A very very senior game developer recently told me how he is changing specialization because AI is much better than him at what he does already.
I asked him if it was just the speed and mass of code, to which he replied that Claude 5 Fable/Mythos is just so advanced, it comes up with solutions he would never have thought of, not even requiring good prompts anymore.
He further said in some areas like Unity it's not perfect yet, but improving drastically.
Honestly this is pretty different to what I read in many articles regarding AI code.
They mentioned errors, bad performance & such.
However if it is already used in production and he as a professional evaluating it, is saying it's better than him...
That same day I also talked to somebody that got hired to train an LLM. His interview was with that companies chatbot, that offered him over 120$ per hour, a roughly 500% increase from his previous job š¤£
So... two things can be true. The AI can be writing terribly dangerous code full of subtle bugs, at the same time as being (as far as your friend notices) a better coder than your friend. (Sorry.)
AI remixes all the code publicly available to humanity. Doing this remix introduces subtle (and sometimes obvious) errors.
The quality of this code (before the subtle errors from remixing) tends to be right smack around the middle level quality of all (public) code, in the world.
Considering that public code often goes through several rounds of expert review before being published - there's no shame that code is better than what your friend writes (on a random Monday, before peer review). The AI code was stolen from great coders working on great teams. I also don't usually individually write better code than great public teams produce. (And we tend to be our own worst critics.)
And considering that the AI's sole purpose is to create an attractive looking remix, there's also not much shame that your friend didn't spot the errors it makes.
Spotting the errors made by AI is difficult.
It's also now probably the most important part of the job of a programmer.
(The most important job of a programmer, previously, was knowing which examples not to copy and paste from Stack Overflow.)
Edit: Anyway, your friend is probably underestimating themself. AI is bringing new completely unqualified people into the developer talent pool, daily. It's a shame to hear about someone who actually thoughtfully judges the quality of their own code giving it up.
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