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AI can't even fix a simple bug – but sure, let's fire engineers
- csallen 1y agoAI is a tool. Just like any other tool, there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well. Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI and claim it can do more than it can do. But I'm also getting tired of people writing articles that showcase people using AI poorly as if that proves some sort of point about its inherent limitations. Man hits thumb with hammer. Article: "Hammers can't even drive a simple nail!"
- OutOfHere 1y ago> there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well. Precisely. AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job. I make sure my prompts have all of the necessary implementation detail that the AI will need. Without this guidance, the expected result is not a good one.
- spookie 1y agoThis often doesn't scale well. And coming up with all the necessary context in writing is a bit harder than when programming.
- OutOfHere 1y agoWell, it's where we are now with AI technology. Perhaps a superior future AI will need less of it. For now I give it all that I think it won't reliably figure out on its own.
- DragonStrength 1y agoIt's actually where we have always been with software development, which is why so many software professionals think the media narrative is so stupid. Oh, you want to fire your engineers? Easy, just perfectly specify exactly what you want and how it should work! Oh, that's what the engineers are for? Huh!
- OutOfHere 1y agoYup, but the management, essentially the ones who control the hiring and firing, are more clued into the media narrative, with a bias toward dismissing what engineers think.
- dinfinity 1y ago> AI needs appropriate and sufficient guidance to be able to write code that does the job. Note that the example (shitty Microsoft) implementation was not able to properly run tests during its work, not even tests it had written itself. If you have an existing codebase that already has a plenty tests and you ask AI to refactor something whilst giving it the access it needs to run tests, it can already sometimes do a great job all by itself. Good specification and documentation also do a lot, of course, but the iterative approach with feedback if things are actually working as intended is a game changer. Not unsurprisingly also a lot closer to how humans do things.
- OutOfHere 1y agoThe iterative approach has one problem -- it is onerous to repeat the lengthy iterative process with a different model, as it will lead to an entirely different conversation. In contrast, when the spec is well-written up-front, it is trivial to switch models to see how the other model implements it differently.
- despera 1y agoA tool can very well be broken thought or simply useless for anything but the most lightweight job (despite all the PR nonsense) They call it a tool and so people leave reviews like any other tool.
- croes 1y ago> Yes, we're all tired of the endless parade of people who exaggerate the abilities of (current day) AI You mean the people who create and sell these AIs. You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself. This is more a your-car-can-drive-without-supervision-but-it-hit-a-another-car case.
- baxtr 1y agoI think the difference is that a hammer manufacturer wouldn’t suggest that the hammer will replace the handyman with its next update.
- deadlydose 1y ago> You would blame the hammer or at least the manufacturer if they claimed the hammer can do it al by itself. I wouldn't because I'm not stupid and I know what a hammer is and isn't capable of despite any claims to the contrary.
- itishappy 1y agoImprove your efficiency with this double headed hammer! I drove 200 screws in one weekend using this hammer! With hammers like these, who needs nails? Hammers are all you need Hammers deemed harmful
- tedunangst 1y agoWhat's the best way to insulate myself from the output of people using AI poorly?
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- benreesman 1y agoIt's increasingly a luxury to be a software engineer who is able to avoid some combination of morally reprehensible leadership harming the public, quality craftsmanship in software being in freefall, and ML proficiency being defined downwards to admit terrible uses of ML. AI coding stuff is a massive lever on some tasks and used by experts. But its not self-driving and the capabilities of tge frontier vendor stuff might be trending down, they're certainly not skyrocketing. Any other tool: a compiler, an editor, a shell, even a browser, but I'd say build tools are the best analogy: you have chosen to become proficient or even expert or you haven't and rely on colleagues or communities that provide that expertise. Pick a project or a company: you know if you should be messing around with the build or asking a build person. AI is no diffetent. Claude 4 Opus just went GA and its in power user tune still, they don't have the newb/cost-control defaults dialed in yet and so its really useful and probably will be for a few days until they get the PID controller wired up to whatever a control vector is these days, and then it will tank to useless slop just like 3.7. For a week I'll get a little boost in my ouyput and pay them a grand and be glad I did, and then it will go back to worse than useless. These guys only know one business plan.
