10 ms·

The copilot delusion

314 points by isaiahwp 1y ago

phillipcarter 1y ago
[flagged]
swyx 1y ago
i think the key is always having the ability to telescope - think coding agents enable you to stay high level, but you always need the ability to go down and fix/understand code when needed.
malfist 1y ago
I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has lost it's goddamn mind. AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail.
- abletonlive 1y ago
  Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when there are a lot of people telling you that it's a life changing tool? Or did you just assume that everybody was lying and you were doing everything correctly? Sorry to say it. It's an unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty much a harsh truth.
  - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
    "Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail." I think this pretty much speaks for itself.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Where did you see that I didn't use AI and that _nothing_ has changed for me?
  - dpistole 1y ago
    > why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? IMO the problem occurs when "the results" are hyped up linkedIn posts not based in reality, AI is a boon but it's not lived up to the "IDEs are a thing of the past, youre all prompt engineers now" expectations that we hear from executives
  - MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
    Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.
    - abletonlive 1y ago
      What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it
      - mplanchard 1y ago
        Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality. Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Clearly the answer is to replace them with AI.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Unions. What other way is there? https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-big-business-now-more-than-ever/ https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.
    - lyu07282 1y ago
      I mean don't bite the boot that you can lick amirite
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that? It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough
      - ghaff 1y ago
        For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
  > I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it. Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient. Like "here's my design doc, I chose $THING for caching for $REASON and $DATASTORE as it offers blah blah" "Please provide feedback and questions" This is totally alien to that approach. Ideally, "hey we're going to use CoPilot/other LLM thingy, let us know if it aids your workflow, give us some report in a month and we'll go from there to determine if we want to keep paying for it"
- ivape 1y ago
  But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.
- lamename 1y ago
  > AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.
CGamesPlay 1y ago
This resonates with me, for sure; both the benefits and the drawbacks of copilot. But while I think kids and hackers were artisans, engineers were always just engineers. The amazing technical challenges they had to solve to create some of the foundational technologies we have today, exist because they had to solve those challenges. Looking at only these and saying "that's how things used to be" is survivorship bias.
- gleenn 1y ago
  I feel privileged to be able to say that as a software engineer who's been doing it the hard way for 20+ years, I relish the hard problems. The CRUD app updates are unbearable without the random in-between challenges that bend my mind. The rare recursive algorithm, the application of some esoteric knowledge I actually learned in college, actually having to do big-o estimates. These are the gems of my career that keep me sane. I hope the next flock of AI-driven SWEs appreciates these things even more given the AI can spout off answers which sometimes are right and sometimes are horribly wrong. Challenges like these will always have to have someone who actually knows what to do when the AIs start hallucinating or the context of the situation is beyond the context window.
  - hollowsunsets 1y ago
    If someone commits to doing it the hard way, I wonder how much they risk being left behind. And will anyone out there really appreciate what it is they're trying to do or their commitment to their integrity? It seems like a deeply dying art. I hope it is the case.
-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on. I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make a lot of sense if they vehemently disliked that. It's hard to make sense of it all otherwise, really.
- wetpaws 1y ago
  [dead]
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  Non-technical business owners have always had deep anxiety about software development. They don’t understand it, it’s very expensive, timelines can explode, and a hack or leak can materially damage their business. A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people, and thus their destiny is not really in their control, other than by hiring the best they can and throwing money at R&D. The AI and the hype around it plays into their anxieties, and also makes them feel like they have control over the situation. In biotech, the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) is often given much more authority in startups than the CTO in tech startups, I have noticed.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    CTO can be a funny position at companies. It sometimes does mean head of engineering and responsible for technical direction at a pretty granular level. But it often also can mean being sort of the public face for the company's technology vision. I've definitely seen companies where the two are largely one and the same. I've also seen companies where the CTO was more the outward-facing vision person.
  - EdwardKrayer 1y ago
    If senior management feels their destiny is not in their control, they're doing it wrong. The best management don't always have the most expertise - but the good ones have an uncanny ability to know when they should defer, when/who to consult with, who to trust, and what to delegate.
bobxmax 1y ago
[flagged]
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  Is the "relevance" of programmers really at stake? Isn't it more like "what programmers actually do"?
noobermin 1y ago
Is the writing here intentionally bad? May be it's not my cup of tea but it's been a while since I've read something so cringey, it's difficult to finish.
- ivape 1y ago
  I don’t know, this made me kinda laugh: Because if that programmer—if that thing, that CREATURE—walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers". The description of the greenfield project first engineer. They are gone before you know it, or at the very least at some point offer a “well I had no choice you see, they really wanted to release something”.
- fracus 1y ago
  Message aside, I thought it was well written comedy.
- CSMastermind 1y ago
  Really? I enjoyed the writing style quite a bit.
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  I found it to be rather good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068828
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  I liked it. Spotted one grammar mistake though. I like even that - an ai doesn’t make that kind of mistake.
- willseth 1y ago
  The main source of the cringe is that the writing is so in your face about how hard it’s trying while the author is clearly unaware.
elliotbnvl 1y ago
Sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, to be honest.
- nalekberov 1y ago
  your comment is more likely to be written by ChatGPT than the blogpost.
  - vibeCoder007 1y ago
    AI writing emits less carbon than human writing.
focusgroup0 1y ago
Adapt or die. Keep up on industry trends and learn how to (responsibly) use the tools to be a better programmer, or be unnaturally selected out.
- BowBun 1y ago
  100% agree, but I bet there will be a quality blowback in software much like what we've seen at Boeing over the last few decades. I think there will be a premium on higher-quality software, but most companies don't need it
- ShroudedNight 1y ago
  What does 'better' mean in this context? Commercial viability is important if one wants to eat, but doesn't seem to justify the smugness projected...
- lyu07282 1y ago
  We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.
  - nalekberov 1y ago
    The response will be "we adapted to the trends, don't blame us, blame the machines"
  - tokioyoyo 1y ago
    Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.
    - douglasisshiny 1y ago
      This whole thread has to be satire.
    - 1y ago
EdwardKrayer 1y ago
