Specifically within the last week, I have used Claude and Claude via cursor to:
- write some moderately complex powershell to perform a one-off process
- add typescript annotations to a random file in my org's codebase
- land a minor feature quickly in another codebase
- suggest libraries and write sample(ish) code to see what their rough use would look like to help choose between them for a future feature design
- provide text to fill out an extensive sales RFT spreadsheet based on notes and some RAG
- generat some very domain-specific realistic sounding test data (just naming)
- scaffold out some PowerPoint slides for a training session
There are likely others (LLMs have helped with research and in my personal life too)
All of these are things that I could do (and probably do better) but I have a young baby at the moment and the situation means that my focus windows are small and I'm time poor. With this workflow I'm achieving more than I was when I had fully uninterrupted time.
This is great, but I wish there was a shorter and more to the point version for me to link folks to.
Each of the ideas in here is solid, but there's too much writing around the core idea -- a sentence or two for each point and then a tldr like "put in some basic level of effort if you're going to ask for others' valuable time." would do it for me personally.
The aftermarket for these things means that the cost winds up being split between multiple parties in a lot of cases.
Anecdotally, most parents within my circle bought their Snoo used and sold it after use. I bought an unopened snoo from facebook marketplace for $X and sold it after 6 months for $X-200.
I was a little annoyed that Happiest Baby is meddling with the resale value (because I was expecting to be able to sell it on after a few months of use)
IMO even though the product is overpriced, I'd have happily paid 5k for the extra sleep I believe it gave me.
It would be an interesting case study on pricing and transaction costs to look at how much the resale value changes.
Does it go down by the $100 people will have to pay in subscriptions? will it go down by more than that because people dont want to bother with the subscription as an extra cost?
My org uses codegen as a starting point for one of our test layers.
It works for us probably because we sidestep the pain points you list - the environments we run in are pristine complete copies of known datasets, we remove as many sources of randomness as possible, and our environment flakiness level is very low.
They still break but usually because the locators in use have been chosen poorly (or we've made planned changes to a page/component)
We're a web based b2b saas that runs an instance of the entire environment for each of our customers. Our non prod setup consists of a bajillion static test environments but more importantly we use testcontainers to spin up the transient test environments from database snapshots. Using the recorder on the static environments (before the transient ones existed) _was_ a pain
A level of fear allows the introduction of regulatory moats that protect the organisations who are currently building and deploying these models at scale.
"It's dangerous" is a beneficial lie for eg openai to push because they can afford any compliance/certification process that's introduced (hell, they'd probably be heavily involved in designing the process)
More interesting than the original statement is how many people seem to have a chip of their shoulder/take the statement as a personal insult.
The professor is correct in that the majority of Web developers could get by without much theoretical/academic background (and anecdotally, do get by without using those skills/knowledge much)
Maybe there's an industry-wide Dunning-Kruger effect?
- write some moderately complex powershell to perform a one-off process
- add typescript annotations to a random file in my org's codebase
- land a minor feature quickly in another codebase
- suggest libraries and write sample(ish) code to see what their rough use would look like to help choose between them for a future feature design
- provide text to fill out an extensive sales RFT spreadsheet based on notes and some RAG
- generat some very domain-specific realistic sounding test data (just naming)
- scaffold out some PowerPoint slides for a training session
There are likely others (LLMs have helped with research and in my personal life too)
All of these are things that I could do (and probably do better) but I have a young baby at the moment and the situation means that my focus windows are small and I'm time poor. With this workflow I'm achieving more than I was when I had fully uninterrupted time.