Man, this is giving me a cognitive dissonance compared to my experiences.
Actually, even the post itself reads like a cognitive dissonance with a dash of the usual "if it's not working for you then you are using it wrong" defence.
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I feel exactly like Karpathy here. I have some work to do, and I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm able to explain it to AI, and the AI seems to understand me (I'm lately using Opus 4.5). I wrote down a roadmap, it should take me a few weeks of coding. It feels like with a proper workflow with AI agents, this work should be doable in one or two days. Yet, I know by now that it's not going to be nearly that fast. I'll be lucky if I finish 30% faster than if I just code the entire damn thing myself. The thing is, I am a huge AI optimist, I'm not one of the AI skeptics, not even close. Karpathy is not an AI skeptic. We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating. That's all. There's no telling anyone else "it's on you if you can't make it work for you". I think Karpathy figured out by now, and at least I did, that the number of AI skeptics by now far outnumbers the number of AI optimists, and it has become something akin to a political conviction. It's quite futile to try and change someone's mind about whether AI is good, bad, overhyped, underused, etc. People picked their side and that's that.
“We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating”
The mirage is alluring.
The real mirage is the utility of median developers
I think with better processes and training they could be. It is just that right now we do not train them and put them through scrum and other horrible processes. Median developers are bad due to bad management.
give them better incentives
If I can reassure you, if your project is complex enough and involve heavy data manipulation, a 30% improvement using Opus/Gemini 3/codex 5.2 seems like a good result. I think on complex tasks, Opus 4.5 improves my output by around 20-25%.
And since it's way, way less wrong than sonnet4, it might also improve my whole team velocity.
I won't lie, AI coding has been a net negative for the 'lazy devs' on my team who don't delves into their own generated code (by 'lazy devs' here I mean the subset of devs who do the work but often don't bother to truly understand the logic behind what they used/did. They are very good coworkers, add velue and are not really lazy, but I don't see another term for that).
I think you articulated perfectly why it's a bubble and why execs are so eager to push it everywhere. It's so alluring, it constantly feels like we're on the verge of something great. No wonder so many people have their brains fried by it.
we're 10 months into agentic coding. Claude code came out in march. I dont understand how you are so unimaginative to think what this might look like in 5 years even with slow progress.
It might be genuinely useful in 5 years, my issue is how it's being marketed now. We're 6 months into "AI will be writing 90% of code in three months" among other ridiculous statements.
Agreed. It is very similar to gambling in how it tricks the human mind. I am sure some of this AI technology will prove yo be useful but the breakthrough has been just around the corner since soon after ChatGPT was released.
I don't mean to be inflammatory but I am not at all convinced that LLMs will be useful for software development in 5 years!
I think LLMs are very well marketed but I don't think they're very good at writing code and I don't think they've gotten better at it!
I sort of agree. If anything I feel like they've gotten a bit worse, but the advances in the tooling around them (eg claude code) has masked that slightly.
I think they are useful as an augmentation, but largely valueless for directly outputting code. Who knows if that will change. It's still made me more productive as a dev despite not oneshotting entire files. It's just not industry-changing, at least yet.
I think of it this way. If you dropped Einstein with a time machine two thousand year ago, people would think he is some crazy guy doing scribbles in the sand.
No one would ever know how smart he is. The same is with people and advanced AGI like Gemini 3 Pro or Chatgpt 5.2 Pro.
We are just dumber than them.
Why do you think the models are AGI?
I also like to think that Einstein would be smart enough to explain things from a common point of understanding if you did drop him 2000 years in the past (assuming he also possesses the scientific knowledge humanity accrued in that 2000 year gap). So, your analogy doesn't really make a lot of sense here. I also doubt he'd be able to prove his theories with the technology of the past but that's a different matter.
If we did have AGI models, they would be able to solve our hardest problems (assuming a generous definition of AGI) even if we didn't immediately understand exactly how they got there. We already have a lot of complex systems that most people don't fully understand but can certainly verify the quality of. The whole "too smart for people to understand that they're too smart" is just a tired trope.
You are certainly dumber than them if you think they are AGI. These models are smart and getting smarter, but they are not AGI.
You think they have “advanced AGI” and are worried about keeping up with the software industry? There would be be nothing to keep up with at that point.
To use an analogy, it would be like spending all your time before a battle making sure your knife is sharp when your opponent has a tank.
> We are just dumber than them.
you are, for sure.