Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world
I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.
Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.
One thing to keep in mind is that the curve for GPU depreciation (in the last 5 years at least) is a little steeper than 3 years. Current estimates is that the capital depreciation cost would plunge dramatically around the third year. For a top tier H100 depreciation kicks in around the 3rd year but they mentioned for the less capable ones like the A100 the depreciation is even worse.
https://www.silicondata.com/use-cases/h100-gpu-depreciation/
Now this is not factoring cost of labour. Labor at SF wages is dreadfully expensive, now if your data center is right across the border in Tijuana on the other hand..
What a strange toss-up.
See for yourself the blacklist features
https://github.com/circlefin/stablecoin-evm/tree/master/scri...
Where AI fails us is when we build new software to improve the business related to solar energy production and sale. It fails us because the tasks are never really well defined. Or even if they are, sometimes developers or engineers come up with a better way to do the business process than what was planned for. AI can write the code, but it doesn't refuse to write the code without first being told why it wouldn't be a better idea to do X first. If we only did code-reviews then we would miss that step.
In a perfect organisation your BPM people would do this. In the world I live in there are virtually no BPM people, and those who know the processes are too busy to really deal with improving them. Hell... sometimes their processes are changed and they don't realize until their results are measurably better than they used to be. So I think it depends a lot on the situation. If you've got people breaking up processes, improving them and then decribing each little bit in decent detail. Then I think AI will work fine, otherwise it's probably not the best place to go full vibe.
This deserves a blog post all on its own. OP you should write one and submit it. It's a good counterweight to all the AI optimistic/pessimistic extremism.
There's gotta be a less antisocial way though. I'd say using BBR and increasing the buffer sizes to 64 MiB does the trick in most cases.
Can we throw a bunch of AI agents at it? This sounds like a pretty tightly defined problem, much better than wasting tokens on re-inventing web browsers.
Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile.
Also, they switch to manual driving if they can't cope, and because the driver isn't paying attention this usually results in a crash. But hey, it's in manual driving, not FSD, so they get to claim FSD is safer.
FSD is not and never will be safer than a human driver.
They have been end to end street level for the past two years.