I agree with this article. But, I do think it's important to understand that these tools do have value - especially when learning. I also think a lot of the issues raised will improve when we can increase context length. Googling problems, and having obsolete answers from 2007 also slow down progress, but we're not saying Google is worthless for serving those results. These tools will get better, and they will eventually allow the best to extend their ability instead of both slowing them down and potentially encouraging bad practices. But it will take time, and increased context length. The world is full of people who don't care about best practice, and if that's all the task requires of them - keep on keeping on.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no clue about nor do they care about whether something just refetches the world in certain scenarios. And AI whether we like it or not, whether it repeats the same shit and isnt DRY, doesn't follow patterns, reinvents the wheel, etc - is already fairly good at that. This is exactly why all your stakeholders and executives are pushing you to use it. they've been fed that it just gets shit done and pumps out code like nothing else. I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers. If these obstacles were entirely removed and we went full bandaid off I do think AI even in its current state is fairly capable of replacing plenty of roles. But it does require a competent person to steer to not end up in a complete mess. If you throw away the guardrails a little bit and not obsess about how nice code looks anymore, it absolutely will move things along faster than you could before.
- edoceo 1y ago
  This is true. But the cost after is high. Creating code, by hand or AI is easier than maintaining or modifying the system. And this is where a problem (still) appears - except now the AI-assiated authors have even less comprehension of the system.
- boxed 1y ago
  Clean code is nice. Working code is a requirement. You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.
  - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you will end up losing your job. Theres no way around it. The problem is we may end up losing our jobs either way.
vibeCoder007 1y ago
Clean code is only good for non-profit organization. Your paid to solve problem as fast as possible, not to code.
- boxed 1y ago
  You missed the point of the article. It's not about clean code. It's about working code.
- joks 1y ago
  For profit organizations usually care a hell of a lot about minimizing production issues, actually. What are you talking about?
dmitrygr 1y ago
Ouch! Right in the feels
padolsey 1y ago
> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new under the sun. It's been seen before thousands of times, and so why not recall and use those old nuggets? For me coding agents are just code-reuse on steroids. Ps. Ironically, the article feels AI generated.
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.
  - boxed 1y ago
    Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.
    - nozzlegear 1y ago
      And god forbid you use an emdash these days.
      - xigoi 1y ago
        I’ve recently been accused of using ChatGPT because I wrote a message with formal language and bullet points.
      - MrVandemar 1y ago
lyu07282 1y ago
these tools have no understanding of clean architecture, they are like geeksforgeeks or w3cschools, decades old shitty "tutorials" written by amateurs for amateurs condensed into a chatbot. If you work on cleanly architectured code they can still be useful, they can see the patterns and usually perform better in my experience. But not in a million years will you get to that clean architecture by starting them off from scratch. Keep it turned off until you have a solid foundation would be my advice.
tptacek 1y ago
The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.
- robocat 1y ago
  > let people in who never wanted the job to begin with I knew plenty of software developers that hate the job: it's a just paid work for many people and AI doesn't change that
- EdwardKrayer 1y ago
  I feel this has been the case for 20 years, when a whole generation was shoveled into the Comp Sci dream.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Meanwhile, > 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadsheets-have-errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee... How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    It's a kind of macabre progress that national policy missteps have advanced to "ChatGPT, generate a table of tariffs for the US to impose on other places." https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-205520...
    - delfinom 1y ago
      Idiocracy was a pretty good take on the future of civilization
  - saulpw 1y ago
    I agree that all of this is madness, but to be fair, 100% of computer programs have bugs, so I don't think this is any more damning than systematizing all of humanity's processes with computers.
wwarner 1y ago
> AI has no concept of memory locality. No intuition for cache misses. Not true at all but you have to ask it.
nsonha 1y ago
[flagged]
felubra 1y ago
> The machine is real. The silicon is real. The DRAM, the L1, the false sharing, the branch predictor flipping a coin—it’s all real. And if you care, you can work with it. This is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve come across in a while.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  Same, The author writes like Dave Barry. I burst out laughing more than once. He was able to articulate with a lot of humor exactly what I think of co-pilot.
groby_b 1y ago
Not sure if he talked about photography, Desktop Publishing, spreadsheets, or some other labor-saving invention. But what I heard over the din of whining was "It was hard for me, it should be hard for you". And... that's not how this or anything works. You get labor-saving stuff, you choose if you want to continue to solve hard problems, or if you want the same problems (which suddenly turned easy). Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, you need to know how you use it, and misusing it causes horrible disfiguring incidents. Guess what, the same was true about C++. And C before it. And that new-fangled assembly stuff, instead of using blinkenlights like a real programmer. And computers instead of slide rules. Up the complexity ladder we keep going.
- sgarland 1y ago
  No, you missed the point entirely. The author was correctly pointing out that if you don’t struggle, you will not understand how things work. Claim otherwise all you want; centuries of pedagogy have proven this time and time again. You have to understand the fundamentals to grok the abstractions, and you have to fail to know why the successes worked.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
sgarland 1y ago
> The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. I fully agree. This already happened with the explosion of DevOps bullshit, where people with no understanding of Linux got jobs by memorizing abstractions. “Stop gatekeeping,” they say. “Stop blowing up prod, and read docs” I fire back.
- mountainriver 1y ago
  This is already happening and it’s a colossal mess
- bangertho 1y ago
  This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions. I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
  - SirSavary 1y ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386. I make no claims that I fully understand anything, but I do have a decent understanding of how a CPU works from the level of doped silicon and up. Crucially, I read every doc I could find at every one of those jobs. You can learn enough to do the job, or you can learn more. That is a choice that everyone makes. More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.
airstrike 1y ago
I think all arguments pro and against AI assistants for coding should include a preface that describes the programing language, the domain of the app, the model being used and the chosen interface for interacting with the assistant. Otherwise everyone's just talking past each other.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  That’s probably asking for too much but I agree. Here are some terms/aspects of LLMs that people _regularly_ use, yet 10 people have 10 definitions of what it means (to them) - Vibe Coding - Boilerplate - Copilot - Cursor/Aider/Claude Code/Codex/OpenHands/etc - LLM Autocomplete and/or inline code suggestion - LLM Agent I’m happy to explain or expand on any of those if it’s not clear what I mean.
holtkam2 1y ago
I loved this article. But for some reason my gut is telling it will age like milk. Can you imagine how effective these coding agents will be in, say, 2036? The concept of coding things by hand for the sake of higher quality will seem so outdated
lunarcave 1y ago
