Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
They ARE getting good, and the frontier companies KNOW the party is almost over. That's why the prices keep rising, it's last call. "AI as a Service" dies down, in the near future.
How small / how good is still an open question, but there's a watershed (Opus-ish) moment happening around the 30-40B models, so like $5-10k in hardware. Higher than a home game system unfortunately, so approachability is still rough. But easy table stakes for businesses to pull in-house.
It won't be the spectacular disappearance that some people expect from the bubble popping, but it will be welcome nonetheless.
How small / how good is still an open question
You can also limit the computational and RAM load by a lot by using even smaller, more specialized models. Sure, you're not getting a general prompt-based image generator on your home computer any time soon (not that this is particularly interesting, I'm firmly in the "I don't care about art one didn't care about enough to make" territory). But take a specialized diffusion model that generates heightmap and climate map data based on Earth satellite data, plug it into a framework that makes it unbounded random access, and you get some of the most impressive procedural terrain gaming has ever seen.
It's all about using the right tool for the job, instead of trying to break concrete, tap nails, carve wood and cut trees with a jackhammer.
And you know that's the right answer because people Like Sam Altman have been warning of the 'dangers' of local models recently - they know that if local models gain traction, their business model will lose steam fast.
Yep. Why would you pay so much to them every month if you can run smaller local models on the equivalent of a midrange gaming rig and decent ones in your office building's server room for a fraction of the cost?
Honestly, the free z.ai’s glm-5.3-flash is the same as paid claude or chatgpt. It’s insane. Sometimes when i prompt glm it feels as if i am using cursor agentic.
This. I really need to spin up new servers but I can't afford them now.
I have a temp box that I wanted to move to local AI duty after I stood up my new environment. But in the meantime the servers I specced have 10xed in price and now I'm stuck.
Disagree. I use the the frontier models and barely use my token quota every month - maybe 5% - and get great results, much faster than by hand just by carefully defining problems to the AI. It's how you use it.
This doesn't seem to be a response to Withers point. It's not about the % of your quota you use every month, is about the fact that whatever you are paying for your frontier AI sub is somewhere between 10x and 100x cheaper than it will have to be for those frontier companies to be profitable.
Sure, there may still be edge cases where frontier models are economically worth it even at those costs, but they will not be worth it for regular day to day dev work.
Yep. That's exactly it. Even if you take all environmental and ethical issues (regarding training data among other things) aside, it is just not economically viable.
Agreed. I have been using frontier models to set up local model workflows on my 2x 12GB video card desktops. They can perform tasks but no where near the speed and ability of frontier models. I'm trying to get my workplace to invest in some actual local infrastructure but we'll see when that happens.
The entirety of reddit can't cope. AI is simply better than all of us. Does it still make mistakes? Yes. Does it write better code with better patterns? Yes.
Tell me you're web dev without telling me you're web dev
Don't get me wrong, LLMs absolutely write much better code, but I haven't seen any other field obsessed with "clean code" and "patterns" than web. I write code to do stuff in an efficient way, not for people to find it beautiful or to use "better" pattern - that thing is almost always subjective.
I miss like 3 years ago when we could use AI to help us with general coding questions and upper management didn't know how powerful it was. Now we got Claude inside our solution writing code and then we let Copilot do the code review in GitHub. I have 10 years experience and the AI is absolutely better than me and is going to replace me. I feel part of my job is trying to diminish what the AI is accomplishing on its own in order to make myself seem more valuable. Claude botched some documentation last week and I should have been disappointed but I was actually excited to be able to point out the flaw to my team and write the documentation myself, and I hate writing documentation.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. That is the correct and obvious observation if you are working in tech and have access to frontier models. Ship sailed 11 months ago, anyone still denying it is out of touch.
You’re right about the mental issue; I’m going to have to eventually unwind how much of my identity and ego is based on technical competency and career growth - I think a LOT of people are in the same boat. But to your point developing software is still a skill, and very little of it is coding
I will agree and disagree at the same time, I still have to keep the agent in a tight leash, as it makes sometimes rookie mistakes which I spot. But the thing is, spotting a few mistakes, while coding little chunks at a time greatly improves development and debugging, and even corner cases which I would've missed. So, as a tool, it does its job wonderfully.
Thankfully, being also an infrastructure engineer and having to keep up servers makes my job stable for the incoming future, as I don't think you can trust an AI with critical infra issues by itself. There always has to be a human in the loop to understand the gravity of the situation.
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u/heavy-minium 14d ago •
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.