I don’t think AI is done improving, but companies need to find something other than throwing more compute at it. It seems to get exponentially more expensive for logarithmic gains in performance. I honestly can’t even tell the difference between ChatGPT 4 and 5. I don’t doubt that it is better but I can’t see a difference in my own productivity.

Time savings vs time sinks depends a lot on exactly what you’re doing. Treading well-worn ground in a new domain can be speedy. But fixing a non-standard or niche (or shitty) code base can be a nightmare because nothing is done the standard way.

So far, I’ve gained a bit of productivity through AI, but I’ve been down a few rabbit holes, too. Integration tests can be a real pain. It always wants to recommend custom test configurations but then you wind up with a different test environment and you can’t necessarily trust your tests. Date parsing with Jackson in particular can be different between your configured ObjectMapper in production and new ObjectMapper() in test to give just a super basic example.