The things that's most often missed in these discussions that "writing code" is the end artefact. It doesn't take into account the endless tradeoffs made in producing the said artefact - the journey to get there. Just try implementing a feature with a junior, in a mildly complex codebase and you'd catch all the unconscious tradeoffs that you're making as an experienced developer. AI has some concept of what these tradeoffs are, but that's mostly by observation. AI _does_ help with writing code. Keyword there being - "help". But thinking is the human's job. LLMs can't/don't "think". Thinking how to get the AI to produce the output you want is also your job. You'd think less and less if models get better.
- bulhi 1y ago
  Exactly. I think the key point from the article is: "When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning."
jboggan 1y ago
This is the crux of the piece to me: "We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore." This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.
quantadev 1y ago
Despite that this post/blog about AI has some valid points, the truth of the matter is that a good experienced developer _can_ extract the power out of a Coding Agent to get 6 months worth of work done in 3 weeks, and even do it in a language he's never coded in before. AI just isn't AGI yet, so comparing it to a human developer doesn't make any sense, to me. On the other hand, I'd also say AI Coding Agents are "Superhuman" in their vast knowledge and code-writing abilities. This indeed does sound like a contradiction, but the world is nuanced enough for it not to be a contradiction, but just two things that are true in a nuanced way.
heddycrow 1y ago
I couldn't help but read parts of this in Bertram Gilfoyle's voice. Someone tell me I'm not alone.
Aziell 1y ago
I used to work with someone like this. At first, he really wanted to do things properly. Over time, he gave up. Not because he was lazy, but because he felt like effort didn’t really matter. Copilot’s fine for boilerplate. But lean on it too much, and you stop thinking. Stop thinking long enough, and you stop growing. That’s the real cost.
wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
I want everyone to join the programming club who wants to.
- sgarland 1y ago
  Wants is the operative word. If you show up to a racetrack with zero experience and a Ferrari, you’re not going to be accepted if you try to pretend that you know how to drive. You’ll probably also hit the wall, which hopefully would provide an opportunity for introspection. If you have an AI generate all your code for you, and then say that you made an app, you should expect people to push back. I want to be around people who like learning and knowing things for the sake of learning. AI is a tool, but if you rely on it too heavily (or really at all when starting out), you’re stifling your ability to truly learn.
webprofusion 1y ago
It's right, AI does require giving up control and letting things be done differently, depends how much you really use it. It's the same when you get a junior dev to work on things, it's just not how you would do it yourself and frequently wrong or naive. Sometime is brilliant and better than you would have done yourself. That doesn't mean don't have junior devs, but having one doesn't mean you don't have to do corrective stuff and refinements to their work. Most of us aren't changing the world with our code, we're contributing an incredibly small niche part of how it works. People (normal people, lol) only care what your system does for them, not how it works or how great the code is.
dlnovell 1y ago
Beautiful and witty prose to say "vibe coding sucks". He's not at all wrong about the state of AI coding in May of 2025. The 3 hours I just burned trying to get it to correct output bugs in a marimo notebook (which I started learning this week) is demonstrable evidence. But it completely ignores the fact that AI generated code is getting better on a ~weekly basis. The author acknowledges that it is useful in some contexts for some uses, but doesn't acknowledge that the utility is constantly growing. We certainly could plateau sometime soon leaving us in the reckless intern zone, but I wouldn't bet on it.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Far as I'm concerned, it's getting better every week in the way Tesla self driving got better every week. Is it closer to its goal? Yes. Does it give value to its users? Arguably yes, but not really. Is it, in 2025, actually better than a real human at its designated task? Pretty universally no. So i won't be surprised when the "last 10%" of software AI takes 30 years to close the gap that 20 years of "immanent self driving" is still yet to close. We should all understand, i would think, that the last 10% is the hard part.
  - dlnovell 1y ago
    It's a fair point. It's hard to know where we are in the S curve. Considering how much better it's gotten in the past 12 months I don't get the sense that we're decelerating towards a plateau of capability, but it's certainly possible
OnionBlender 1y ago
The author is clearly a C++ programmer. I've been noticing that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages, especially scripting languages. Whenever I try to learn from people that are using these tools successfully, they always seem to be using a scripting language and working on some CRUD app.
- sgarland 1y ago
  They seem to be a game dev judging by their other posts. I imagine there’s a lot less content online about that for LLMs to scrape than yet another CRUD app.
breno12321 1y ago
What a great essay, this make me laugh out loud as I'm finishing my week. Thanks for this masterpiece, just shared in some engineering channels in my company even the AI ones! People think LLM is magic but its just engineering and we should treat like so, it has flaws, can be improved and in the end many times is just a tool for a job. Not the tool for all the jobs.
Glyptodon 1y ago
My point of comparison of choice is overseas contractors, not pair programming. Copilot or Cursor or whatnot is basically a better experience because you do not have to get on Zoom calls (after Slack has failed) to ask why some chunk of your system that cares about root nodes has mysteriously gained a function called isChild (not hasChildren) that returns a boolean based on whether or not the node has children and not whether it has a parent. Or to figure out why a bunch a API parameters that used to accept arrays now don't. Or why an ask to not show a constant literal in a menu resulted in algorithmic derivation of ordinals rather than using i18n. With AI you probably don't have those kinds of things happen, but if you do, you can instantly tell it, sorry, that's wrong, this is why, and have it changed in a minute. Whereas with contractors, you waste a lot of time on things like communication and understanding gaps and language barriers that are mostly gone with AI. The second you can interact really easily w/ AI from Jira Tickets, most engineers are going to turn into ticket writers and overseers for 80% of their work. (And yes, you'll still need engineers, because Product can't actually write decent engineering tickets, though telling the AI to write engineering tickets will probably get close, and because somebody with a clue needs to be in the loop, though many organizations will try to forget this and have things they don't understand go terribly wrong.)
laacz 1y ago
I came here to tell that the story was a rather delightful read regardless agreeing or not with the points being made.
dorkitude 1y ago
My favorite thing about this article is that it was released the exact same day as Claude 4 Opus. If it's satire, it's brilliant: because most of the comments I see (here and elsewhere) are clearly written by people who tried agentic coding before Opus 4, and haven't given it a fair shake over the ensuing five days. IMO the most important engineering skill in 2025 isn't low-level programming, or the craft of debugging, or even having a firm grasp of system architecture. Believe it or not, I truly believe the vibe-first juniors will learn that stuff too, over the course of their careers, just as we did: through necessity (As an aside: if you don't think they'll encounter such necessity, then it's inherently not one any more than the countless other once-honored, fastidious hallmarks of craft that have since been rendered obsolete. And if you don't think they'll learn even upon encountering a true necessity, then you underestimate them.) No, the most important engineering skill in 2025 is non-attachment: constantly update your priors, and hold your opinions very loosely. Because those opinions could be fully wrong before the essay even gets shared.
- makk 1y ago
  Attachment leads to suffering. Always has, always will.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
I think the difference between A.I. fake intelligence and us, humans, can be summed up to that single quote from Oscar Wilde. "I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out." No A.I. would ever think more than a millisecond about a comma, it's pure data retrieval for it. "how many percent of text there is a coma after this word, how many didn't ? ok, done."

