posted in Asklemmy

What is your opinion on the future & AI

The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.

Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.

In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?

Replying to @⁨CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml⁩

If you don’t work in tech or software development, it’ll be very hard for you to understand what this tech is doing within that space.

As a game developer who has worked in professional environments for about 15 years, I can say this is the most dramatic shift in working patterns in my own lifetime. A lot of it has to do with the mechanics, some of which are physical limitations. Humans can type around 300 wpm, and maybe you can stretch that with an integrated environment that has some intelligence around auto complete and so on. However, AI can write at 6000 wpm. This is a modern John Henry problem: even the best programmer could not out write the AI, and I think the best programmer partnered with an AI will always beat the best programmer without it. In all honesty, humans make tons of mistakes, and programming has many patterns that reappear. I’m not sure if the human+keyboard is the best interface to write code. Likewise, an agent without clear context is somewhat worthless & will generate poorly architected projects.

I don’t think AI’s assault on software development translates to all industries. Agriculture may use AI to inform how they do things, and eventually, machines could then take that knowledge and run the farm for you. The reality is that’s coming, but maybe 20 years or something. It’s not today, not tomorrow, and not for a while.

Other industries have greater risk profiles compared to game development. If a game is programmed poorly, so what? If a medical app is programmed poorly, someone could die. Legal & financial apps programmed by AI have meaningful risk profiles as well. Sure, AI will impact them, but it must be slower due to the considerations at hand.

In December of 2025, I would have said an AI bubble is going to pop. Now, I’m really not so sure. It’s upending how I’m used to working, and I struggle predicting the future. A few years ago, I would say I had a good sense of how to position myself & my career for a long term plan. Now, colleagues of mine with more tenure than me say, “I can’t predict what’s next.” This is pervasive once AI tools enter your workflow. It really is magic at times, talking to a machine & watching a game come into existence.

This is buttressed by people showing me memes of ChatGPT screwing up the count of R’s in strawberry & other silly memes. The reality is the consumer models are different than the business models, and integrated agents (ones with access to a scripting environment) can be very powerful compared to a chatbot. It’s like comparing an e-bike to a car: they each get you somewhere faster than walking, but the scale of capabilities changes quite a bit.

AI will need to find new patterns outside of LLMs in order to actually create something like AGI. LLMs are a mechanical process, a regression towards the mean at scale, but its still very powerful. You could write code on punch cards, or in a language with a compiler. AI feels like it is a big step, in that way.

For my own area, my hopeful self wants to believe that this will enable new voices & projects to exist that would have required significant funding or hard, multi-disciplinary skills prior, or a combination of them. You can hack an unbelievable amount of the game dev process for what’s basically $100/mn, compared to what would have been a burn rate of +$100k/mn for a small dev team. That is transformational.

At the same time, my pessimistic self sees things like arcade.gov, which is a fucking travesty & embarassment to the medium, clearly vibe coded by some nepo-baby with connections. The Skyrim IKEA shelf meme mod, while funny, is a marketing stunt. More of these sort of projects are coming, where the game is a vehicle for something else (a product, a brand, a person). We had Sneak King & Cool Spot, but I mean the scale. I think those sort of projects will be normalized, or at the least, many more will exist than today. If you look up AI disclosures on steam, it’s turning into a hockey stick.

It feels like Pandora’s box has been opened. I don’t think it’s all smoke & mirrors. It will not impact all industries equally. It won’t fix humans being poorly intended or malicious actors seeking power & wealth. In many ways, they benefit the most (giving capital more access to creativity). It’s built on the largest scale theft of public good for profit. To me, that’s wrong, and the people/masses should be getting financial returns, collectively & universally, in exchange for what was stolen.

Replying to @⁨currycourier@lemmy.world⁩

I watch a streamer who game devs without AI because I appreciate watching him discuss his thought process & learning more about how I could write it manually. For context, I’m a game designer who knows some code, not an engineer. There’s real concern around skill atrophy without people doing some of these more manual ways of doing things.

My point about WPM is moreso about how the scale impacts velocity. I do think the speed impacts the old adage about software & pregnancy.

  • How long does it take a pregnant person to deliver a baby? Roughly 9 months.
  • How long does it take 2 people? …Roughly 9 months.

There was a quality of software development where work takes the time needed, and sometimes throwing more bodies at something wouldn’t alter the time. A good engineer could maybe shave some time off, or the patterns they used were more resilient or production ready on the first pass. Now, that engineer could genuinely deliver that feature much faster.

Here’s another trap I forgot to mention: our human read speed is always faster than our write. We may write up to 330 wpm, but your read speed is 400-1000 wpm. AI read speed is like 11m / wpm. The gap between our write v. read suggests it’s faster to describe a plan, read what the AI wrote & triage it, rather than the alternative.

  • Case 1: Engineer is capped at 300 wpm write
  • Case 2: Engineer writes a plan at 300 wpm, AI writes a bulk at 6k wpm, then humam reviews at ~800 wpm

I mention John Henry because in the story Henry wins but dies in the process. Going fast is not the only goal, but the scale of the velocity change happening is really difficult to overcome mechanically on paper.

Finally, to be clear, I say this stuff as a bitter pill I don’t want to swallow either. :/ I have my own emotional qualms with the whole situation. There’s big business risks around becoming captured markets & beholden to token costs. I think part of the AI acceleration is about creating that dynamic, and it greatly concerns me.

Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨19⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨13:35⁩⁩

Replying to @⁨Fandangalo@lemmy.world⁩

Reading speed is not equivalent to code review speed in the slightest! A good case study: …smartbear.co/…/code-review-cisco-case-study.pdf Tl;dr the ideal rate of code review is something like 300 lines per hour.

As someone who writes software for a living, these tools are simply nowhere near as good as a seasoned developer in terms of code quality. Getting them to write code at that level takes so much babysitting and tweaking that it is faster to just write it by hand. If you are not a full-time developer and are just writing some code on the side here and there, then yes, an LLM will probably do a better job. And thats ok! I’ve used them plenty and thought about this a lot as well. So I don’t say this out of denial. But, at least for now, they are nowhere near a good as someone who knows what they are doing if you account for quality, and not just how fast the machine can spit out lines.