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.