Happily drive off a cliff?

Even today I got terrible advice from Claude about calling Close() on a database in Golang. This kind of stuff would screw over a junior Dev who didn't know better:

"You're right to question this, and I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. Let me clarify: If you're using a connection pool (which is typically the case with sql.Open), you generally don't need to (and shouldn't) call Close() on the *sql.DB object after each operation."

I feel like all AI is doing atm is giving me extreme paranoia from being gaslit so much lol

Asking about specific Microsoft documentation it will just immediately bail and tell me to look that up on my own because it was built on training data up to 2022 and may not be fully up to date on the latest documentation. It won’t even link to the page last time I tried. It makes up PowerShell commands and suggested completely out of date options.

So Microsoft’s own AI assistant cannot even provide accurate information about the Microsoft products it is integrated with let alone anything else.

It can be useful for a short script but anything beyond that it is slower and less reliable than doing things myself.

For some reason I don't run into hallucinations as much as other people seem to, assumedly because I'm on well trod paths, but being lied to like that is always a fear. I asked it about argocd and it told me there is a command line program for it and I didn't believe it and had to Google it for myself, which didn't save me time or energy, but I got to ask it how to do things instead of hooting hoping the documentation had the right example.

"It is rare to Close a DB, as the DB handle is meant to be long-lived and shared between many goroutines."

source: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql#DB.Close

2 seniors + AI may be able to have the same output at the 2 seniors + 6 juniors you mention. But if their competitors keep all those people and add AI, will they accelerate past the company when the layoffs by moving faster? Cost savings aren’t so great if they are at the expensive of remaining competitive in the market and retaining customers.

This is the perspective I hope takes hold. I think the layoffs you mentioned from Intel and IBM were very premature, if AI was the only basis for them.

> If AI makes programmers more productive, and everyone is getting it, they will need everyone to keep up with the competition.

This assumes that there's competition. When money is expensive to borrow, companies stop throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, they start being more conservative with where they expend their capital. Efficiency will absolutely be the name of the game for 2-3 of the next 5 years. I don't really see AI being a huge part of it. Writing code doesn't take up the majority of my time as a senior engineer.

Why not?

When I say operations I don't mean devops, there's that too, but I mean the actual operations of an organization. The team leaders, go-getters, etc. Everybody has their niche.