It feels like a lot of people keep falling into the trap of thinking we’ve hit a plateau, and that they can shift from “aggressively explore and learn the thing” mode to “teach people solid facts” mode.
A week ago Scott Hanselman went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about AI-assisted coding. I generally respect that guy a lot, so I tuned in and… well it was kind of jarring. The dude kept saying things in this really confident and didactic (teacherly) tone that were months out of date.
In particular I recall him making the “You’re absolutely right!” joke and asserting that LLMs are generally very sycophantic, and I was like “Ah, I guess he’s still on Claude Code and hasn’t tried Codex with GPT 5”. I haven’t heard an LLM say anything like that since October, and in general I find GPT 5.x to actually be a huge breakthrough in terms of asserting itself when I’m wrong and not flattering my every decision. But that news (which would probably be really valuable to many people listening) wasn’t mentioned on the podcast I guess because neither of the guys had tried Codex recently.
And I can’t say I blame them: It’s really tough to keep up with all the changes but also spend enough time in one place to learn anything deeply. But I think a lot of people who are used to “playing the teacher role” may need to eat a slice of humble pie and get used to speaking in uncertain terms until such a time as this all starts to slow down.
A week ago Scott Hanselman went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about AI-assisted coding. I generally respect that guy a lot, so I tuned in and… well it was kind of jarring. The dude kept saying things in this really confident and didactic (teacherly) tone that were months out of date.
In particular I recall him making the “You’re absolutely right!” joke and asserting that LLMs are generally very sycophantic, and I was like “Ah, I guess he’s still on Claude Code and hasn’t tried Codex with GPT 5”. I haven’t heard an LLM say anything like that since October, and in general I find GPT 5.x to actually be a huge breakthrough in terms of asserting itself when I’m wrong and not flattering my every decision. But that news (which would probably be really valuable to many people listening) wasn’t mentioned on the podcast I guess because neither of the guys had tried Codex recently.
And I can’t say I blame them: It’s really tough to keep up with all the changes but also spend enough time in one place to learn anything deeply. But I think a lot of people who are used to “playing the teacher role” may need to eat a slice of humble pie and get used to speaking in uncertain terms until such a time as this all starts to slow down.