Yes, exactly. AI will soon be treated like yet another technology, not a sentient alien, and will be used largely to accomplish mundane, well-trodden tasks.
Its analogous to how social media founders dreamily promised global democracy at first; in reality, we got an app to sell a used monitor, complain about a new thing, and look at some cat pictures.
HN's bubble/biases are pretty obvious here and we should expect them. But, as someone that uses code but is not a coder, I'll confirm this.
Nearly none of my coworkers were hired as coders. Yet we all code in some small way or another. As such, 100% of our code is really bad. No, its okay, we know it, it really is bad.
To echo the GP too; I had a friend in grad school that was trying to do some neuroscience experiments and analyze the data. He wanted my help with some matlab code and I said, sure, I'll sit down with you for a six pack. After the 11th nested if-statement, I upped the price to a case.
Like, most of the people I work with do not care at all about the code itself. They care about the result. I know much of HN does care about the code, and I'm not calling you out on it. Your feelings are quite valid! But so are those of myself and my coworkers.
LLMs that can, and very much do, code for us? That is the thing I think HN is really missing out on, understandably so. The power of AIs is not going to be trying to figure out the code base. From what I hear on here, it's bad at this. The power I see in my life is that suddenly, things are possible that we never thought we'd ever be able to do. And most of those things are under 200 lines of code, probably under 15 lines really.
I tend to think of AI as a wheelchair or other mobility aids. For a lot of people I know, AI/LLMs let us get moving at all. The dark ages where we just sat there knowing that we weren't smart enough to do the code we wanted to, to get the results we need? Those days are over! It's so nice!
I find LLM coding reduces the "activation energy" required to get started. It's like a "knowledge catalyst" for these kinds of tasks. I've leveraged them to make a few scripts (talking 100 lines out less) that added a lot of value to our little data processing team.
Funnily enough, a lot of the time some huge expensive software tool is purchased or even built to order, but all you really need from it can be done with some small scripts. It completely changes the economics of small tasks.
