Readit News1) “What It Wants Me To Say”: Bridging the Abstraction Gap Between End-User Programmers and Code-Generating Large Language Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06597) -- they try to tackle a similar problem as what you described above
2) On the Design of AI-powered Code Assistants for Notebooks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11178) - uses Mito as part of their case study
I explored academia when I was young and gave up because I realised how limiting it was going to be for me. The infighting, and politics are crazy. Software is a game that's best played in teams and the kind of team you can realistically build in academia is limited (for reasons I'm sure you're far too aware of).
However, as I've gotten older (getting near the tail end of my career), I've discovered something interesting. In business, your teams are composed of the people you can hire. It's not a true collaboration either. Small startups are the most fun because it's small and cosy and you can usually get a good feel for your coworkers before you join. But as the business grows, the business needs take over. At some point, your contribution becomes one of encoding the (usually ill thought-out) dreams of the business people.
There are plenty of interesting problems, but unfortunately, there is very little desire to solve these problems. And as the business grows, your influence is likely to diminish greatly. It's very frustrating to see the problem you want to work on hovering in front of your face, but be denied access to it.
As an academic with tenure, you have something incredibly valuable: freedom. You work on what you want to work on. You solve the problems that you want to solve. And, as you said, you may not be able to get grants, or hire grad students and get a lot done, but you also don't have to grind through the day following other people's priorities (for the most part).
This seemed to be what a PhD was all about, but it's not what I've experienced. I've just completed the first year of grad school, and while the classes have been interesting, the expectation is that you already have an advisor when you arrive (or at the latest at the end of your first year) and you hit the ground running pumping out papers. There seems to be little opportunity to explore computer science as a whole or to work towards one singular result. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Sarnak about CS graduate education. He said that CS is in a weird spot between traditional engineering disciplines and the liberal arts, and that the need for grant funding causes departments to encourage students to work on whatever projects the professors are leading. But even he seemed a little surprised when I told him that our department's general exam is basically a presentation on the research you've accomplished so far.
I think this is unfortunate. First, because it goes against what I wanted out of a PhD. But also because it makes the PhD not much different than working in industry. If in either case I have to write code for some boss and satisfy my curiosities on the nights and weekends, why would I choose to do it for much less money and worse career prospects? I imagine this is causing the best and brightest to avoid academia in computer science, which seems bad for research and technological progress in general.
my two cents: find something where the grants align with your interests, or find a brand-new faculty member who has startup money so isn't as bound by grants in the near term. and if things don't work out, simply leave and go to industry -- with a marketable skill set like what you get from being a CS major, there's no way for you to lose. go wherever has work that you like more.
I know you had mentioned you could write a whole book on this, so I'm sure there's a lot to the story.
there's been a rising tide of academic HCI work in a similar space, wonder if there will be cross-pollination of ideas along these lines (many more papers i'm sure but some off the top of my head): https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11473https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09128