I've been thinking of it as a "conservation of cognition". there is some fundamental about of cognition that needs to be spent in order to keep things moving. LLMs do not reduce that, they only change it.
You can't keep people from being stupid via the language you use. People who have the reaction you describe would not magically "get it" if different language is used.
> Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, small.
One of the most uncomfortable truths about our profession is that there is no floor to how bad software can be while still making people billions of dollars.
I don't think you've understood the lesson here. Chesterton's fence is not about keeping systems in place. It is about how you approach changing the system.
yeah he's not a crank, just an asshole. Taking credit for work did by his employees, to the point of suing them. The only significant discovery to come out of his CA work was completed by an employee, who wolfram sued when he published a paper and gave a talk on it.
That does not match my experience. Composer 2 was fantastic for my uses, and I hit Composer 2.5 with some very difficult things last night, which it handled fast and effectively. I don't really care about benchmarks. I care about practice, and in practice, it's been very very good for me.
I've been using cursor for over a year for my personal projects. At work, I use Claude Code, and so I've been wondering if I'm missing something in the other agents.
Over the last week, I tried out two other agents on my personal projects: dirac and forgecode, after seeing impressive results from both of them on terminal bench.
After a good amount of testing, and over $100 in open router spend, I'm back to cursor.
I really liked forgecode the best, and it feels better than claude code, but cursor definitely feels best to me. Composer 2.5 is fast and effective, and it makes a huge difference. I was running `forge` with Opus, and it was taking dozens of minutes to do things, and the feedback loop was so slow.
The previous version of composer was also much faster, and it makes a difference. Maybe people like context switching, but I prefer to stay focussed on the task in front of me, and I'm reviewing the code carefully.
I think that's a pretty good moat. I was ready to end my subscription a week ago, and now I'm back after learning the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side of the fence.
I didn't imply anything. I just called out the emotional reality. There are a lot of externalized pain in the world today, and little recourse to addressing it. You can try telling people that they are naive and need to look at the big picture, but you might not see much success at getting your point across.
It sounds like this has a pretty falsifiable claim here - is the revenue attributed to a tax thing? Then it's clearly not attributable to code.
I agree that the macro picture would speak for itself. Can you point to any macro level detail that is indeed cleanly showing benefits from increased productivity from LLMs?
Those things cost resources, and now you're introducing a new attack vector: open up a bunch of shit PRs, burn a lot of cash for the target organization.
Libraries also do a lot more than just provide books. $35 per resident per year for everything that libraries do provide is forking cheap, and we would be greatly impoverished if they were to disappear.