I spent a lot of time trying to think about how we arrived here

> just because it accelerates their hack project, it won't accelerate someone who's an expert. I would say that this is the wrong distinction. I'm an expert who's still in the code every day, and AI still accelerates my hack projects that I do in my spare time, but only to a point. When I hit 10k lines of code then code generation with chat models becomes substantially less useful (though autocomplete/Cursor-style advanced autocomplete retains its value). I think the distinction that matters is the type of project being worked on. Greenfield stuff—whether a hobby project or a business project—can see real benefits from AI. But eventually the process of working on the code becomes far more about understanding the complex interactions between the dozens to hundreds of components that are already written than it is about getting a fresh chunk of code onto the screen. And AI models—even embe…

Aye - this is a limitation of the current tech. For any project greater than 1k lines where the model was not pretrained on the code base…. AI is simply not useful beyond documentation search. It’s easy to see this effect in any new project you start with AI, the first few pieces of functionality are easy to implement. Boilerplate gets written effortlessly. Then the ai can’t reason about the code and makes dumb mistakes.

I’m using it to ship real projects with real customers in a real code base at 2x to 5x the rate I was last year. It’s just like having a junior dev. Without enough guidance and guardrails, they spin their wheels and do dumb things. Instead of focusing of lines of code, I’m now focusing on describing overall tasks, breaking them down, and guiding an LLM to a solution.

The point is that leadership gets to write on their own promo document / resume about how they "boosted developer productivity" by leading the charge on introducing AI dev processes to the company. Then they'll be long gone onto the next job before anybody actually knows what the result of it was, whether it actually boosted productivity or not, whether there were negative side-effects, etc.