314 points by isaiahwp 1y ago

[flagged]

swyx 1y ago

i think the key is always having the ability to telescope - think coding agents enable you to stay high level, but you always need the ability to go down and fix/understand code when needed.

malfist 1y ago

I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. It's like the world has lost it's goddamn mind. AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail.

abletonlive 1y ago
Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail. Have you considered that instead of resisting you should do more to figure out why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? If nothing has changed for you in the past 2 years in your productivity the problem is most likely you. Don't you think it's your responsibility as an engineer to figure out what you're doing wrong when there are a lot of people telling you that it's a life changing tool? Or did you just assume that everybody was lying and you were doing everything correctly? Sorry to say it. It's an unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty much a harsh truth.
- oh_my_goodness 1y ago
  "Well when you have a hammer big enough everything is indeed a nail." I think this pretty much speaks for itself.
- malfist 1y ago
  Where did you see that I didn't use AI and that _nothing_ has changed for me?
- dpistole 1y ago
  > why you're not getting the results that a lot of us are talking about? IMO the problem occurs when "the results" are hyped up linkedIn posts not based in reality, AI is a boon but it's not lived up to the "IDEs are a thing of the past, youre all prompt engineers now" expectations that we hear from executives
- MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
  Kind of brutal, but if LLMs drastically improved your productivity I think it speaks more to your baseline productivity than the power of LLMs.
  - abletonlive 1y ago
    What's more likely A) all of this money being funneled into tech to build out trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure, a month over month increasing user base buying subscriptions for these llm services, every company buying seats for LLM because of the value that it provides - these people are wrong B) yappers on hackernews that claim they derive no productivity boost out of llms while showing absolutely nothing about their workflow or method when the interface is basically a chat box with no guardrails - these people are wrong Sorry I'm going to be it's B and you just suck at it
    - mplanchard 1y ago
      Regarding A, first time on the hype train? VC and silicon valley funding is often completely divorced from any real value, and is one of the last places I’d look for reliable signal on quality. Regardless, I’m sure it’s a little of A and a little of B, plus some of C) yappers on Hackernews who think that the majority of the work of software engineering is writing code, and who generally write code in sufficiently simple contexts for the LLMs to produce something equivalent to their normal output.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. I really think we need to figure out how to cut back on management so we can get back to the business of actually doing work
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Clearly the answer is to replace them with AI.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Unions. What other way is there? https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-big-business-now-more-than-ever/ https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
- ghaff 1y ago
  Coordinating teams, talking to stakeholders/customers (including spending a lot of time with them), having someone manage individual contributors at some level, etc. is work that can't just be ignored at a company of any size. The only way to avoid (a lot of) it is to be very small and that has its own set of issues.
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    I mean don't bite the boot that you can lick amirite
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Sure, but do we really need four layers of people to do all of that? It's really common to see just layers and layers of management at companies that get big enough
    - ghaff 1y ago
      For a big enough company? Probably. Someone isn't going to effectively manage 100 or 500 people.
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
> I feel this in my bones. Every day I'm getting challenged by leadership that we're not using AI enough, told that I should halve my estimates because "we'll use AI", and being told that there's a new AI tool that I have to adopt because someone is tracking KPIs related to adoption and if our team doesn't adopt enough AI tools we're going to be fired to give more headcount to those that do. This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it. Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient. Like "here's my design doc, I chose $THING for caching for $REASON and $DATASTORE as it offers blah blah" "Please provide feedback and questions" This is totally alien to that approach. Ideally, "hey we're going to use CoPilot/other LLM thingy, let us know if it aids your workflow, give us some report in a month and we'll go from there to determine if we want to keep paying for it"
ivape 1y ago
But, management is the one to go soon. The other shoe is going to drop dear brother, this I promise you. Stay strong.
sanderjd 1y ago
Yeah, I mean, this is just the current phase of the hype cycle. It'll settle down. Some of the tools and techniques will have staying power, most won't. If you can figure out which is which and influence others, you'll be in good shape.
lamename 1y ago
> AI is always being touted as the tool to replace the other guy's job. But in reality it only appears to do a good job because you don't understand the other guy's job. This is a well considered point that not enough of us admit. Yes many jobs are rote or repetitive, but many more jobs, of all flavors, done well have subtleties that will be lost when things are automated. And no I do not think that some "80% done by AI is good enough" because errors propagate through a system (even if that system is a company or society), AND the people evaluating that "good enough" are not necessarily going to be those experienced in that same domain.