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- JHer 1y agoThe television, the atom bomb, the cigarette rolling machine, and penicillin are also "just tools". They nevertheless changed our world entirely, for better or worse. If you ascribe the impact of AI to the people using AI, you will be utterly, completely bewildered by what is happening and what is going to happen.
- _se 1y ago[flagged]
- mplanchard 1y agoIsn’t this exactly what the article says? It’s the entire thesis of the second half.
- nessbot 1y agoIt's not a tool its a SaaS. I own and control my tools. I think a John Deer tractor looses it's "tool" status when you can't control it. Sure there's the local models but those aren't what the vast majority of folks are using or pushing.
- steventruong 1y agoThis is an incredibly weird view to me. If I borrow a hammer from my neighbor, although I don’t own the hammer, it doesn’t suddenly make the hammer not a tool. Associating a tool with the concept of ownership feels like an odd argument to make.
- tacheiordache 1y agoNow the hammer has mapped your house and knows where all the screws are and is uploading all that to some servers.
- Kinrany 1y agoYou don't own the hammer but you control it.
- collyw 1y agoAs he says a tool's ownership shouldn't affect it's status of a tool.
- nessbot 1y agoand my comment said "own and control" and later focused on "control".
- AstralStorm 1y agoYou do not control the tool either. You cannot manually train it for your case. You cannot tell it to not touch particular parts of your project either. It will stomp over all of the code. You cannot even easily detect this tool has been used except for typical failures. The tool may also leak your secrets to some central database. You cannot tell it to not do that. (If you try either tack of those, it will lie to you that it complied while actually not doing that at all.) When your networking fails, the tool does not work. It's fragile in all cases.
- pier25 1y agoI'd agree with you if AI companies weren't relentlessly overhyping AI.
- Jackson__ 1y agoMore like: Man hits thumb with hammer. Hammer companies proclaim Hammers will be able to build entire houses on their own within the next few years [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/podcasts/google-ai-demis-hassabis-hard-fork.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/podcasts/google-ai-demis-...
- pempem 1y agoThis is a way better version of my comment.
- csallen 1y agoOkay, so write an article about how the hammer companies are dumb. Don't write an article about how hammers can't drive nails. Why is this complex?
- ruraljuror 1y ago> Okay, so write an article about how the hammer companies are dumb This is exactly how I interpreted the OP blog post: it is a great example of how companies are (mis)using AI given it's current abilities.
- csallen 1y agoThe article is literally titled, "AI can't even fix a simple bug," reinforces the claim that "the technology can’t understand a simple bug" multiple times, and willfully ignores all the good that it can do. Anyone who read this article without having experienced AI coding themselves would be grossly misled. Sure, the article makes other good points, too. But those points could be made without hyperbolic claims about what AI can and can't do, by everyone, not just this author
- ruraljuror 1y agoYou missed half of the title.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago> Just like any other tool, there are people who use it poorly, and people who use it well. We are not talking about random folks here but about the largest software company with high stakes in the most popular LLM trying to show off how good it is. Stephen Toub is hardly a newbie either.
- ruraljuror 1y agoAI can be used as a tool, sure, but it is distinct from other technologies in that it is an agent, that is: it has or operates with agency. There are many prominent people out there who are saying that AI will replace SWEs--not just saying that AI will be a tool added to th SWE tool belt. Although it seems like you agree with the conclusion of the article you are criticizing, the context is much more complex than AI is a tool like a hammer.
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y agoIt is not "an agent" in the sense you are implying here, it does not will, want, plan, none of those words apply meaningfully. It doesn't reason, or think, either. I'll be excited if that changes, but there is absolutely no sign of it changing. I mean, explicitly, the possibility of thinking machines is where it was before this whole thing started - maybe slightly higher, but moreso because a lot of money is being pumped into research. LLMs might still replace some software workers, or lead to some reorganising of tech roles, but for a whole host of reasons, none of which are related to machine sentience. As one example - software quality matters less and less the as users get locked in. If some juniors get replaced by LLMs and code quality plummets causing major headaches and higher workloads for senior devs, as long as sales don't dip, managers will be skipping around happily.
