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I spend a fair amount of time on open source and one thing I noticed is that in real pieces of software it doesn't look like all these 10x and 100x AI engineer

I spend a fair amount of time on open source and one thing I noticed is that in real pieces of software it doesn't look like all these 10x and 100x AI engineers are anywhere to be found. VLC has like 4000 open issues. Why aren't the AI geniuses fixing these? Nobody has ever any actual code to show, and if they do it's "here's an LED that blinks every time my dog farts, I could've never done it on my own!". I'm feeling like Charlie in that episode of It's Always Sunny with his conspiracy dashboard. All these productivity gurus don't actually exist in the real world. Can anybody show me their coding agent workflow on a 50k LOC C codebase instead of throwaway gimmick examples? As far as I'm concerned these things can't even understand pointers

chrisco255 1y ago
This is something I've been thinking about too. I think lower skill devs seem to feel the most ecstatic about LLMs as are able to prompt something into existence that is beyond their skill level, and that feels like magic. It very quickly becomes a crutch, however, and a junior developer may struggle to become a senior in skill level with too much dependency on Cursor and tools like it. They definitely lose their edge on complex products. I find it can be a great time saver for language reference and for rapid fire questions, but it isn't able to, as of yet, operate at an expert level on a complex novel codebase. Maybe it gets there in another year or two. But it currently makes enough mistakes at that level that it isn't worth it.
000ooo000 1y ago
You only have to look at the C# GitHub repos where MS enabled Copilot, and the utter ridiculousness of those interactions between the likes of Stephen Toub and the bot. It's comical.