John Siracusa

Ask any open source maintainer who's getting bug reports from AI that are just not bug reports.

But for your own code, I, as a programmer, value very highly the ability to find even one bug out of like 10 things that it pointed out.

Because, hey, that's one bug you didn't know about before.

And when you fix it, it's gone.

And when it can't find any more legitimate bugs, does that mean there's no more bugs in your program?

Absolutely not.

there's always more bugs in your program.

Like we're programmers.

We know there's always more bugs.

But this is one of the few tools I've ever seen, aside from like, you know, linters and memory safety checkers and stuff like that.

Like all those things that are in Xcode can find like your Swift 6, you know, strict concurrency, finding places where there might be issues.

This is like that.

And I highly value tools like that.

So I hope these tools find a way to continue to exist in some reasonable form so that they can be used even for that targeted purpose.

we don't know if they're going to plateau like the other uses uh i got some pushback last episode saying that like the chat interface had plateaued but it actually is you can advance not plateaued as in flatlined but the rate of advancement is much slower for those things than it is right and and so like i mean what i'm saying about the coding thing is i haven't seen the rate of advancement slowing yet surely it will at some point because unless we have some other advance because these things don't scale forever right but uh

But, you know, the line is still going up.

And as for your analogy with like assembly versus C and stuff, a couple of things to say on that.

One, when we went from like assembly to like higher level languages, that resulted in tremendously more programmers and tremendously more code because it became more accessible.

Doing stuff in assembly is work that is

Only possible by a much smaller subset of people because it's so fiendishly difficult and unforgiving.