In the beginning there were manufacturer’s manuals, spec sheets, etc.

Then there were magazines, like Byte, InfoWorld, Compute! that showed you a bit more than just the specs

Then there were books, including the X for Dummies series that purported to teach you theory and practice

Then there was Google / Stack Overflow and friends

Somewhere along there, where depends a lot on your age, there were school / University courses

Now we have “AI mode”

Each step along that road has offered a significant speedup, connecting ideas to theory to practice.

I agree, all the “magic bullet” AI hype is far overblown. However, with AI something I new I can do is, interactively, develop a specification and a program. Throw out the code several times while the spec gets refined, re-implemented, tried in different languages with different libraries. It’s still only good for “small” projects, but less than a year ago “small” meant less than 1000 lines of code. These days I’m seeing 300 lines of specification turn into 1500-3000 lines of code and have it running successfully within half a day.

I don’t know if we’re going to face a Kurzweilian singularity where these things start improving themselves at exponential rates, or if we’ll hit another 30 year plateau like neural nets did back in the 1990s… As things are, Claude helps me make small projects several times faster than I could ever do with Google and Stack Overflow. And you can build significant systems out of cooperating small projects.