My personal stance on AI over the past 6 months has slowly shifted from being very strongly opposed to much more of an optimist. I still think that so much of the hype around it is overblown, it's being shoved in all sorts of places it doesn't need to be, etc., but since I started using AI coding agents, my productivity has gone through the roof. Notice too that I didn't say speed, because honestly I think I take longer to ship code now, but productivity. I actually get more done. I spend a while writing out a good prompt, let Claude run for 20-30 minutes while I go get some food and stimulants, then spend a couple/few hours at least tweaking the code, reviewing it, testing it, etc. But I can now just throw out ideas! If I want to quickly try adding oCR to Paperback, I can tell Claude to try it, go eat, then come back, read the code, learn not what to do when I try this later, and git reset. I forgot where I heard this, and I'm paraphrasing, but the quote goes something like: "AI does not create fast experts; it makes experts faster". Can definitely say that's been my experience. A lot of these dumb tiny AI startups will probably die, I hope AI browsers go to the software graveyard, etc., but LLMs are here to stay and honestly I've come around to it. I still get queezy when thinking about what it's doing to the environment, but also, humans are doing plenty of horrible things to the earth right now that I'm not even aware of that are taking out endangered species and eliminating lifeforms that make the chemical we need to survive, so with or without LLMs we're fucked and headed for global warming. That doesn't mean I don't think we should solve the problem, but it's not the only problem either.