I work in an R&D team as research scientist/engineer.

Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate and understand complex code.

However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my job harder in two other ways:

1. There’s an increased volume of code that requires more thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in keeping with the overall repo design.

2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity to perform the same as I did before because the friction of implementation time has been drastically reduced.

I agree with you. I try to remember though that this is just the same situation that artists, musicians and (more recently) writers have been in for a long time. Unless you’re one of a very lucky few you’ll only get fulfillment in those pursuits if you enjoy the process rather than the output since it’s hard to get money or recognition for output anymore. Pure coding and lots of areas of code problem solving are going to end up in the same position.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You made me order The Cuckoo's Egg. Luis Alvarez is my scientific hero since I read his memoir last year. Truly underappreciated in the pop-sci community.

I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly doesn't mean that theory wont't open new doors though that we haven't currently thought of.