One point that hasn’t been addressed in this thread is that these things only actually work when used by someone who knows what they are doing. I’m sure that you (Skip) could use these things to do something useful but the idea that someone who doesn’t know how to program can use these tools to produce good code is demonstrably false.
You asked “Who checks Claude’s work?” and the answer is that you do and if you don’t know how to do that then the code will be riddled with problems. Sometimes it is fine for the code to be riddled with problems e.g. if it is just a toy prototype but if the code is not supposed to be riddled with problems then you have to check Claude’s work. Then you either tell Claude to fix the problems or manually edit the output (I recently saw someone call this “self-adjusting”). From talking to others I think it is quite common to hit a point where you’ve prompted again and again and then you say okay git reset --hard and just type the code yourself because that is faster than checking the AI output.
Yes, if you just want a few lines of boilerplate for some common task then it can be fine but creating “working software” and doing “advanced coding” are not things that a novice can do just by using AI. I’m also not convinced that this is something that will change any time soon because always somewhere there needs to be a human in the loop who has enough understanding of what is going on in the code and what it is supposed to do in the real world.
From reviewing open source PRs I have seen many examples of people with different levels of ability/experience using different kinds of AI and most of it is bad. Novices produce garbage that might be randomly correct and more experienced people make mistakes that they would never have made if not using AI.
It doesn’t even work to say that novices can use AI to produce something that more experienced people would review and give feedback on. Honestly reviewing many PRs now is like prompting a broken LLM. The human on the other side actually makes it worse then using an LLM directly because they garble the review feedback when prompting the LLM.
AI spam is a growing burden on open source that actually threatens the whole model of open-to-anyone contribution where maintainers attempt to review code submitted by anyone. There was a register article about this yesterday: