>For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term

It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years. The correlation between high quality code and economic performance was not just non-existing, it was almost negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where engineering felt like a true priority, tech debt was well managed, principles followed, that place was not making any money.

I am not saying that this is a general rule, of course there are many places that perform well and have solid engineering. But what I am saying is that this short-sighted management might not be acting as irrationally as we prefer to think.

Why would it need people to steer the AI? I can easily see a future where companies that don't rely on the physical world (like manufacturing) are completely autonomous, just machines making money for their owner.

I wrote my own modal-mode extension for vscode/cursor because couldn't get the VIM-ones to function like I wanted. During that time, I thought that I should look into Kakoune and Helix as those seemed to represent a true iteration on the paradigm. Being able to see what you're about to change makes complete sense, as does the "multi-cursor first" approach.

However, after a few weeks, I ended up rewriting things to be more classic VIM-like after all. This might have just been muscle memory refusing to yield, I am not sure. One thing I remember though, was that the multi-cursor+selection approach only really helps when you can see everything you're about to change on the screen. For large edits, most selections will be out of the scroll window and not really helping.

I still haven't written it off completely, though with AI I increasingly find myself writing more prose than keywords and brackets, so I am not sure it's going to feel worth it.

I had Claude help me get a program written for Linux to compile on macOS. The program is written in a programming language the author invented for the project, a pretty unusual one (for example, it allows spaces in variable names).

Claude figured out how the language worked and debugged segfaults until the compiler compiled, and then until the program did. That might not be magic, but it shows a level of sophistication where referring to “statistics” is about as meaningful as describing a person as the statistics of electrical impulses between neurons.

I have been positively surprised with Mistral which I have been trying out.