- ruraljuror 1y agoI didn't mean to imply AI was sentient or approaching sentience. Agency seems to be the key distinction between it and other technologies. You can have agency, apparently, without the traits you claim I imply.
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y agoAh, ok, you must be using agency in some new way I'm not aware of. Can you clarify what exactly you mean then when you say that "AI" (presumably you mean LLMs) has agency, and that this sets it apart from all other technologies? If this agency as you define it makes it different from all other technologies, presumably it must mean something pretty serious.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- yetihehe 1y agoI will say it again and again - AI will replace developers like excel and accounting programs replaced accountants.
- eastbound 1y ago1000x more reporting requirements?
- Joeboy 1y agoWhich is how? This is an honest question, I genuinely don't know what happened to all the people who used to be employed to do manual calculations. Or all the people who worked as typists for that matter.
- bgwalter 1y agoI took it for irony, that is, accountants weren't replaced by Excel. There are thousands of articles right now of course that accountants will be replaced by AI.
- Joeboy 1y agoOf course, but my question stands. Did all the people who used to do easily automatable clerical work remain in those roles? I presume that isn't the case, but like I say I don't really know what happened to them.
- blooalien 1y agoAccountants are the only folks with the knowledge and skills to actually use the tools correctly that were to supposedly replace accountants... ;) (Much the same as programmers will be replaced by "A.I." ... They won't as long as they educate themselves on proper use of the tools available to them. It'll likely someday be like the "Star Trek" computers, but even they still needed folks with the technical skills to use those computers well / properly.)
- marcosdumay 1y ago
- randunel 1y agoDon't let perfect be the enemy of good, or even good enough.
- AstralStorm 1y agoAlso don't let bad be the enemy of good enough, if it brings shareholders?
- ironmagma 1y agoOver-hiring may have been part of the issue, but a large part is also Section 174: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
- tocs3 1y agoThe tax code Section 174 stuff sounds like a likely case for reducing the number of developers on staff.
- rvz 1y ago> Microsoft’s .NET runtime, That is why, it's not a web app. (As Javascript is the most used language on the internet) This sort of software (language runtime) requires that it HAS to be correct and no room for clumsiness. Why do you think almost every AI copilot "demo" is on typical web apps and not on the Linux kernel or on the PyTorch compiler? It would ruin the "AGI" coding narrative. The AI boosters need to show that the hype train isn't slowing down. Tell it to replace the Linux kernel developers and watch it struggle in real time.
- amarant 1y agoI feel like this whole "but sure, let's fire the engineers" part is just anti-ai narrative. Like, is anyone actually firing engineers because they have AI now? Does anyone know anyone who's lost their job as an SWE due to being replaced by AI? I sure don't, and noone I've asked so far knows anyone who's had that happen to then either. I want to say it's a sign of the times to try and make technology a political issue, but my understanding is the same thing happened during the industrial revolution, so maybe it's just human nature? Well the industrial revolution didn't make us all homeless beggars, so I doubt AI will, either.
- softwaredoug 1y agoWell at least companies use AI as a reason for layoffs / not hiring. Though there are other reasons that may be masking. Generally what actually seems to be happening is companies want to focus on AI so they close non-AI parts of their business and beef up the AI parts. Which isn’t the same as “replacing engineers with AI”
- aerhardt 1y agoI have literally seen dozens, if not hundreds of people claim here, on Reddit and LinkedIn things like "we have downsized our engineering team from 50 to 5 engineers", "I produce 5x the amount of code", etc. A few tech CEOs - both from frontier labs and traditional software companies - are also claiming software engineers are a thing of the past. I think these two audiences - tech CEOs and random anons on the internet - tend to be full of shit and I give very little credence to what they say, but to your point, some people are at least claiming things of the sort.
