Readit NewsLast week, when I was on PTO, I used AI to to a full redesign of a music community website I run. I touched about 40k lines of code in a week. The redesign is shipped and everyone is using it. AI let me go about 5-10x faster than if I would have done this by hand. (In fact, I have tried doing this in the past, so I really do have an apples to apples comparison for velocity. AI enabled it happening at all: I’ve tried a few other times in the past but never been able to squeeze it into a week.)
The cited 40% inaccuracy rate doesn’t track for me at all. Claude basically one-shot anything I asked for, to the point that the bottleneck was mostly thinking of what I should ask it to do next.
At this point, saying AI has failed feels like denying reality.
All to say we could have quite a bit more resilience as an economy, but we decided to sacrifice our leadership in these areas.
I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.