There is a slightly weird thing about working at an AI company when you... take a pragmatic view of what the tools are capable of.
There was an exchange last week that has stuck in my head, which sorta encapsulates the whole thing.
Me: "And even when an agent can write the code, and it compiles, it is often less performant than our libraries." (Speaking of our kernel libraries.) Them: "Then tell them to make the code more performant. I've gotta believe it's capable of writing code better than a human. Otherwise, what are we doing here?" Me: "I haven't seen evidence of that."
Shortly after that, the person left the room. I don't know if it was because of this exchange, or they just had somewhere else to be.
But here's the thing. Yes, AI is great. Yes, it continues to improve. Yes, I use it all the time.
But I believe that currently, someone with domain expertise can often still write better code (or prose, or docs) than AI. Maybe not faster, but more correct, or more performant, or more aware of edge cases, or better fit for an overall system or pipeline, or any of the many things humans can still outperform AI in.
It's a great democratizer. It lets people who lack domain expertise create things they wouldn't be able to create otherwise (myself included). But I keep being confronted with cases where AI output is less than human.
Which I guess means I will keep having encounters like this with my peers.