Where I'm at with AI
by crashwhip on 1/30/2026, 2:38:32 PM
https://paulosman.me/2026/01/18/where-im-at-with-ai/
Comments
by: datsci_est_2015
This article is different because it actually talks about code review, which I don’t see very often. Especially in the ultra-hype 1000x “we built an operating system in a day using agentic coding”, it seems like code review is implied to be a thing of the past.<p>As long as code continues to need to be reviewed to (mostly) maintain a chain of liability, I don’t see SWE going anywhere like both hypebros and doomers seem to be intent on posting about.<p>Code review will simply become the bottle neck for SWE. In other words, reading and understanding code so that when SHTF the shareholders know who to hold accountable.
1/30/2026, 4:33:26 PM
by: jillesvangurp
> increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work.<p>Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.<p>And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.<p>And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.
1/30/2026, 4:05:25 PM
by: Legend2440
> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough.<p>You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed.<p>There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsic value of art, etc.
1/30/2026, 3:12:23 PM
by: mkw5053
The Uber comparison feels weak because their lock-in came from regulatory capture and network effects, neither of which LLMs have once weights are commoditized (are we already there?).
1/30/2026, 3:44:08 PM
by: ivanstojic
> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said<p>It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.”<p>I’m tired of the hype boss.
1/30/2026, 3:14:04 PM
by: dtnewman
<i>> The current landscape is a battle between loss-leaders. OpenAI is burning through billions of dollars per year and is expected to hit tens of billions in losses per year soon. Your $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT is nowhere near keeping them afloat. Anthropic’s figures are more moderate, but it is still currently lighting money on fire in order to compete and gain or protect market share.</i><p>I don't doubt that the leading labs are lighting money on fire. Undoubtedly, it costs crazy amounts of cash to train these models. But hardware development takes time and it's only been a few years at this point. Even <i>TODAY</i>, one can run Kimi K2.5, a 1T param open-source model on two mac studios. It runs at 24 tokens/sec. Yes, it'll cost you $20k for the specs needed, but that's hobbyist and small business territory... we're not talking mainframe computer costs here. And certainly this price will come down? And it's hard to imagine that the hardware won't get faster/better?<p>Yes... training the models can really only be done with NVIDIA and costs insane amounts of money. But it seems like even if we see just moderate improvement going forward, this is still a monumental shift for coding if you compare where we are at to 2022 (or even 2024).<p>[1] <a href="https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2016487974876164562?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2016487974876164562?s=20</a>
1/30/2026, 3:17:14 PM
by: yalogin
There really are no other use cases for generative AI than software flows. The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable. One think I am convinced of is that software engineering salaries will fall and we have seen the peak salaries for this industry, they will only fall going forward. Sure there will be a few key senior folks that continue to make a lot, but the software salaries itself will go through a k split just like out economy.
1/30/2026, 4:12:59 PM
by: skydhash
> that most software will be built very quickly, and more complicated software should be developed by writing the specification, and then generating the code. We may still need to drop down to a programming language from time to time, but I believe that almost all development will be done with generative AI tools<p>My strongly held belief is that anyone who think that way, also think that software engineering is reading tickets, searching for code snippets on stack overflow and copy-pasting code.<p>Good specifications are always written after a lot of prototypes, experiments and sample implementations (which may be production level). Natural language specifications exist after the concept has been formalized. Before that process, you only have dreams and hopes.
1/30/2026, 3:23:23 PM
by: willtemperley
It's important to remember these things are almost certainly gaslighting people through subtle psychological triggers, making people believe these chatbots far more than they are, using behavioural design principles [1].<p>I often find when I come up with the solution, these little autocompletes pretend they knew that all along. Or I make an observation they say something like "yes that's the core insight into this".<p>They're great at boilerplate. They can immediately spot a bug in a 1000 lines of code. I just wish they'd stop being so pretentious. It's us that are driving these things, it's our intelligence, intuition and experience that's creating solutions.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_design" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_design</a>
1/30/2026, 3:48:39 PM
by:
1/30/2026, 3:56:54 PM
by: fatheranton
[dead]
1/30/2026, 3:48:28 PM
by: vonneumannstan
Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful"<p>Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on anything at all. Same vibes as the guys saying horseless carriages were useless and couldn't possibly do anything better than a horse which after all has its own mind. Just incredibly short sighted and lacking curiosity or creativity.
1/30/2026, 3:13:59 PM
by: bandrami
> I use it for routine coding tasks like generating scaffolding or writing tests<p>IDK this sounds a whole lot like paying for snippets
1/30/2026, 4:03:26 PM