Given the current state of battery technology, this is probably the only possible commercial use case. Even then, you have serious limitations like low passenger capacity, takeoff/landing still requires a helipad, recharge time, and the questionable safety in the event of motor or hinge malfunction.
And once this gets in use improvements will lead to bigger, longer range, etc etc etc. Batteries too are rapidly improving and this will push more emphasis on that. The first Write flyer couldn't do much either.
This isn’t meant to slot into the role of other planes, though, it’s meant for rideshare. It can take off and land on my suburban lawn. There’s a lot to figure out before we can get to that point, so they’re just displace helicopters for the moment, but it can be a lot more. It’s basically the long awaited flying car, in nascent form.
No, it can't take off and land on your suburban lawn. The wires and trees overhead would make that ridiculously dangerous, a last resort only for emergencies. Plus they need to recharge for the next flight. These e-VTOL aircraft will operate from dedicated pads.
Just talking about what they've talked about as goals in interviews. And I'm surprised you're willing to make definitive statements about my lawn, we have a large enough area with none of those obstructions you're talking about, we live on a few acres. And if it's running 20 miles here and there, it can do a few trips before it needs to go somewhere to charge or battery swap. That would cover our trip to our nearest international airport.
If these e-VTOL aircraft get used for air taxi service at all it's going to be for short hops in denser urban areas. Not in rural areas where people have acres of open land.
Go watch one of JoeBen's interviews. His original inspiration for the company was making something that could make where he grew up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains more accessible. His stated long term vision is vertiports embedded in communities. In the short term, I agree that they're going to start in denser areas.
Heh it doesn't have to be literally on one's own lawn, it could just be a little helipad per community. And my understanding is that the vast majority of private helipads don't have air traffic control - your hospital's roof doesn't have its own air traffic control. Pilots operate under "see and avoid" rules.
Use your imagination a little. So much status quo bias here.
Who would want to privately own a community helipad? Sounds like an insurance and liability nightmare.
This is an impressive enough achievement, but let's not kid ourselves this is going to revolutionaise suburban or semi-rural transport. Its maximum payload weight (450kg) barely covers 5 passengers with no baggage. It's for hopping from the country club to the golf course.
LLMs are great at producing plausible BS. If your job involves creating plausible BS, then it could be done much faster by "AI". As a low-level programmer, I am much less concerned :-)
It's the very reason why I don't get this brutal attempt to replace developers with AI. I would have considered a more reasonable approach to use it for things were "chatting" is the main skill.
I wonder if this is less about the environmental impact (which can be greenwashed as necessary), and more about the power consumption of individual data centres.
Well datacenters ARE rated by their power usage. And then there is a PUE ratio which indicates how much power is to be used by feeding the equipment vs overall usage for supporting equipment (cooling).
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...
Modern datacenters use local power generation that means lots of bad pollution worse than most factories. There is really bad sound pollution from many of them. They are enormous and create barriers where people should be able to move around.
Hmm. I wonder what it would look like if you added the corresponding "minute" labels (eight, five, four, etc) at the appropriate places. It might make it at least a little feasible to read the time!
This part will go away over the next year. You doing it will be too slow, when an agent can do it in 5 to 30 minutes.
Technically it's not needed now, but everything's so new, it's understandable. Everyone's workflow hasn't migrated yet. You should go take a look.
We all mourn the loss of the craft, but the wheel turns. People still make furniture by hand sometimes,
even if most furniture is made in a factory now.
Why hasn't it gone away already? ChatGPT at least has been around for over 3 years.
Why is my AI-first colleage constantly having to get more expensive AI subscriptions approved?
>most furniture is made in a factory now
Terrible analogy. Software is not like a mass-produced item - it is written significantly less often than it is executed!
You could say that AI will allow many more variations of softwares to be written in the same time frame, but I'm still sure I can produce quality output in a competitive time.
Why hasn't it gone away already? ChatGPT at least has been around for over 3 years.
Because the models only got good enough to be trusted in the past few months and the developer tooling and agent abstractions are still rounding off the sharp corners to make it easy to use.
ChatGPT didn't have your whole codebase in context, the ability to automatically pull and push information to JIRA to plan code changes, and the ability to break your problems down into manageable pieces and sub-divide them among a fleet of sub-agents.
Developers didn't yet have the "Ask -> Plan -> Implement -> Review" workflow that results in the best agent-written code.
Now the tools and developers do and it works incredibly well.
>Because the models only got good enough to be trusted in the past few months
They have got noticably worse over the past few months! It looks like we are going in the direction I've been predicting for a while - the cost of AI will increase until it's similar in cost/benefit to hiring a recent graduate, who can also do all of those things you mention (and will get better at it).
Also a lot of software should be small. The only reason they aren’t (especially web) is because the trend is to bring in frameworks instead of using libraries. I spend more times tweaking code than adding features. The time spent on coding is way smaller than the time spent discussing about those tweaks
We all could live in fantastical universes where CEOs tell the truth and shareholders put other things over profits, but that's not the case. Another such case of a fantastical world, that contends with what Tolkien might have come up with, is believing LLMs are reliable, secure, or have any intelligence.
For one, I'm at peace with all these obituaries, like yours. If they're written by technical people, I rest assured of my job security. If they're not written by tech people, I'm at peace too, for time, as always, will come back with the invoice for their piss-poor hype-driven, sanguine mandates on the technical side of things.
I mean to say, it is a sad state, has always been, how informal software engineering compared to other engineering fields.
It is actually true though, I only use tmux nowadays when I am SSHed into a server that I need to do some work on.
The only issues I've had with it is that sometimes it's hot keys conflict with vim, but you can easily turn it temporarily off with ctrl+ g.
If you're already used to tmux I'm not sure you would benefit much from changing, but it definitely has a better out of the box with pane hints, names, and more user friendly hot keys.
Maybe give terminal windows in vim a try? vim is not a terminal multiplexer, but if all you need is multiple terminals windows:
:term to open a terminal in a new vim window (or :vert term)
Standard window movements apply (by default the window prefix is Ctrl-W), most important are: Ctrl-W,{hjkl} to switch between windows, Ctrl-W,{<>+-} to resize windows, Ctrl-W,{HJKL} to move windows to edges, Ctrl-W,{qc} to (force) close windows
Enter normal mode of a terminal buffer with Ctrl-W,N: now you can perform vim motions and scroll the output
Enter insert mode with i and you can type into the terminal again
In insert mode: Ctrl-W "x to paste register x, Ctrl-W . to send a literal Ctrl-W. If too annoying, you can change the window prefix of vim
This goes for vim, neovim also has a terminal mode but it works differently I think
I see everyone complaining about this but as a new tmux user as of a few months ago, I had an LLM assist me with configuring it how I wished and it did a bang-up job. Stuff like using “-“ to split horizontal and “|” to split vertical so you don’t even have to remember it…
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