Well Amazon makes it take way less time to buy something (almost anything). I dont have to waste time and money going to the hardware store, it only takes 90 seconds of my time and the price including shipping is less than what the hardware store wants to charge, with its rent and utilities and so on to cover. Amazon cut out a middleman between the warehouse and the household. It made things more efficient, and I can use the time and money savings to spend more money or work harder at my job. (I for one do spend more hours working if I have more time in my day. Not everyone is like this.)
AI could do the same thing. It could cut 90 seconds down to... 10 seconds? It doesn't seem like the same impact as Amazon, where an hour's investment became 90 seconds. And I can't see how AI shopping is going to save me money here. There's no middleman to cut out, except maybe some web site storefront?? There's also a huge downside: with Amazon, I suddenly had access to 100 different pairs of scissors to choose from, instead of the 2 or 3 I could find in Staples. That was a plus. With AI shopping, suddenly I'm down to one choice: whatever Chat chooses for me. If I want to have a say in which pair of scissors I buy, I'm back to shopping for myself.
A trillion dollar valuation doesn't imply there's actually a trillion dollars there. It's just the last price the stock sold for, times the shares in existence.
If Elon tried to sell every share of Tesla tomorrow, he would get a lot less than the face value of all his shares.
So in other words, there doesn't need to be that much currency, just that much hype.
It seems the people who think they can just tell computers to write code for them, also are the people who are inclined to tell other people to build apps for them.
We are hurdling towards a brave new world where only 10% of humans have to work, and the other 90% form the bureaucracy on top.
If the cost of building software had dropped 90%, the author wouldn't need to write a blog post. Just undercut the competition by 80% (they can keep 10% for themself).
The main benefit of writing tests is that is forces the developer to think about what they just wrote and what it is supposed to do. I often will find bugs while writing tests.
I've worked on projects with 2,000+ unit tests that are essentially useless, often fail when nothing is wrong, and rarely detect actual bugs. It is absolutely worse than having 0 tests. This is common when developers write tests to satisfy code coverage metrics, instead of in an effort to make sure their code works properly.
I don't think zero unit tests is the right answer either. And if you actually take the time to read all 300 and cull the useless or overlapping ones, you've invested much more than 10% of the time it would have taken you.
Having a zillion unit tests (of questionable quality) is a huge pita when you try to refactor.
When I am writing unit tests (or other tests), I'm thinking about all the time I'll save by catching bugs early -- either as I write the test or in the future as regressions crop up. So to place too much importance on the amount of time invested now is missing the point, and makes me think that person is just going through the motions. Of course if I'm writing throwaway code or a POC, I'll probably skip writing tests at all.
In order to add coverage for scenarios that I haven't even thought of, I prefer fuzz testing. Then I get a lot more than 2-300 tests and I don't even pretend to spend time reviewing the tests until they fail.
If you want to use an LLM to help expedite the typing of tests you have thought of, fine. If you just tell it to write the suite for itself, that's equivalent to hiring a (mediocre to bad) new grad and forcing them to write tests for you. If that's as good of an outcome as doing it yourself, I can only assume you are brand new to software engineering.
I think there are likely a lot of people for whom their voice is not unique or an asset. Those people need to hire someone who is better at writing (assuming they're managing a business's social media). Or those people can save money and use an LLM. Whether that's a good business decision or not, I don't think human vs LLM is an apples to apples comparison, because you'd have to compare LLMs to whoever is willing to write marketing copy pro bono.
Agreed, except s/know/think. It's possible that there are some false positives in my detection algorithm, that I tune out just because someone's prose style has that undercurrent of blandness characteristic of LLMs. But I suppose if we're talking about "art" and not, for example, technical documentation, that's no great loss --- bland writing isn't worth recreationally reading.
It does seem that LLMs could avoid this detection with some superficial tweaks such as injecting poor grammar and reducing peppiness. I hope it doesn't get to the point that I have to become suspicious of all text.
Some of the stuff I work on is quite involved, anyway.
I’ve been at this game awhile (coding for over 40 years), so I have learned a few tricks.
Of course, I “cheat.” I’ve learned to write software that doesn’t tend to have that many bugs, and I also don’t have to deal with other people’s code, so much. I write code for myself, which means that I don’t get to practice my debugging, so much, these days.
AI could do the same thing. It could cut 90 seconds down to... 10 seconds? It doesn't seem like the same impact as Amazon, where an hour's investment became 90 seconds. And I can't see how AI shopping is going to save me money here. There's no middleman to cut out, except maybe some web site storefront?? There's also a huge downside: with Amazon, I suddenly had access to 100 different pairs of scissors to choose from, instead of the 2 or 3 I could find in Staples. That was a plus. With AI shopping, suddenly I'm down to one choice: whatever Chat chooses for me. If I want to have a say in which pair of scissors I buy, I'm back to shopping for myself.
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