- geraneum 1y ago> from frontier labs The target market of these companies are software shops. You don’t see them advertising the model capabilities in i.e. Civil Engineering much. They are trying specifically to sell a cheaper replacement of software engineers to those CEOs. You have to read the news and announcements with this lens: A vacuum cleaner manufacturer claims that dirty dusty house is a thing of the past. Of course they say that.
- criley2 1y agoCEOs laying off engineers for AI is a good thing. It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly. These are bad companies with horrible leadership that are wasting resources. Their existence is a net negative to society and our industry. Good bye to the garbage Klarna's and DuoLingos. No one will miss you.
- deathanatos 1y ago> It's a natural selection mechanism whereby poorly run companies will fail extremely quickly. Sure, but at the short term cost of engineers' livelihoods. Or were you thinking C-suite would be held to account for the failure?
- throwanem 1y agoSo you'd rather be a parasite than a free agent?
- gopher_space 1y agoIt's a mutualistic relationship. I get paid to learn and employers get to ingest my nutrient-rich metabolite. Poorly run companies can be an opportunity to direct development towards whatever I'm curious about, and that's usually beneficial to both parties.
- throwanem 1y agoThat would be commensalism at best, phoresy perhaps also, but never mind. You're not exactly wrong, but you may be depending on the financial equivalent of a nutrient waste spill: an alga, assuming this bloom is forever.
- gopher_space 1y agoIt's more about reading the room and being proactive with my decades of experience, but I take and enjoyed your point. I needed to look up phoresy and loved it! Thank you.
- HelloUsername 1y agoRelated: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152 21-may-2025 544 comments
- zihotki 1y agoIt's not related, it's actually the original source of this article. The submitted article doesn't add anything to the source apart from advertizements.
- epignosisx 1y agoTo be fair AI never had a chance against Stephen Toub . One of the smartest engineers out there.
- epignosisx 1y agoTo be fair, AI never had a chance against Stephen Toub . One of the smartest engineers out there.
- craftkiller 1y agoOne of my teammates recently decided to us AI to explain a config option instead of reading the 3 sentences in the actual documentation. The AI told him the option did something that the documentation explicitly stated the option did not do. He then copied the AI's lies as a comment into our code base. If I hadn't read the actual documentation like our forefathers used to, that lie would be copied around from one project to the next. I miss having coworkers that are more than a thin facade to an LLM.
- jarym 1y agoLooking at the speed of AI advancement a lot of this ‘funny failure’ will be gone within months. Those humans explaining why fixes aren’t complete are proving data for the next training run - really training their replacements. Then when you do have AIs fixing bugs you won’t need the more mediocre engineers.
- data-ottawa 1y agoMy experiences with Copilot are exactly like these threads – once it's wrong you have to almost start fresh or takeover, which can be a huge time sink. Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet seem much better for me. The models needed alignment and feedback but worked fairly well. I know Copilot uses Claude but for whatever reason I don't get nearly the same quality as using Claude Code. Claude is expensive, $10 to implement a feature, $2 to add some unit tests to my small personal project. I imagine large apps or apps without clear division of modules/code will burn through tokens. It definitely works as an accelerator but I don't think it's going to replace humans yet, and I think that's still a very strong position for AI to be in.
- fuzzzerd 1y agoAre those costs from the pay as you go credit system or is that on top of a max subscription? I've tinkered with the pay as you go, but wonder if a higher cap on max for 100/month would be worth it?
- data-ottawa 1y agoI bought $20 of pay as you go API credits to test out the models and how to use them. I have not tried the $100/month subscription. If it's net cheaper than buying credits I would consider it, since that's basically 10 features per month.
- fuzzzerd 1y agoGotcha. I am in the same boat with pay as you go credits and evaluating what it can do. There are limits with the max subscription but I'm not sure exactly how to measure it against the pay as you go tokens. So for now I just use tokens sparingly.
- NBJack 1y agoNote we aren't really seeing the price reflect the true costs of using LLMs yet. Everyone is prioritizing adoption over sustainable business models. Time will tell how this pans out.
