It's interesting watching livestreams of senior programmers adopting agentic AI. George Hotz recently had a livestream where he shared how he's using these tools in production. Much of what he said cuts through a lot of the rhetoric you hear online:

“No amount of AI prevents you from understanding... If you don't fully understand the code that your agent is writing, you're backing yourself into a corner.”

“And then you ask, well, I mean, yeah, but someday these agents are going to become superhuman. I can trust a chess bot without understanding what the chess bot is doing. And yes, because you and the chess bot have already completely agreed on what you want to do. You want to win the game. A lot of this stuff is just kind of agreeing on what you want done.”

“It's interesting how code production kind of looks more like diffusion now. You can still get quality code out of these things, but your first thing is very fast and then your refinement stage is longer. It's unclear if these things are overall a net productivity win.”

“The top programmers in the world are not spamming Gas Town and OpenClaws and all of that stuff. They're using these things in a very restrained and tasteful way. The slopapocalypse is not coming.”

“There really are bad ways to use these things and it's unclear if there are such good ways to use these things. This is consistent with a lot of results I've seen about AI that it does not actually make anything faster. I'm still playing with this new workflow for myself. I don't know if it's making me faster.”

“The other alternative is to say that I'm not going to use these tools. And I did feel that way until Opus 4.5. Because it is clear that you're going to have to use these things. Software engineers are going to get more productive. It's unclear if the tools today actually make people more productive.”

“I think that these these tools can be very dangerous if you don't have good judgment and taste and if you don't understand like know yourself really well. So I think that these things are going to help certain people and hurt other people, but I don't think that the overall change to the rankings of programmers will be that high because the skills look very similar.”

“There's something that they're just so incredible at, which is writing these little one-off scripts. And it's not that they're better at the scripts than you. It's like that script would take me 15 minutes and it takes the AI 15 seconds, which is really cool.”

“No, I don't think there's a learning curve in using AI. I think that every time someone talks about how some new workflow is better or some system prompt is better, I never actually see it. I think that there is some getting used to working with these dumb people who are fast.”

“Don't fall for everything you see online.”