While not strictly a dinner, I’m usually opting (or at least suggest, if the other side would be interested) for a local billiard place. It’s not just a pub with a random one table, but an actual cue sports place/bar, with like 20 tables. It does have drinks and is also a restaurant, and in general looks relatively fancy.
I like billiard (pool) because it’s easy to pick up, gives you something to do during/between conversations without requiring too much focus, can be done in fancy clothes without needing to change into anything, and can look fancy with drinks. It’s also something that everyone plays basically on the same skill level, whether you are playing for a first time or for 50th time, with only people who are actually practicing regularly being noticeably better (which I’m not), so it’s never really too one-sided. And it’s fun.
So far it has worked well.
I’ve been able to find a workflow where it’s mostly correct and can handle most of my gamedev related coding without making too many mistakes. I still have to actually read through the code and pay some attention to what it’s doing, and if it misses something and goes on a wild goose chase, it’s unusable and I have to start over (so someone who didn’t know what they are doing would be cooked), but whatever.
Sure, it does require a lot of looping adversarial reviews, and my average token cost is around 3000$ (4B tokens) a month (we have unlimited budgets and a pretty accurate tracking, and also probably cheaper than consumer prices per token with how large company it is), which is actually more than my monthly salary, but it’s just a job, for a company and on a product I don’t really care about, and I can 1) keep slacking in my job while doing my own coding stuff and projects, and keep seeing how absolutely unreasonable the prices are if you want to get at least semi-submitable results.
You could ask if it’s necessary to spend so much tokens - but so far most adversary review rounds do find serious blocker bugs the first implementation had, most of them being some hidden stuff that would be difficult to reasonably find by hand unless you really understand everything around the code, which you should, but the point of AI is that you shouldn’t have to.
Is it worth it? Lol, no. The whole team is loosing codebase knowledge, we’re getting bottle-necked by pending PR reviews that are just stacking up and no one wants to do, so we’re not even more effective, the cost is absolutely absurd and in no way near sustainable or worth it. And the longer it goes on, the less I can realize it’s spewing bullshit and I should stop it and nudge it into a different direction in our codebase, because I’m slowly loosing touch with it, while for now I’m still relying on what I remember from before we went all-in on AI.
And that’s while the whole industry is in the “Uber pricing” phase, so it will get a lot worse. But yeah, if you can burn 100-200$ per a simple implementation task, then it can have a pretty usable results. And that 3000$ a month does not include our CI review bot, that does additional rounds of multi-agent council reviews. And I’m not even working on anything complex, mostly just various menu screens UI. I can imagine the bill getting a lot higher if you get into more involved systems.