simanyay

These days I often see extraordinary claims from reputable industry and other insiders that AI writes most of the code and human programmers are simply supervising it.

For example, this morning I was reading [1] and it had the following claim: “ If you really want to grasp how much better A.I. has gotten recently, talk to a programmer. A year or two ago, A.I. coding tools existed, but were aimed more at speeding up human coders than at replacing them. Today, software engineers tell me that A.I. does most of the actual coding for them, and that they increasingly feel that their job is to supervise the A.I. systems.

Jared Friedman, a partner at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, recently said a quarter of the accelerator’s current batch of start-ups were using A.I. to write nearly all their code.”

As a programmer myself, whenever I read this I feel like there’s a giant group chat going on and I’m excluded. I use AI in my work, mostly through Zed assistant, but with the latest available models the output and reasoning is nowhere in quality where I’d let it generate majority of the code and ship it to production.

Am I missing something? Do people really generate majority of the code that then successfully operates in production at any significant business scale?

[1] - https://archive.ph/XykVf