And that all wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wave of bots that makes the crypto wave seem like child's play.
If you really in good faith want to understand where people are coming from when they talk about huge productivity gains, then I would recommend installing Claude Code (specifically that tool) and asking it to build some kind of small project from scratch. (The one I tried was a small app to poll a public flight API for planes near my house and plot the positions, along with other metadata. I didn't give it the api schema at all. It was still able to make it work.) This will show you, at least, what these tools are capable of -- and not just on toy apps, but also at small startups doing a lot of greenfield work very quickly.
Most of us aren't doing that kind of work, we work on large mature codebases. AI is much less effective there because it doesn't have all the context we have about the codebase and product. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. But to start making that tradeoff I do think it's worth first setting aside skepticism and seeing it at its best, and giving yourself that "wow" moment.
One of the first three projects I tried was a spin on a to-do app. The buttons didn't even work when clicked.
Yes, I keep it iterating, give it a puppeteer MCP, etc.
I think you're just misunderstanding how hard it is to make a greenfield project when you have a super-charged stack overflow that AI is.
Greenfield projects aren't hard, what's hard is starting them.
What AI has helped me immensely with is blank page syndrome. I get it to spit out some boilerplate for a SINGLE page, then boom, I have a new greenfield project 95% my own code in a couple of days.
That's the mistake I think you 10x ers are making.
And you're all giddy and excited and are putting in a ton of work without realising you're the one doing the work, not the AI.
And you'll eventually burn out on that.
And those of us who are a bit more skeptical are realising we could have done it on our own, faster, we just wouldn't normally have bothered. I'd have gone done some gardening with that time instead.
Personally I've found that it struggles if you're using a language that is off the beaten path. The more content on the public internet that the model could have consumed, the better it will be.
> It's hardly even useful for coding.
I’m curious what kind of projects you’re writing where AI coding agents are barely useful.
It’s the “shills” on YouTube that keep me up to date with the latest developments and best practices to make the most of these tools. To me it makes tools like CC not only useful but indispensable. Now I do not focus on writing the thing, but I focus on building agents who are capable of building the thing with a little guidance.
