What are these people doing that requires $2-300 worth of tokens every day? It would have to be a huge harness of agents spinning up massive changes and running them through their CI/CD cycle while the software engineers go play some ping pong or hit the fitness center.

I stand by what I have written here, which was entirely accurate. Show otherwise or fuck off.

"you're arguing it cannot be done when it obviously can"

I don't need your sorry ass to rephrase my statements into some kind of strawman here. I'm arguing that any attempt to make the automated reading of license plates illegal would be unenforceable because it is very easy to do. An ordinary household security camera with an appropriate view of the street can pick up license plates of passing vehicles, and there are services like this that will extract the plate data if you send them images or even a video stream;
https://platerecognizer.com/pr...

You could get AI to write a cellphone app that would send your snapshots of cars to that service and build up a database of plate numbers. Or maybe you couldn't, but any decent programmer could. If the car is in a driveway and a house street number is in the picture you have a correlation with the owner.

Yap yap yap, and then the usual snark.

Apparently there isn't a law that prevents Axon or anyone else from capturing photos of vehicle license plates and using software to get the plate numbers. Even if there were it would basically be unenforceable. You can walk around with your cellphone taking snapshots of license plates and send them off over the internet for an AI or other paid service to extract the plate data for you. Axon does it at scale but anyone could do it on a small scale.

What happened is that they didn't follow the letter of the "ALPR Privacy Act". You can do it, but you have to disclose how you do it, and what you do with the data.

"has failed to comply with a California privacy provision by not disclosing how it collects, uses and shares plate data gathered through its camera systems"

"Axon collects California drivers’ vehicle and location information and does not tell them what it does with it."

"This AI unlocks 10 hours a week per person to finally address the backlog of strategic projects we've delayed for the past two years."

That's the right way to think about it, at least initially. And then there's the technical debt backlog, the documentation, and the aspirational projects and improvements that nobody has had time to work on.

"While creating the tests the AI will discard those tests that work in the old code and fail in the new code"

That certainly hasn't been my experience. Recent AI knows exactly what to do in many cases. Writes tests, checks for bugs in it's work and fixes them. By the time I see it everything is down to a few choices I can make.

Are you using recent models? I'm frequently amazed and what they can do with a good prompt and the appropriate context.

"he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months"

My guess is that him and his team will spend the first 4 weeks getting the AI to examine the codebase and whatever documentation may be available. Documentation quickly goes bad so they'll have to compare it against the current implementation. AI will write all of that up in some detailed markdown files. Then they will have AI use that to give them a set of options for the refactoring/rewrite. Seems doable up to that point.

Then they can determine how feasible it all is, where is the low hanging fruit, what incremental steps to take, etc.

"trying to build it with limited access to tokens"

That's the limiting factor these days I agree. You can subscribe for a weekly or monthly allotment of tokens and burn through them in a few days if you aren't careful. Or you can fund a wallet that gets drawn down as your tasks consume tokens and see exactly how much it costs, and keep feeding the beast.

With multiple agents running in parallel this can get expensive real quick.

If its like all the other legacy code I've worked with over the years, it will now be looking like a big ball of paper mache'. New features and fixes were pasted onto it so thickly as time passed that it is brittle, delicate, and opaque.

I bet this guy spends the first month just trying to figure out what's there and how it could be modularized. He will get AI to do this for him of course, and then it will put an implementation plan together for him that it will work from later. There will be an extensive test suite so he can compare the behavior of his new code against the legacy version. Ideally he would phase in pieces of his reimplementation little by little instead of one huge code drop in 2 years.

The article doesn't give any technical details. From what I can tell, the Cisco IOS is written in C language. The original implementation was written in the 80's. I always disliked any situations where I had to interact with it back in the day, maybe it has improved.

By now the codebase is probably a barnacle-encrusted mess. Wouldn't surprise me if they want to just recreate all the existing functionality from scratch in Rust. Can some kid and a couple of his buddies make significant headway in a month with unlimited AI assistance? Could be.

"he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months", might be able to do that.

Sounds like it is much more than assumptions seeing as how "American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset".

"Anyone can use an LLM."

Yeah but apparently a lot of people suck at it, including several of the trolls here.

"Where is your evidence to support your causal assertions?"

They said it themselves.

"Probably half of the suggestions AI wants to do for me is stupid or else just plain wrong", I'm still waiting to see your work. Maybe it's just you.

"Everyone should provide evidence to support their personal experiences", you made the claim buddy. Got nothing?

"Probably half of the suggestions AI wants to do for me is stupid or else just plain wrong"", let's see your work.