No doubt, I am simply being pragmatic. I will keep hand-holding AI when needed, it is increasingly less needed, good. I am not a skeptic, I will keep using AI to the limits of its ability the whole way, but one quickly learns its limits when you try to do some professional work with it.

It’s still plenty useful of course, but it absolutely needs constant babysitting for now, which is fine. I like AI coding tools that acknowledge those limits and help you work around them, rather than just pretending its magic and hiding its workings from you as an autonomous background process. Maybe soon such need for control will become obsolete, awesome, I will be the first one onboard.

PS:

Chess AI is definitely superhuman now, but Stockfish is a small NN surrounded by tons of carefully human-engineered heuristics and rules. Training an LLM (or any end-to-end self-supervised model) to be superhuman at chess is still surprisingly hard. I did some serious R&D on it a while back. Maybe we’ve gotten there in the last few years, not sure, but it’s very new and still not that much better than the best players.

Most real-world stock trading is still carefully supervised and managed by human traders. Even for automated high-frequency trading, what really works is to have an army of mathematicians devising lots of trading scripts, trading with proper deep-learning/reinforcement-learning is still surprisingly niche and unsuccessful.

Also combat aviation is far from being automated, sure they can bomb but not dogfight, and most drones are remote controlled dumb puppets.

I do agree with your point generally, but any good engineer needs to understand the details of where we are at so we can make real progress.