That is wildly optimistic IME. Frontier models do a great job of sounding authoritative on any given subject. This is not the same as actually having expert-level knowledge and understanding, and the choices the models make when you ask them to implement something can and often do reflect that. There are several domains I've worked in over the past few years where AIs lack even basic knowledge an expert practitioner would have, probably because these fields are too specialised to have a lot of books available or papers published, so presumably there hasn't been much subject-specific content to train the models on.

I don't think it's usually about what AI "did really badly on" at this point. It's more about whether the overheads of adding all the guard rails and then reviewing and correcting all the output end up costing at least a similar amount to just writing the code yourself.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago. Today's LLMs routinely write code at the level of a competent junior-mid but with the advantage of an inhumanly broad knowledge base.

For a good senior, I'm much less convinced. The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites, which matters a lot when they rely on tests so heavily to reach acceptable quality. IME, they are still mostly miss when it comes to the business insight that seniors will take into account and design/architecture decisions that keep the code manageable as it evolves. While they have become much better at recognising existing patterns in the code, and I would say they follow them reasonably well the majority of the time now, there are still bizarre anomalies that creep in, and they aren't very good at extending those patterns when necessary.

I think AI advocates also tend to underestimate just how much time it takes to properly review what they are doing. Take a half-day Claude session to implement some new feature. It might take half an hour to give it the initial brief and then review its plan. Make a few edits and it'll propose a new plan that is also long and detailed and has no edit markings to show what it changed so you have to review the whole thing, carefully and in detail, again to pick up the minor changes it also made for no obvious reason. Then you let it start doing its thing. You can't really leave it unattended for long because it'll stop to ask questions. Some of those questions might be whether it can run a screenful of ad-hoc Bash script to make some edits to your source files, because for some reason it decided not to show the actual edits as it usually would, so now you have to figure out what all the sed incantations are actually going to do while looking at those files in another editor or just trust it and then review all the changes properly later anyway. Sometimes it decides to change its plan mid-flight, but not always in a good way, and if you interrupt it to apply corrections or redirect, you break the neat plan flow it was in. Then you get to the end and you can finally see how everything it has done fits together, and you still need to review everything with the same care as you would with a junior developer's code and probably apply a few fixes where it's come up with weird names or not quite followed a pattern or imagined some instructions that were never there and made other changes in other parts of the system that should be out of scope.

If you read to the end of that last paragraph, you know how I typically feel at the end of a half day working with an agentic UI. And the thing is, I do those sessions as experiments fairly often to keep up with progress, but a lot of what I do is still written by hand, which gives me simple, objective data to compare the two ways of working and see whether the AI tools are really making me more productive once you take everything into account.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Personally, I think the optimum use of LLMs right now is probably not to use them for the whole coding workflow like that or rely on agentic tools, but to use them for tasks like answering quick questions about the existing code, doing research like a fancy search engine, writing a first draft of some boilerplate, and writing quick and dirty throwaway code for experiments, one-shot tools and the like, where you don't really care about the quality as long as it gets the job done and you will see immediately if it has in fact got the job done. For these things, the LLM can read and type faster than me, and that's useful.

They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.

Now MAGAs will have to troll the old-fashioned way: type Fox talking points into social media.

Are you talking as a language per programming productivity, or per security?

Don flips faster than his hair in the wind.

not very bright, but patient and determined, happily manipulating humans to get its way.

1) Comcast could have started moving to fiber a decade before the upstarts and qualified for the same subisidies.
2) Comcast has received 2.6B in subsidies since 1987.
3) Remind us again, how long as Biden been out of office now?

Tovarishch, your sons are dying, cold, alone, in a Ukranian ditch; just waiting for one of the many overhead drones to notice them and blow off their manhood while they bleed out. And for what? So the ex-KGB gangster in Moscow can fantasize about reuniting a mythical Historical Russian Empire that never existed and never will?

Go home to the family farm and enjoy a peaceful life. There's no glory for you in Ukraine.

I'm curious where exactly he gets that $1500 figure from. When Spectrum installed my fiber, it was half an hour's labor for a lineman, 150m of such crappy fiber I wouldn't use it as a patch cable inside my house, a 4-port 1Gbit EPON, a mid-range pre-compromised bandwidth-stealing router I threw back in the box the second the tech left (if I don't have the real admin password, it's not going on my network!). That's it. Even at massively inflated replacement prices for captive customers, that's $600 total at most (and realistically more like half that).

Pssst, Jason - You need to realize the fictional numbers you use to justify rate increases to state PUCs are just that, fiction; and your competitors are eating your lunch precisely because you don't understand the difference. One year of "subsidizing" the installation on a two year contract is still net profitable! But then, they say to never correct your enemy when they're making a mistake, and I could not be happier to have escaped Comcast's footprint years ago. You go right ahead and pretend everyone else in the market is selling at a loss. Meanwhile, they're doing just fine, I don't need to deal with Comcast, and you won't be missed.

Either they are right and we can all retire early and live in a socialistic Trek-ish paradise, or the AI bubble will pop and we'll have yet another nasty recession. There's not a lot in between because Wallstreet is pricing and valuating for the 1st scenario.

The preliminary results that previously sent their stock soaring "only" showed a 49% reduction. 42% over a much larger population still ain't bad!

I'm honestly stumped why the market reacted as badly as it did to this news - That's still a 100% viable product, and it targets people desperate for any reduction in recurrence! Exactly 0 people will turn down 42% who would have been thrilled with 49%.