Fuck AI

Is your work paying for dumb robots? Like Atlassian's shit? Or something built-in to your industry software (I guess some kinda CAD)? These are next to useless. Or is work only paying for basic model access? Also pretty useless for detailed work. The only models that give me consistent, detailed-ish work are the state of the art models. And even then you have to watch them, or have very strong verification/validation so they can bash their head against to eventually get the right result.

I'll say that I am not so much a booster, but more of a pragmatist. After the step change in quality this past fall/winter, I gave the SOTA models a try with hard earned cash. And it was worth it.

My ADHD makes it difficult to really finish personal projects once they get past the fun and interesting learning portion and neck deep into tedium of actually molding the code into the right shape or shaving the various yaks that came up. All motivation ceases. Unfortunately, my job is also my hobby. I don't wanna work after work, yo.

That game I always wanted to finish writing but got stuck at needing to grind out code? Done in an afternoon of carefully directing it. That programming language I spent significant amounts of time thinking and designing and getting the shitty PoC running but now needed to actually make it work? A week to the first version. Another to my first significant application written in that language which revealed flaws in my design for real use cases. Another to the next version with a conformance test suite which was then used along with the spec to do a complete reimplementation in another language. Another project was trying to "grow" a sorting algorithm expressed in a niche esoteric programming language using a genetic algorithm. Stuck at the point of needing to build the tools for analysis, needing a refactor to fix the poor persistence choices, just nothing but yaks to shave. Got it unstuck over a weekend and actually started to DO the damn experiment after spending so much time writing the esoteric lang interpreter and all of the experiment harness.

It is not perfect. It fucks up frequently. I have to really watch it and steer it. It loves mediocrity and shortcuts. All that said...

Like, holy shit. The amount of work I've finished or moved forward in two months is nothing short of miraculous given how many projects like these I have in various states of finished.

All I can say is that my experience aligned with your experience any time I needed to use a bolted-on AI to some product (Atlassian, Lucid, etc) but that does not reflect my experience when using SOTA models for real work.