> Coding is one area where AI has been successful.
I have my doubts about this. Do you have actual good data for this? Most devs including streamers like primeagen and others seem to think Devin is a joke.
Sure, but if AI was actually useless for coding I doubt we would see numbers like this in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ai/
These data points are not a good indicator of AI being useful because we don’t have a baseline to compare it to.
The baseline is the same IDE tooling support we see with copilot but with more traditional tech like search engines and API docs search. Dev productivity without relying on AI is a market few cared about until AI money came along looking for problems to solve.
I can only speak for myself but AI has had a profound effect on my coding. I really can't imagine going back and search engines and API docs are not even in the same ballpark. I wrote a bit on why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41350824
I wasn't sure if I would but I agree with the points you made. I'm generally not for using AI but there are places it works great and as you said, stuff I don't want to do because it's tedius and mindless, well the AI is great at that...
One use I had today... Make all the fields on this record nullable and add these attributes to them. Done in seconds what would really have been at least 30 minutes of work. It's mindless and tedius but I didn't need to do it...
I don't think I would trust the AI to catch edge cases I didn't think about, but I get the feeling for you it's more that dealing with them would be super tedius and they are truly rare. Like an http server unable to create a socket... It's an edge case but realistically let it crash, well the AI can write some more graceful exit with logging I guess...
I have my doubts about this. Do you have actual good data for this? Most devs including streamers like primeagen and others seem to think Devin is a joke.