CGamesPlay 1y ago

This resonates with me, for sure; both the benefits and the drawbacks of copilot. But while I think kids and hackers were artisans, engineers were always just engineers. The amazing technical challenges they had to solve to create some of the foundational technologies we have today, exist because they had to solve those challenges. Looking at only these and saying "that's how things used to be" is survivorship bias.

gleenn 1y ago
I feel privileged to be able to say that as a software engineer who's been doing it the hard way for 20+ years, I relish the hard problems. The CRUD app updates are unbearable without the random in-between challenges that bend my mind. The rare recursive algorithm, the application of some esoteric knowledge I actually learned in college, actually having to do big-o estimates. These are the gems of my career that keep me sane. I hope the next flock of AI-driven SWEs appreciates these things even more given the AI can spout off answers which sometimes are right and sometimes are horribly wrong. Challenges like these will always have to have someone who actually knows what to do when the AIs start hallucinating or the context of the situation is beyond the context window.
- hollowsunsets 1y ago
  If someone commits to doing it the hard way, I wonder how much they risk being left behind. And will anyone out there really appreciate what it is they're trying to do or their commitment to their integrity? It seems like a deeply dying art. I hope it is the case.

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago

I wonder if we'll look back on this period in a couple of years and feel a nostalgic fondness as we think of the fateful moment when people working in software were forced to pull the wool from their eyes and look at the fact that businesses really, really, really dislike losing huge amounts of money paying people to make the software their businesses completely depend on. I mean, I'm guessing that's true. It'd make a lot of sense if they vehemently disliked that. It's hard to make sense of it all otherwise, really.

wetpaws 1y ago
[dead]
monero-xmr 1y ago
Non-technical business owners have always had deep anxiety about software development. They don’t understand it, it’s very expensive, timelines can explode, and a hack or leak can materially damage their business. A reasonably smart CEO can pretty much understand, in depth, every aspect of their business. But when it comes to tech, which is often the most essential part, they are left grasping, and must rely on the expertise of other people, and thus their destiny is not really in their control, other than by hiring the best they can and throwing money at R&D. The AI and the hype around it plays into their anxieties, and also makes them feel like they have control over the situation. In biotech, the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) is often given much more authority in startups than the CTO in tech startups, I have noticed.
- ghaff 1y ago
  CTO can be a funny position at companies. It sometimes does mean head of engineering and responsible for technical direction at a pretty granular level. But it often also can mean being sort of the public face for the company's technology vision. I've definitely seen companies where the two are largely one and the same. I've also seen companies where the CTO was more the outward-facing vision person.
- EdwardKrayer 1y ago
  If senior management feels their destiny is not in their control, they're doing it wrong. The best management don't always have the most expertise - but the good ones have an uncanny ability to know when they should defer, when/who to consult with, who to trust, and what to delegate.

bobxmax 1y ago

[flagged]

beepbooptheory 1y ago
Is the "relevance" of programmers really at stake? Isn't it more like "what programmers actually do"?

noobermin 1y ago

Is the writing here intentionally bad? May be it's not my cup of tea but it's been a while since I've read something so cringey, it's difficult to finish.

ivape 1y ago
I don’t know, this made me kinda laugh: Because if that programmer—if that thing, that CREATURE—walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers". The description of the greenfield project first engineer. They are gone before you know it, or at the very least at some point offer a “well I had no choice you see, they really wanted to release something”.
fracus 1y ago
Message aside, I thought it was well written comedy.
CSMastermind 1y ago
Really? I enjoyed the writing style quite a bit.
throwaway314155 1y ago
I found it to be rather good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44068828
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
I liked it. Spotted one grammar mistake though. I like even that - an ai doesn’t make that kind of mistake.
willseth 1y ago
The main source of the cringe is that the writing is so in your face about how hard it’s trying while the author is clearly unaware.

elliotbnvl 1y ago

Sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, to be honest.

nalekberov 1y ago
your comment is more likely to be written by ChatGPT than the blogpost.
- vibeCoder007 1y ago
  AI writing emits less carbon than human writing.

focusgroup0 1y ago

Adapt or die. Keep up on industry trends and learn how to (responsibly) use the tools to be a better programmer, or be unnaturally selected out.

