David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
I’m using a lot of agentic coding at work. The code isn’t better, far from it, but it gets to a working state much much faster and that’s what my company values unfortunately.
It’s also really tricky because it seems to get better but whenever I’ve let my guard down it starts slopping about for real.
But I see it more like IKEA furniture vs hand made. It’s quality (if you have a decent craftsman) vs price, and as long as the price is lower many companies are going all in on IKEA.
My concern is that people like you will end up being something called “a responsibility sink” where you’re expected review and understand more lines of code than is reasonable and when the company gets in trouble they’ll throw ol’ MirrorGiraffe directly under the bus. To me it’s pretty dumb, people were already forking projects they didn’t understand to stand up their own projects, let’s just go back to they and not add extra steps.