn't do anything I need anymore.
As for security, I think enough serious people have confirmed that AI reported issues by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI are real enough despite the massive amounts of AI slop that they also have to deal with in issue trackers. You can ignore that all you like. But I hope people that maintain this software take it a bit more seriously when people point out exploitable issues in their code bases.
The good news of course is that we can now find and fix a lot of these issues at scale and also get rid of whole categories of bugs by accelerating the project of replacing a lot of this software with inherently safer versions not written in C/C++. That was previously going to take decades. But I think we can realistically get a lot of that done in the years ahead.
I think some smart people are probably already plotting a few early moves here. I'd be curious to find out what e.g. Linus Torvalds thinks about this. I would not be surprised to learn he is more open to this than some people might suspect. He has made approving noises about AI before. I don't expect him to jump on the band wagon. But I do expect he might be open to some AI assisted code replacements and refactoring provided there are enough grown ups involved to supervise the whole thing. We'll see. I expect a level of conservatism but also a level of realism there.
You are in a bubble. Some segments use essentially no AI, while others have gone all in. Just because the type of engineers you're surrounded by do engineering that is obsolete doesn't mean that's the case across the board. All the best game engineers I know still write at least 90% of the code (probably closer to 99%). The bad ones use AI nearly exclusively - just like yourself. They can't create very complex or performant game systems, and they struggle even with highly unique or interactive game UI systems. I've looked over their code; almost every choice is bad, and it's clear why their projects completely collapse after a certain point. They simply can't build super complex, performant, or novel systems.
I'm going to assume you do the type of engineering where all the hard problems are solved for you already, and you are merely connecting inputs/outputs and hooking up APIs. Because, frankly, the value in "software plumbing" is gone; anyone with a Claude license can do that now.
You're condescending for no valid reason and I will tell you that what you say is not correct. Models superseded "plumbing" tasks and went well into the engineering grounds a generation or two ago already. Evidence is plenty. We see models perfectly capable reasoning about the kernel code yet you're convinced that game engines are somewhat more special. Why? There're plenty of such examples where AI is successfully applied to hard engineering tasks (database kernels), and where it became obvious that the models are almost perfectly capable reasoning about that tbh quite difficult code. I think you should reevaluate your stance and become more humble.
Link me the research on the hard engineering tasks they've done on database kernels, I'd love to see it, sounds interesting.
As long as people comment, "Only bad/stupid engineers hand-write code because LLMs are better in every way," and that's objectively not true in various engineering circles, I'll keep trolling them and being just as hyperbolic in the inverse because it amuses me. Don't take things too seriously on the internet; you'll have a bad time ;)
> They simply can't build super complex, performant, or novel systems.
Neither can single humans.
If you introduce some reasonable constraints AI will come out ahead most of the time, especially for optimization cases where AI will run circles around your average programmer and is perfectly happy to inline some ASM for you.
You still have bespoke cordwainers/cobblers 100 years after that process has been well and truly automated. But they're rare and almost nobody cares.
I think you are a bit dishonest about how objectively you are measuring. From where I'm sitting, I don't know a lot of developers that still artisanally code like they did a few years ago. The question is no longer if they are using AI for coding but how much they are still coding manually. I myself barely use IDEs at this point. I won't be renewing my Intellij license. I haven't touched it in weeks. It doesn't do anything I need anymore.
As for security, I think enough serious people have confirmed that AI reported issues by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI are real enough despite the massive amounts of AI slop that they also have to deal with in issue trackers. You can ignore that all you like. But I hope people that maintain this software take it a bit more seriously when people point out exploitable issues in their code bases.
The good news of course is that we can now find and fix a lot of these issues at scale and also get rid of whole categories of bugs by accelerating the project of replacing a lot of this software with inherently safer versions not written in C/C++. That was previously going to take decades. But I think we can realistically get a lot of that done in the years ahead.
I think some smart people are probably already plotting a few early moves here. I'd be curious to find out what e.g. Linus Torvalds thinks about this. I would not be surprised to learn he is more open to this than some people might suspect. He has made approving noises about AI before. I don't expect him to jump on the band wagon. But I do expect he might be open to some AI assisted code replacements and refactoring provided there are enough grown ups involved to supervise the whole thing. We'll see. I expect a level of conservatism but also a level of realism there.