I’m serious. Treat it like any other tool. When it helps solves problems, use it. When it makes problems, don’t use it.
There are a lot of people and an enormous amount of money trying to make hands off agentic happen, but the happiest and most effective enthusiasts I know do not give up control: they go function by function and class by class, generating or writing as they see fit.
The goal is to make useful software. At least, I think that’s still true?
The middle ground is to use it as a power tool: give me an example of this, fix my types, do this fussy bit, find this in the docs, without ever letting go of control.
When using power tools you make all the measurements and decisions, you just hammer screw drill and cut faster. You cannot power tool your way to building a things that you don’t know how to build.
The other interesting thing about this is it works with smaller models and uses a fraction of the compute.
Yeah #2 may be incidental. Suppose one lab focused on bigger, and another on reinforcement training geared towards factual accuracy over sycophancy. You could easily wind up with a model from the second lab that is less powerful but more accurate.
I can’t prove it but I suspect there’s a bit of that going on.
The other side of this is... the thing that made the web is anyone, even a 12-year-old who just downloaded Notepad++, could spend a few hours and build a website.
VSCode is free. Stackoverflow is free. MDN is free. There are examples out there of every trick in the book, you can even use free AI to find them. You can even hose your website on Github pages for free.
But nevermind that, what's exciting is paying a robot a month's rent to do the thing that you could just go learn how to do in an afternoon?