- quantadev 1y agoStack Overflow never fixed any bugs either, but a developer with access to S.O. always had a huge productivity boost from using it. So with even a 1% productivity boost that means a big company can fire 1% of developers, and we're seeing that happen already, although for largely political and reputation reasons company management is currently denying that AI is a direct cause of the layoffs. Only an AGI will ever "replace" developers. Current AI merely boosts us.
- bee_rider 1y agoThe line: > Become the AI expert on your team. Don't fight the tools, master them. Be the person who knows when AI helps and when it hurts. Is something I’ve been wondering about. I haven’t played with this AI stuff much at all, despite thinking it is probably going to be a basically interesting tool at some point. It just seems like it is currently a bit bad, and multiple companies have bet millions of dollars on the idea that it will eventually be quite good. I think that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, they’ll probably get around to making it useful. But, I wonder if it is really worthwhile to learn how to work around the limitations of the currently bad version? Like, I get that we don’t want to become buggywhip manufacturers. But I also don’t want to specialize in hand-cranking cars and making sure the oil is topped off in my headlights…
- abletonlive 1y agoIt is worth it and anybody that hasn’t spent the past month using it has nothing useful to say or contribute, their knowledge about what these tools are capable of is already outdated. I would bet about 90% of the people commenting how useless llms are for their job are people that installed copilot and tried it out for a few days at some point not in the last month. They haven’t even come close to exploring the ecosystem that’s being built up right now by the community.
- bee_rider 1y agoThe issue (if you aren’t interested in AI in and of itself, but just in the final version of the tool it will produce) is that the AI companies advertise that they’ve come up with an incredible new version that will obsolete any skills you learned working around the previous version’s limitations, on like a monthly basis. Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
- abletonlive 1y agoif you're someone in tech and can't separate the noise from the practicality i'm not sure what to say at this point. do you drop everything you're doing every time a saas product comes out and change your entire life, or do you go play with it and figure out if it's useful for your life? seems like one should be able to determine this for themself without resorting to taking everything that marketing says at face value
- rudedogg 1y agoThe narrative and hype is out of control. After seeing all the praise on Twitter for the latest frontier models, I figured I'd' try to generate a semi-simple View for SwiftUI. All the features I'm asking for have been covered in a 2023 or 2024 WWDC session, and are in the sample code, as well as public repos. The prompt was "Please create a basic NSTextView wrapper in SwiftUI, that uses TextKit2 and SwiftUI best practices." Claude 4 Sonnet produces something I can't type in and the font is invisible, Gemini 2.5 Pro produces a bunch of compiler errors. I use this stuff for React at work, and while it's slightly better in that context, it still makes completely idiotic mistakes and it really is a toss up on whether I save any time at all IMO. I think the positive experiences are some mix of people who: - Lack the skill/experience to recognize bad code or issues - Don't care about the quality at all (future upgrades or maintainability) - Only care about the visual output -------------------- The more I use these tools the more I think the raw generation aspect is a complete crapshoot. The only thing I've had success with is data marshaling or boilerplate code where I provide examples - and even then they'll do random things I specifically instruct them not to in the prompt. Even for small context windows. And to do anything useful I have to be a fucking surgeon with the context and spend a lot of time crafting a really good prompt, and they still mess it up frequently. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... was posted in a comment here a few days ago, and I think it explains a lot of the issues. Programming works because it's a rigid language to communicate precise instructions to the machine. We're trying to circumvent that by using natural language, but natural language isn't precise. So the LLM has all this ambiguity to deal with, and output isn't what we want. To counteract this the new idea is to provide tools to the LLM so it can check that its output is rigid/valid to at least fix some of the issues, but it's never going to be 100% due to the fundamental way this all works (LLMs using probabilities/randomness and us instructing them with natural language). -------------------- Not to be completely negative, I think there are really exciting use cases that we can leverage well today: - Embeddings for semantic/similarity search is amazing and will have all kinds of applications - Processing error messages/logs with LLMs is awesome. They can parse out the actual issues much faster than I can
- bgwalter 1y agoI wonder why all these prompt geniuses don't write AppleScript, it should be the perfect language for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript But AppleScript does not let you steal other people's code.