BowBun 1y ago
100% agree, but I bet there will be a quality blowback in software much like what we've seen at Boeing over the last few decades. I think there will be a premium on higher-quality software, but most companies don't need it
ShroudedNight 1y ago
What does 'better' mean in this context? Commercial viability is important if one wants to eat, but doesn't seem to justify the smugness projected...
lyu07282 1y ago
We will see, but I can also imagine the pile of shit you vibecoded around you collapsing on top of you.
- nalekberov 1y ago
  The response will be "we adapted to the trends, don't blame us, blame the machines"
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Does it matter? The selling point of AI generated code is, eventually, you won't care what's happening in your code base and things just "work". It's like 95% of people who code (99%?) don't know what compilers do. Throw away what is collapsing, bring up new stuff, rinse and repeat.
  - douglasisshiny 1y ago
    This whole thread has to be satire.
  - 1y ago

EdwardKrayer 1y ago

I agree with this article. But, I do think it's important to understand that these tools do have value - especially when learning. I also think a lot of the issues raised will improve when we can increase context length. Googling problems, and having obsolete answers from 2007 also slow down progress, but we're not saying Google is worthless for serving those results. These tools will get better, and they will eventually allow the best to extend their ability instead of both slowing them down and potentially encouraging bad practices. But it will take time, and increased context length. The world is full of people who don't care about best practice, and if that's all the task requires of them - keep on keeping on.

Jcampuzano2 1y ago

As a preface, I think lots of people will not like this take. A lot of people are going to have to come to the realization that has already been mentioned before but many find it hard to grasp. Your boss, stakeholders, and especially non-technical people literally give 0 fucks about "quality code" as long as it does what they want it to do. They do not care about tests insofar as if it works it works. Many have no clue about nor do they care about whether something just refetches the world in certain scenarios. And AI whether we like it or not, whether it repeats the same shit and isnt DRY, doesn't follow patterns, reinvents the wheel, etc - is already fairly good at that. This is exactly why all your stakeholders and executives are pushing you to use it. they've been fed that it just gets shit done and pumps out code like nothing else. I really think a lot of the reason some people say it doesn't give them as much productivity as they would like is due largely to a desire to write "clean" code based on years and years of our own training, and due to having to be able to pass code review done by your peers. If these obstacles were entirely removed and we went full bandaid off I do think AI even in its current state is fairly capable of replacing plenty of roles. But it does require a competent person to steer to not end up in a complete mess. If you throw away the guardrails a little bit and not obsess about how nice code looks anymore, it absolutely will move things along faster than you could before.

edoceo 1y ago
This is true. But the cost after is high. Creating code, by hand or AI is easier than maintaining or modifying the system. And this is where a problem (still) appears - except now the AI-assiated authors have even less comprehension of the system.
boxed 1y ago
Clean code is nice. Working code is a requirement. You missed the point. AI slop doesn't just fail on point 1. It fails on point 2.
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot. We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using. AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you will end up losing your job. Theres no way around it. The problem is we may end up losing our jobs either way.

vibeCoder007 1y ago

Clean code is only good for non-profit organization. Your paid to solve problem as fast as possible, not to code.

boxed 1y ago
You missed the point of the article. It's not about clean code. It's about working code.
joks 1y ago
For profit organizations usually care a hell of a lot about minimizing production issues, actually. What are you talking about?

dmitrygr 1y ago

Ouch! Right in the feels

padolsey 1y ago

> if you want to sculpt the kind of software that gets embedded in pacemakers and missile guidance systems and M1 tanks—you better throw that bot out the airlock and learn. But the bulk of us aren't doing that... We're making CRUD apps for endless incoming streams of near identical user needs, just with slightly different integrations, schemas, and lipstick. Let's be honest. For most software there is nothing new under the sun. It's been seen before thousands of times, and so why not recall and use those old nuggets? For me coding agents are just code-reuse on steroids. Ps. Ironically, the article feels AI generated.

throwaway314155 1y ago
I don't mind your rebuttal of the article, but to suggest that this particular article is AI generated is foolish. The style the author presents is vivid, uses powerful imagery and metaphor and finally, at times, is genuinely funny. More qualitatively, the author incorporates a unique identity that persists throughout the entirety of a long form essay. All of that is still difficult to get an LLM to do. This isn't AI generated. It's just good writing. Whether you buy the premise or not.
- boxed 1y ago
  Maybe he meant it was long. Some people seem to think that long walls of text is how you spot AI slop.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    And god forbid you use an emdash these days.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      I’ve recently been accused of using ChatGPT because I wrote a message with formal language and bullet points.
    - MrVandemar 1y ago

lyu07282 1y ago

these tools have no understanding of clean architecture, they are like geeksforgeeks or w3cschools, decades old shitty "tutorials" written by amateurs for amateurs condensed into a chatbot. If you work on cleanly architectured code they can still be useful, they can see the patterns and usually perform better in my experience. But not in a million years will you get to that clean architecture by starting them off from scratch. Keep it turned off until you have a solid foundation would be my advice.

tptacek 1y ago

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. Gross. Also: you could have said this about the spreadsheet.

