Agreed on the product. I can't make Gemini read my emails on GMail. One day it says it doesn't have access, the other day it says Query unsuccessful.
Claude Desktop has no problem reaching to GMail, on the other hand :)
> Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe...
How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?
My father, a Turk, has a couple of close Armenian friends from Arapkir, a county of Malatya, from his childhood right after WWII. Going back 30-40 years before that period, Armenians were the majority ethnic population in many counties of eastern Turkish cities. Not sure about Persians, but having an Armenian connection in a big chunk of your DNA if you're from the area shouldn't be that surprising.
Fun fact. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, has Malatya and Arabkir districts.
> Not software engineers being kicked out ... but rather experienced engineers using AI to generate bits of code and then meticulously reviewing and testing them.
But what if you only need 2 kentonv's instead of 20 at the end? Do you assume we'll find enough new tasks that will occupy the other 18? I think that's the question.
And the author is implementing a fairly technical project in this case. How about routine LoB app development?
Just like in blind wine tasting, I suspect people’s perceptions (including many here) would be very different if the author hadn’t told us it was created by AI.
There’s a noticeable negativity on HN toward AI when it comes to coding, writing, or anything similar as if these people have been using AI for the past 30 years and have reached some elevated state of mind where they clearly see it's rubbish, while the rest of us mortals who’ve only been fiddling with it for the past 2.5 years can’t.
"Be careful about telling Opus to ‘be bold’ or ‘take initiative’ when you’ve given it access to real-world-facing tools...If it thinks you’re doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above."
I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ... juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won’t be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on their own.
I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.
The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.
What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.
> I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
Can't disagree more (on LLMs. NFTs are of course rubbish). I'm using them with all kinds of coding tasks with good success, and it's getting better every week. Also created a lot of documents using them, describing APIs, architecture, processes and many more.
Lately working on creating an MCP for an internal mid-sized API of a task management suite that manages a couple hundred people. I wasn't sure about the promise of AI handling your own data until starting this project, now I'm pretty sure it will handle most of the personal computing tasks in the future.
As a programmer, I think it's easier to replace programmers than many other occupations. We work with generic DSLs called programming languages, which can be easily handled by AI. Most of what we produce can be easily parsed by an AI. We work in small, incremental tasks which is perfect for AI. Most of us use the same set of tools. What else? UI is similar everywhere, especially in LoB apps. What we produce is repetitive, most of us practically doing clever meshups of the code on the Internet.