As someone who works in a studio that can afford unlimited AI bills, if you can afford to pay for 4-5B tokens per developer per month (that is the average monthly usage across our team for the past montha + CI) on latest models, it does a pretty good job and we can mostly commit fully AI authored code. Not one shots, it’s rounds upon rounds of AI reviews, re-prompting to use a different system/make a change that sucks, but it works well.
Sure, the team is loosing project domain knowledge. The results are currently possible because most of us did spend few years working in the codebase before AI, so we can quickly spot an issue and point the prompt to a general direction, a space/system to use, or ask it to look into what part of the code. If we don’t, it will duplicate random stuff and make it even more mess.
Of course, neither is worth it or sustainable. The cost is not reasonable in the slightest, my usage alone is more than my salary. Reviews are a bottleneck, and people have started to just run more rounds of AI on the PR, in adittion to the CI review loops and the authors review loops. It does help - each round usually catches something, but the cost, lol. And of course, we are slowly loosing both the abilitty to work without AI, and domain knowledge to be able to somehow rein in the code base.
So, if you have unlimited usage and can afford to run billions of tokens of looping reviews with the latest models, you can go fully AI pretty succesfully. But at the cost, and that is the pricing while AI companies are in the start-of-Uber phase, it’s such a stupid idea.
I don’t care about the job that much. I get to spend money (without trying to, to be exact - its just the only viable workflow) to make a point how stupid it is, while being able to do other stuff, so I don’t really care, other than getting a course to requalify into another field after the studio burns.
But yeah, if you just ask claude to one-shot something, it sucks. It needs at least a few rounds of looping, clean slate review loops, or council decisions during the development. It would probably eat your Claude weekly limit just for one PR.
The point is - there is a huge difference in how people experience AI. If you can pull the slot machine lever more times, for an absurd cost, it will eventually get to passable results. The AI companies only see that, and from that PoV, yes, it is kinda passable. But there’s like five companies in the world that can do that, and not for long.
As someone who works in a studio that can afford unlimited AI bills, if you can afford to pay for 4-5B tokens per developer per month (that is the average monthly usage across our team for the past montha + CI) on latest models, it does a pretty good job and we can mostly commit fully AI authored code. Not one shots, it’s rounds upon rounds of AI reviews, re-prompting to use a different system/make a change that sucks, but it works well.
Sure, the team is loosing project domain knowledge. The results are currently possible because most of us did spend few years working in the codebase before AI, so we can quickly spot an issue and point the prompt to a general direction, a space/system to use, or ask it to look into what part of the code. If we don’t, it will duplicate random stuff and make it even more mess.
Of course, neither is worth it or sustainable. The cost is not reasonable in the slightest, my usage alone is more than my salary. Reviews are a bottleneck, and people have started to just run more rounds of AI on the PR, in adittion to the CI review loops and the authors review loops. It does help - each round usually catches something, but the cost, lol. And of course, we are slowly loosing both the abilitty to work without AI, and domain knowledge to be able to somehow rein in the code base.
So, if you have unlimited usage and can afford to run billions of tokens of looping reviews with the latest models, you can go fully AI pretty succesfully. But at the cost, and that is the pricing while AI companies are in the start-of-Uber phase, it’s such a stupid idea.
I don’t care about the job that much. I get to spend money (without trying to, to be exact - its just the only viable workflow) to make a point how stupid it is, while being able to do other stuff, so I don’t really care, other than getting a course to requalify into another field after the studio burns.
But yeah, if you just ask claude to one-shot something, it sucks. It needs at least a few rounds of looping, clean slate review loops, or council decisions during the development. It would probably eat your Claude weekly limit just for one PR.
The point is - there is a huge difference in how people experience AI. If you can pull the slot machine lever more times, for an absurd cost, it will eventually get to passable results. The AI companies only see that, and from that PoV, yes, it is kinda passable. But there’s like five companies in the world that can do that, and not for long.