robocat 1y ago
> let people in who never wanted the job to begin with I knew plenty of software developers that hate the job: it's a just paid work for many people and AI doesn't change that
EdwardKrayer 1y ago
I feel this has been the case for 20 years, when a whole generation was shoveled into the Comp Sci dream.
yencabulator 1y ago
Meanwhile, > 88% of the Excel spreadsheets have errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadsheets-have-errors https://www.cassotis.com/insights/88-of-the-excel-spreadshee... How many companies mismanaged their finances because they had an enthusiastic spreadsheet user in charge? From that article, we know a country did.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  It's a kind of macabre progress that national policy missteps have advanced to "ChatGPT, generate a table of tariffs for the US to impose on other places." https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-2055203 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-chatgpt-205520...
  - delfinom 1y ago
    Idiocracy was a pretty good take on the future of civilization
- saulpw 1y ago
  I agree that all of this is madness, but to be fair, 100% of computer programs have bugs, so I don't think this is any more damning than systematizing all of humanity's processes with computers.

wwarner 1y ago

> AI has no concept of memory locality. No intuition for cache misses. Not true at all but you have to ask it.

nsonha 1y ago

[flagged]

felubra 1y ago

> The machine is real. The silicon is real. The DRAM, the L1, the false sharing, the branch predictor flipping a coin—it’s all real. And if you care, you can work with it. This is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve come across in a while.

bwfan123 1y ago
Same, The author writes like Dave Barry. I burst out laughing more than once. He was able to articulate with a lot of humor exactly what I think of co-pilot.

groby_b 1y ago

Not sure if he talked about photography, Desktop Publishing, spreadsheets, or some other labor-saving invention. But what I heard over the din of whining was "It was hard for me, it should be hard for you". And... that's not how this or anything works. You get labor-saving stuff, you choose if you want to continue to solve hard problems, or if you want the same problems (which suddenly turned easy). Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, you need to know how you use it, and misusing it causes horrible disfiguring incidents. Guess what, the same was true about C++. And C before it. And that new-fangled assembly stuff, instead of using blinkenlights like a real programmer. And computers instead of slide rules. Up the complexity ladder we keep going.

sgarland 1y ago
No, you missed the point entirely. The author was correctly pointing out that if you don’t struggle, you will not understand how things work. Claim otherwise all you want; centuries of pedagogy have proven this time and time again. You have to understand the fundamentals to grok the abstractions, and you have to fail to know why the successes worked.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

sgarland 1y ago

> The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs—it’s that it will let people in who never wanted the job to begin with. I fully agree. This already happened with the explosion of DevOps bullshit, where people with no understanding of Linux got jobs by memorizing abstractions. “Stop gatekeeping,” they say. “Stop blowing up prod, and read docs” I fire back.

mountainriver 1y ago
This is already happening and it’s a colossal mess
bangertho 1y ago
This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions. I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
- SirSavary 1y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- sgarland 1y ago
  Fun fact, I was a Nuclear Electronics Technician, and have a decent understanding – though admittedly not to the level of an EE – of how computers work at a very low level. I also worked for a chip fab for a couple of years, and literally made silicon wafers. I also rewrote the US Navy’s microprocessor training course for Nuke ETs, updating it from the Motorola 68000 to the Intel 386. I make no claims that I fully understand anything, but I do have a decent understanding of how a CPU works from the level of doped silicon and up. Crucially, I read every doc I could find at every one of those jobs. You can learn enough to do the job, or you can learn more. That is a choice that everyone makes. More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

airstrike 1y ago

I think all arguments pro and against AI assistants for coding should include a preface that describes the programing language, the domain of the app, the model being used and the chosen interface for interacting with the assistant. Otherwise everyone's just talking past each other.

joshstrange 1y ago
That’s probably asking for too much but I agree. Here are some terms/aspects of LLMs that people _regularly_ use, yet 10 people have 10 definitions of what it means (to them) - Vibe Coding - Boilerplate - Copilot - Cursor/Aider/Claude Code/Codex/OpenHands/etc - LLM Autocomplete and/or inline code suggestion - LLM Agent I’m happy to explain or expand on any of those if it’s not clear what I mean.

holtkam2 1y ago

I loved this article. But for some reason my gut is telling it will age like milk. Can you imagine how effective these coding agents will be in, say, 2036? The concept of coding things by hand for the sake of higher quality will seem so outdated

lunarcave 1y ago

The things that's most often missed in these discussions that "writing code" is the end artefact. It doesn't take into account the endless tradeoffs made in producing the said artefact - the journey to get there. Just try implementing a feature with a junior, in a mildly complex codebase and you'd catch all the unconscious tradeoffs that you're making as an experienced developer. AI has some concept of what these tradeoffs are, but that's mostly by observation. AI _does_ help with writing code. Keyword there being - "help". But thinking is the human's job. LLMs can't/don't "think". Thinking how to get the AI to produce the output you want is also your job. You'd think less and less if models get better.

bulhi 1y ago
Exactly. I think the key point from the article is: "When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning."

jboggan 1y ago

This is the crux of the piece to me: "We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore." This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.

quantadev 1y ago

Despite that this post/blog about AI has some valid points, the truth of the matter is that a good experienced developer _can_ extract the power out of a Coding Agent to get 6 months worth of work done in 3 weeks, and even do it in a language he's never coded in before. AI just isn't AGI yet, so comparing it to a human developer doesn't make any sense, to me. On the other hand, I'd also say AI Coding Agents are "Superhuman" in their vast knowledge and code-writing abilities. This indeed does sound like a contradiction, but the world is nuanced enough for it not to be a contradiction, but just two things that are true in a nuanced way.

heddycrow 1y ago

I couldn't help but read parts of this in Bertram Gilfoyle's voice. Someone tell me I'm not alone.

Aziell 1y ago

I used to work with someone like this. At first, he really wanted to do things properly. Over time, he gave up. Not because he was lazy, but because he felt like effort didn’t really matter. Copilot’s fine for boilerplate. But lean on it too much, and you stop thinking. Stop thinking long enough, and you stop growing. That’s the real cost.

