[zhshsha]

Have you actually used these tools?

My CTO is pushing 30k line PRs and when asked “how do you know it works” all he can say is “I’m not sure but it probably does. Our customers can QA”. Meanwhile I’m cleaning up half vibed messes from my coworkers that demo’d well.

They’re very powerful, but I think their marketing departments are even more powerful. I do wonder how many of these comments are real people.

[JamesSwift]

Alternatively:

Have you actually used these tools?

They work like magic but are not magical. Theres a skill in using them well, and getting good output. Its not just an automatic free lunch button. Good engineers become great engineers and the gap widens, as juniors/outsourcing gets pushed out of the market.

[Gud]

I use Claude and ChatGPT to build a highly complex piece of software. It is working, and it is working well.

It probably helps that I am a skilled programmer while being an expert in another domain.

My software development has gone from write/read/execute to read/execute and I’m fine with that.

[RivieraKid]

Not much, only the non-paid non-agent stuff. It's pretty impressive but my estimate is at best a 2x productivity jump for general use.

My worry is that the agentic stuff is reportedly a significant improvement and getting better quickly.

[farmdawgnation]

IMO If you're not using the tools regularly, you should start from the assumption that you're being heavily influenced by the folks that are trying to sell you something. I'm using these agentic tools for writing and improving software many times a day. The way I describe this to people is that it has changed the balance between "do I need to teach the computer to do this" or "do I just do it myself" farther in realm to the former. It's really good a boilerplate which I think is a welcome thing altogether. It's not actually doing the hard thinking that's required to scale something in production, reconcile a conflict between privacy and functionality effectively for your particular customers, or determine with any reliability what will actually sell.

[johnstenner]

only 2x? :( why are we even bothering at that point