I think this comment underlines the biggest difference between people that say AI is a transformative tool and people that say it is nowhere close to working as expected.
I never expect some magic "understanding" to ever arrive, but doing remedial pattern matching is already a hugely valuable power that frees up humans to do more interesting work. This is how I use current AI - spitting out 5 line functions I could spend 5 minutes writing that he can do in 3 seconds and take me 10 seconds to review. Like "check for circular references" or "use Django ORM to write a query for all categories that have this flag for users that have this permission".
It doesn't "write the app" or solve difficult problems for me (unless it is some configuration issue). I can paste in a error code and save myself a few minutes of manual debugging. If I add a new parameter to a function it prefills the correct type definition and things like that. These are all micro-improvements but add up to a lot of saved time. Some people have success with editing across files but I rarely even try that - it excels at solving discrete, repeatable bits of work with tidy solutions so I use it for that.
Until AI can return "I don't know" or, better, "did you want it this way or that way?" it will be severely limited. Yes, it acts like a junior dev in some ways, but a junior dev that never asks any questions, which is not the junior dev you ever want to give important work.
I never expect some magic "understanding" to ever arrive, but doing remedial pattern matching is already a hugely valuable power that frees up humans to do more interesting work. This is how I use current AI - spitting out 5 line functions I could spend 5 minutes writing that he can do in 3 seconds and take me 10 seconds to review. Like "check for circular references" or "use Django ORM to write a query for all categories that have this flag for users that have this permission".
It doesn't "write the app" or solve difficult problems for me (unless it is some configuration issue). I can paste in a error code and save myself a few minutes of manual debugging. If I add a new parameter to a function it prefills the correct type definition and things like that. These are all micro-improvements but add up to a lot of saved time. Some people have success with editing across files but I rarely even try that - it excels at solving discrete, repeatable bits of work with tidy solutions so I use it for that.
Until AI can return "I don't know" or, better, "did you want it this way or that way?" it will be severely limited. Yes, it acts like a junior dev in some ways, but a junior dev that never asks any questions, which is not the junior dev you ever want to give important work.