Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.

I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.

Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.

But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.

And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.

So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.

Eh. Honestly, the line of “questions” was rather stupid.

“Why aren’t you lobbying to make your business irrelevant” is essentially what the interviewer pushed aggressively.

Sure, I get calling out a CEO for deflecting tough questions with corporate BS. But it was a pretty dumb line of questioning in the first place.

Why isn’t Google lobbying for privacy protections?

Why isn’t Comcast lobbying for net neutrality?

Just make your statement and ask for comment. “Our listeners consider Intuits lobbying against tax reform that would benefit tax payers to be adversarial to their customers. What would you say to them?”

We can defederate them now. Content will move as it reaches fewer eyes.