Hi! Before I start, want to give a quick appreciative sentence towards Ed and the other people on this sub. I really enjoy reading the articles, posts and listen to the podcast, it's nice having a somewhat "grounded" perspective on things going on amid all the noise everywhere else.
To myself, I am European living in a medium sized city, so the whole environment I am in is certainly a little bit different than what most regulars here (who I'd assume are Americans, going by Reddit demographics) experience, on- and offline. Be it a bit inspired from the recent post of someone from China, I figured I could give some thoughts as well, though most likely not as interesting, I'd assume. Still appreciate anyone taking the time to read and interact though!
I work at a top 100-ish company in the EU, somewhat at the forefront of this whole buildout craziness, which definitely has a sizeable impact on our bottom line too. I myself am in more of an DevOps role inside the IT department, so I may not be the exact target for it, but in regards to AI adoption and usage within my space I don't see... all that much, honestly? From what I work with directly, the only really visible thing is a different kind of search engine that works sometimes. Same with the developers I work with, consult and review the code of. Most of that is kinda same as always, and doesn't seem too LLM heavy either, even though our architecture has a lot of clear guidelines you could most likely even do with LLMs in an acceptable way. (Haven't tried that though, so maybe I overlook something).
Even myself when I code (I have written a few libraries the apps get built on, as well as tools for maintenance, automation, etc.) I really don't find this stuff all that useful. Most of the time it does what I ask of it, yes, but occasionally I feel like I would have just been quicker looking stuff up myself and writing it myself. And that would have been more fun too! Even worse when one Opus request takes 1% of the Github Copilot quota, lol. The most use I get is probably from the tab complete suggestions, because that actually works with me while developing, and doesn't throw me out of the flow completely. But game-changing, 5x performance as hailed by Mr. Wario and Twitter people? Still looking for it.
My team lead has developed a data fetching application in Python using agents because he isn't that super versed in the language. Resulted in me taking one look over it and finding a critical logic issue right away, and this was finance data related!! So with the amount of refactoring and reviewing needed, I don't think this was quicker than the alternative of letting someone familiar with the technology do it.
What I found most interesting was actually the words of a new executive (ex FAANG even) coming in -> "Yes, we will build agents, most will be shit, some are probably gonna be cool" paired with a little insight about how LLMs actually work. So, a good bit more level headed than what I expect going into that. Now add to that how usually stingy this company is with IT budget and I think the agent building idea is probably gonna die somewhere along the way too.
Finally, I feel like people in general are just more chill about it. This may be a combination of me only seeing the overseas space through the online lens, but this whole stuff isn't much of a daily topic even. You see occasional news about it, and even those are more in line with "beware of disinfo" than anything. No one goes around boasting "Yes I laid off all my Devs" or similar. It's really just another (soon to be quite expensive) tool. And the usual low effort AI slop also gets more negative than positive reception.
So yeah, rambles over. Mostly just wanted to put some words down and give a few points of view from over the pond. Thanks to everyone reading for them. Remember to smile and go outside to talk to your fellow humans, it's quite fun!