AI hype is excessive, but its productivity gains are real
I'm kind of writing this to "past" me, who I assume is "current" you for a number of folks out there. For the rest of you, this might just sound like ramblings of an old fogey super late to the party.
Yes, AI is over-hyped. LLMs will not solve every problem under the sun but, like with any hot new tech, companies are going to say it will solve every problem out there, especially problems in the domain space of the company.
Startups who used to be "uber for farmers" are now "AI-powered uber for farmers." You can't get away from it. It's exhausting.
I let the hype exhaustion get the best of me for a while and eschewed the tech entirely.
Well, I was wrong to do so. This became clear when my company bought Cursor licenses for all software developers in the company and strongly encouraged us to use it. I reluctantly started experimenting.
The first thing I noticed is that LLM-powered autocomplete was wildly accurate. It seemed like it "knew" what I wanted to do next at every turn. Due to my discomfort with AI, I just stuck with autocomplete for a while. And, honestly, if I stuck with just using autocomplete it would still have been a massive level up.
I remember having a few false starts with the agent panel in Cursor. I felt totally out of control when it was making changes to all sorts of files when I asked it a simple question. I have since figured out how to ask more directed questions, provide constraints, and supply markdown files in the codebase with general instructions.
I now find the agent panel really helpful. I use it to help understand parts of a codebase, scaffold entirely new services or unit tests, and track down bugs.
As a former skeptic, I am a wildly more productive developer with AI tooling. I let my aversion to the hype train cause me to miss out on those productivity gains for too long. I hope you don't make the same mistake.
Enjoy this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed on Feedly or add my RSS XML file to another reader!