- deadbabe 1y agoI think what people in these discussions are missing is that AI isn’t free. You have to fire a couple engineers to pay for the costs of your whole org now using AI daily.
- ekaryotic 1y agowouldn't it make more sense for ai to be tasked with detecting and fuzzing for bugs instead of attempting to fix them. the cost could be balanced by requiring less payments to bug bounty schemes since the bugs would be caught before a human saw them.
- Vvector 1y agoHe laughed. “AI makes my team unstoppable. Why would I want fewer unstoppable people?”
- bgwalter 1y agoIt is true, but in the opposite sense: AI makes the kind of 0.1x but high volume developer unstoppable, so the code base will degrade even faster.
- zkmon 1y agoAI adoption is mostly driven from the top. What this means is, shareholders and regulators would make the CEOs to claim that the company is using AI. CEOs trickle this grand vision and goals down, allocating funds and asking for immediate reports showing the evidence of AI everywhere in the company. One executive went to the extent saying that anyone not using AI in their work would face disciplinary action. So the point is, it is not about whether AI can fix a bug or do something useful. It is about reporting and staying competitive via claiming. Just like many other reports which don't have any specific other purpose other than reporting itself. A few years back, I asked an Architect who was authoring an architecture document, about who the audience for this document is. She replied saying the target audience is the reviewers. I asked, does anyone use it after the review? She says, not sure. And not surprisingly, the project which took 3 years to develop with a large cost, was shelved after being live for an hour in prod, because the whole thing was done only for a press release, saying the company has gone live with a new tech. They didn't lie.
- bravetraveler 1y agohttps://xkcd.com/2899/ https://xkcd.com/2899/
- sixtram 1y agoYesterday, I asked AI for help: Check my SQL stored procedure for possible logical errors. It found a join error that I didn't remember including in my SQL. After double-checking, I found that it had hallucinated a join that wasn't there before and reported it as a bug. After I asked for more information, it apologized for adding that. I also asked for a C# code with some RegEx. It compiled, but it didn't work; it replaced the order of two string parameters. I had to copy and paste it back to show why it didn't work, and then it realized that it had changed the order of the parameters. I asked for a command-line option to zip files in a certain way. It hallucinated a nonexistent option that would be crucial. In the end, it turned out that it was not possible to zip the files the way I wanted. My manager plans to open our Git repository for AI code and pull request (PR) review. I already anticipate the pain of reviewing nonsensical bug reports.
- aerhardt 1y agoI'm an experienced programmer but currently picking up C# for a masters course on Game AI. I appreciate having the LLMs at hand but I am surprised by how much of a step down the quality of the code output is compared to Python.
- NBJack 1y agoStep down in terms of LLM performance? I think that is easily explained in the sheer bulk of articles, blogs, and open source projects in Python rather than C#. I actually prefer the latter to the former, but I know it is still not that widely adopted.
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- in_ab 1y agoI think a lot of AI replacing engineers talk is just cover for layoffs or lack of business growth. If AI ever gets to that point, it's not going to just replace software engineers in isolation. If it was capable of replacing engineers, what's to stop it from replacing management as well? And why would you need HR when all your employees are AI?
- siliconc0w 1y agoIn my experience these models are extremely bad at debugging and can often do better either regenerating the code with a tweaked prompt/context/premise. We need like a DebugBench to really measure and push the SoTA here since that is a core part of the SWE Journey.
- bradlys 1y agoPeople just don’t seem to get that we’re in a tech recession. You’re getting fired because interest rates are high and companies are trying to find ways to be profitable/drive-up share prices. That’s all it is. There’s no replacement. That’s the point.
- mrcsharp 1y agoThe really sad thing here is that Stephen Toub is a big figure in the .Net land and a respected dev. I love reading his yearly .net performance improvements article/book and he has some great deep dives into .Net topics on YouTube. Seeing him waste his time on stupid LLM handholding like this is quite the sad scene. It probably wasn't his decision to use CoPilot. Microsoft probably has some dumb KPI being enforced.