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newsincontext
@newsincontext.bsky.social

Agreed. But to further the analogy it would be more like quitting carpentry as a career after the invention of a table saw that sometimes cuts straight lines and sometimes cuts crooked lines and sometimes just goes berserk and cuts your hand off. Even when given the exact same instructions. 🫠

newsincontext
@newsincontext.bsky.social

I've gotten some useful summaries, snippets, and decent references from AI. It is like a slightly better Google in some cases (in other cases, worse). I worked w/a colleague a couple months back on a problem w/sorting derived, calc'd fields. We got 20 different answers in 20 prompt attempts. 🫠

newsincontext
@newsincontext.bsky.social

None of the 20 answers provided or even led to a workable solution that covered all of our needs. We eventually had to request either a change of the specs or a change to use a SQL view vs. EF context. Our lead advised strongly against anything non-ORM. AI was less than useless in this case.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

That kind of thing is why I like the power tools analogy: you need to learn a whole bunch of things to stay safe from those kinds of behaviors

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KWierso
@kwierso.com

So true! Number one tool in my toolbox: Don't believe a single goddamned word that the Black Box of Lies That Your Dipshit Boss Will Eventually Use To Fire You tells you.

Paul Moore
@pfmoore.bsky.social

It also feels like "here's a free power tool that cuts your arm off most of the time, but that's ok because there's a hugely expensive one that mostly works once you learn its quirks, and keep a surgeon nearby just in case"

Paul Moore
@pfmoore.bsky.social

Given the situation with nearly every other developer tool, anything non-free is expensive (especially for non-professional or open source developers). $200/month is ludicrous, and even $20/month is more than I pay for any software that I use - for *anything*.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

The $20/month plan tends to run out of tokens pretty quickly - I know a lot of people who have upgraded to $100/month or even $200/month plans purely to use Claude Code more aggressively

Andrew S
@andrew.diaryland.com

I believe that, but to the "hugely expensive" thing I was replying, I just don't buy it, what you can get out of the $20 plan is pretty significant, and same with the Cursor $20 plan (which I don't like but technically gives you more usage)

Paul Moore
@pfmoore.bsky.social

What frustrates me most of all is that people praising LLMs aren't transparent that this is *not* the experience you get from free ChatGPT or Gemini, or whatever. Maybe everyone is talking past each other, but IMO it's pretty basic that a tool not being free is worth being explicit about.