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

I want everyone to join the programming club who wants to.

sgarland 1y ago
Wants is the operative word. If you show up to a racetrack with zero experience and a Ferrari, you’re not going to be accepted if you try to pretend that you know how to drive. You’ll probably also hit the wall, which hopefully would provide an opportunity for introspection. If you have an AI generate all your code for you, and then say that you made an app, you should expect people to push back. I want to be around people who like learning and knowing things for the sake of learning. AI is a tool, but if you rely on it too heavily (or really at all when starting out), you’re stifling your ability to truly learn.

webprofusion 1y ago

It's right, AI does require giving up control and letting things be done differently, depends how much you really use it. It's the same when you get a junior dev to work on things, it's just not how you would do it yourself and frequently wrong or naive. Sometime is brilliant and better than you would have done yourself. That doesn't mean don't have junior devs, but having one doesn't mean you don't have to do corrective stuff and refinements to their work. Most of us aren't changing the world with our code, we're contributing an incredibly small niche part of how it works. People (normal people, lol) only care what your system does for them, not how it works or how great the code is.

dlnovell 1y ago

Beautiful and witty prose to say "vibe coding sucks". He's not at all wrong about the state of AI coding in May of 2025. The 3 hours I just burned trying to get it to correct output bugs in a marimo notebook (which I started learning this week) is demonstrable evidence. But it completely ignores the fact that AI generated code is getting better on a ~weekly basis. The author acknowledges that it is useful in some contexts for some uses, but doesn't acknowledge that the utility is constantly growing. We certainly could plateau sometime soon leaving us in the reckless intern zone, but I wouldn't bet on it.

queenkjuul 1y ago
Far as I'm concerned, it's getting better every week in the way Tesla self driving got better every week. Is it closer to its goal? Yes. Does it give value to its users? Arguably yes, but not really. Is it, in 2025, actually better than a real human at its designated task? Pretty universally no. So i won't be surprised when the "last 10%" of software AI takes 30 years to close the gap that 20 years of "immanent self driving" is still yet to close. We should all understand, i would think, that the last 10% is the hard part.
- dlnovell 1y ago
  It's a fair point. It's hard to know where we are in the S curve. Considering how much better it's gotten in the past 12 months I don't get the sense that we're decelerating towards a plateau of capability, but it's certainly possible

OnionBlender 1y ago

The author is clearly a C++ programmer. I've been noticing that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages, especially scripting languages. Whenever I try to learn from people that are using these tools successfully, they always seem to be using a scripting language and working on some CRUD app.

sgarland 1y ago
They seem to be a game dev judging by their other posts. I imagine there’s a lot less content online about that for LLMs to scrape than yet another CRUD app.

breno12321 1y ago

What a great essay, this make me laugh out loud as I'm finishing my week. Thanks for this masterpiece, just shared in some engineering channels in my company even the AI ones! People think LLM is magic but its just engineering and we should treat like so, it has flaws, can be improved and in the end many times is just a tool for a job. Not the tool for all the jobs.

Glyptodon 1y ago

My point of comparison of choice is overseas contractors, not pair programming. Copilot or Cursor or whatnot is basically a better experience because you do not have to get on Zoom calls (after Slack has failed) to ask why some chunk of your system that cares about root nodes has mysteriously gained a function called isChild (not hasChildren) that returns a boolean based on whether or not the node has children and not whether it has a parent. Or to figure out why a bunch a API parameters that used to accept arrays now don't. Or why an ask to not show a constant literal in a menu resulted in algorithmic derivation of ordinals rather than using i18n. With AI you probably don't have those kinds of things happen, but if you do, you can instantly tell it, sorry, that's wrong, this is why, and have it changed in a minute. Whereas with contractors, you waste a lot of time on things like communication and understanding gaps and language barriers that are mostly gone with AI. The second you can interact really easily w/ AI from Jira Tickets, most engineers are going to turn into ticket writers and overseers for 80% of their work. (And yes, you'll still need engineers, because Product can't actually write decent engineering tickets, though telling the AI to write engineering tickets will probably get close, and because somebody with a clue needs to be in the loop, though many organizations will try to forget this and have things they don't understand go terribly wrong.)

laacz 1y ago

I came here to tell that the story was a rather delightful read regardless agreeing or not with the points being made.

dorkitude 1y ago

My favorite thing about this article is that it was released the exact same day as Claude 4 Opus. If it's satire, it's brilliant: because most of the comments I see (here and elsewhere) are clearly written by people who tried agentic coding before Opus 4, and haven't given it a fair shake over the ensuing five days. IMO the most important engineering skill in 2025 isn't low-level programming, or the craft of debugging, or even having a firm grasp of system architecture. Believe it or not, I truly believe the vibe-first juniors will learn that stuff too, over the course of their careers, just as we did: through necessity (As an aside: if you don't think they'll encounter such necessity, then it's inherently not one any more than the countless other once-honored, fastidious hallmarks of craft that have since been rendered obsolete. And if you don't think they'll learn even upon encountering a true necessity, then you underestimate them.) No, the most important engineering skill in 2025 is non-attachment: constantly update your priors, and hold your opinions very loosely. Because those opinions could be fully wrong before the essay even gets shared.

makk 1y ago
Attachment leads to suffering. Always has, always will.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

I think the difference between A.I. fake intelligence and us, humans, can be summed up to that single quote from Oscar Wilde. "I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out." No A.I. would ever think more than a millisecond about a comma, it's pure data retrieval for it. "how many percent of text there is a coma after this word, how many didn't ? ok, done."