You can actually get high-quality code out of them -- at least with Claude; not had a great experience with Gemini -- but for complex tasks requires riding them very, very hard and really understanding where things can go wrong and poking at them repeatedly. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
That describes my last week. What made it most annoying, was the need to release through TestFlight, because the memory issues would not appear, when tethered. Also, I was checking in constantly, because I had to revert and reset the context, several times.
That's very much not how it works. Musk and Trump are absolutely miserable despite having effectively infinite wealth and power. Not that either of them have the taste to wear an Aquanaut, mind.
I think the odds of a happy person being willing to put in the work to reach the positions those two notoriously unhappy individuals have reached are rather low.
I strongly suspect that the more leisurely rich are overrepresented among Aquanaut-wearers. It's a rather casual piece, popular among the St Barth/Tropez crowd.
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
Can you point to a single performant, high-quality SwiftUI-first app with a messages-like chronological transcript and correct scrolling behavior on macOS? The problems with AppKit integration are real and should not be dismissed out of hand.
It's likely the SwiftUI Mac implementation is subpar. SwiftUI-on-Catalyst might be a better choice for these applications, but it probably has other problems.
Why is this even an "if" at this point? China's EV industry has overtaken the US's. They are at worst only slightly behind in AI -- all of the best large open weight LLMs are from Chinese companies, and there are more major Chinese LLMs chasing SOTA than western SOTA LLMs.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
Strangely enough, AI could turn this on its head. You can have your cake and eat it too, because you can tell Claude/Codex/whatever to build you a full-featured Swift version for iOS and Kotlin for Android and whatever you want on Windows and Mac. There's still QA for the different builds, but you already have to QA each platform separately anyway if you really care that they all work, so in theory that doesn't change.
Of course, it's never that simple in reality; you need developers who know each platform for that to work, because you must run the builds and tell the AI what it's doing wrong and iterate. Currently, you can probably get away with churning out Electron slop and waiting for users to complain about problems instead of QAing every platform. Sad!
I don't personally have an opinion yet on what is the correct way to do things, I can only talk from my own personal experience within Academia in the UK as both a student and teacher with Computer Science.
The prime example is that most software roles in the economy are (or where, perhaps AI will change this, I do not know) simple web-dev/CRUD/SQL roles. Specifically Python/JS was a high-demand skill. This pushed universities to get rid of lower level courses such as concurrency/computer architecture, C/C++/assembly, or more maths based modules such as logic, in favour of more web-dev/software/AI/data-science modules.
One could (and I do) argue that this is effectively turning computer science degrees into more of a software engineering degrees piece by piece, thus turning univerisities into vocational schools.
Now here lies the question. Is this correct? Should universities be vocational schools? Or should they be seperate? Personally my feeling is that universities are not set up well for this method of teaching, and it would be much better for everyone involved if the students were instead taught through apprenticeship or vocational schools, which tend to be significantly cheaper (or even pay) for the student, whilst making sure that the university degree can stay focused within academia and funneling a good research pipeline.
Instead my view is that politicans have pushed many young adults into expensive degree programs that they did not need, with the false promise that it would give them emplolyement (which was never the goal of a university in the first place). This isn't good for the students (who are saddled with debt), the employers (who end up having to train the juniors anyway) or the economy (which now has less money in it due to the large drain on disposable income from student loan repayments).
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