4 ms·

AI for coding itself is a fad

by mgaunard 10mo ago

bpavuk 10mo ago
strongly agree! can't see any use of LLMs beyond tabcomplete and navigating an unknown codebase.
- ndr 10mo ago
  Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when? Latest Claude Code can do a lot over lots of domains. I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month. Also most people who I see succeed from the start are technical managers. That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.
  - hexo 10mo ago
    Why would we use something that makes us dumber and wastes our planet more than anything else. Nah, I'll skip.
  - mgaunard 10mo ago
    As a technical manager the reason you accept things that are not quite what you had in mind is because you delegate the responsibility of the correctness to the employee who is gonna be owning that area, maintaining it and ensuring it works. There is no responsibility with AI. It doesn't care about getting it right or making sure the code delivers on what the company needs. It has nothing to prove, no incentive to supporting anything.
  - bpavuk 10mo ago
    > Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when? vibe-coding the GTK-rs app with Codex, delegating ready Figma designs to Junie to implement in Jetpack Compose, improving a11y and perf on my personal website built in Svelte with Claude. (a friend threw $100 into that slot machine and shared access to Claude Code with me.) all in December 2025. all failed *horrendously*. Claude Sonnet 4.5 actually worsened the Lighthouse performance score on mobile from 95 down to 40!! though, it did a decent job on a11y. Codex CLI constantly used older versions of all sorts of crates, spat out deprecated code, outright refused to use Blueprints and Context7, but some time after, I could get a mockup of Superhuman-style email client. and Junie... well, it did best. it had Gemini 3 Flash picked as a model. despite Material 3 Expressive being beyond Gemini's knowledge cutoff, it actually used Context7 to fill the gap. though, it fumbled the bag with details, performance, and overabstractioning. > I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month. as I said, my friend already did. we both find it the worst spend of the decade. seriously, in yesteryear's Call of Duty we would at least have fun. being a purchase worse than Call of Duty is a floor so low, you have to break it deliberately. before you say "try again," do your research around food prices and salaries in Ukraine. (or delegate it to Claude Deep Research feature, you may love it.) to feed yourself well here, you have to spend measly by Western standards $300-600/mo. (that's without housing and utilities, presuming you live alone.) though, salaries outside dev jobs are just as measly, and then you have the overall job crisis in Ukraine overlaid on top of the worldwide IT job crisis. 4-8 months of Claude Max amount to the rumored price of Steam Machine. I would rather spend $800 to see the joy on my younger sister's face and familiarize her with true games, beyond what's on Google Play. > That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected. I would rather spend that time nursing a real open-source contributor or a junior colleague. I would have a real person with real willpower and real ideas in my network, and that would spread the joy of code.
margorczynski 10mo ago
Have you even tried it? I don't know anyone who has seriously used the latest models and stuff like CC and still said that with a straight face.
- qsera 10mo ago
  s/Code/Thinking/ and it might make better sense. For some people coding == thinking..
rolymath 10mo ago
Computers themselves are a fad.
- sffddfsdsf 10mo ago
  [dead]
retrac98 10mo ago
At this point, when people say this I just assume they’ve not used the latest models or haven’t invested time in learning how to use these tools properly. There’s slop out there, yes, but in the hands of an engineer who cares to use tools well, LLMs allow you to move much more quickly and increase the quality of your output dramatically.
- mgaunard 10mo ago
  Good software isn't about quantity but quality of the code. AI cannot produce better quality code than someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain. What I've seen AI be very good at is creating a lot of legacy code very quickly, which itself needs extensive use of AI just to maintain it. A decent approach to move quickly for PoC or prototypes, or to enable product managers to build things without a team. But obviously not something you can build a real company on.
  - zo1 10mo ago
    Have you been in the same industry as the rest of us? 90% of all developers out there in the wild create "legacy code very quickly" anyways, they too create "slop" before we coined the term "AI slop". This mythical "someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain" you mention is maybe 5% of the entire software development ecosystem. If you work with only those developers, you're extremely privileged and lucky, but also in a very isolated bubble.
    - mgaunard 10mo ago
      If you work on meaningful tech projects, where tech is a real driver to the businesses and there are genuine challenges to overcome, then you can't afford slop. I say that, but then it's true I have seen businesses be successful despite low quality of software. It turned out that for those businesses, the value wasn't that much driven by tech after all.
barnacs 10mo ago
That's probably why a boundary (like MCP) is useful. Imagine maintaining the critical application logic the "old fashioned way" and exposing a MCP-like interface to the users so that they can have their LLM generate whatever UI they like, even realtime on the fly as they are engaging with the application. It's a win-win in my mind.
hahahahhaah 10mo ago
Absolutely. But not for the reason you are getting at. Because whem AI gets good enough there is no longer going to be code at all. Which makes me sad, as a luddite.
OutOfHere 10mo ago
The applications of MCP and tool-calling are vastly wider than just for coding, with tremendous diversity. Constraining it to the single application of coding doesn't make any sense.

AI for coding itself is a fad

bpavuk 10mo ago

strongly agree! can't see any use of LLMs beyond tabcomplete and navigating an unknown codebase.

ndr 10mo ago
Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when? Latest Claude Code can do a lot over lots of domains. I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month. Also most people who I see succeed from the start are technical managers. That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.
- hexo 10mo ago
  Why would we use something that makes us dumber and wastes our planet more than anything else. Nah, I'll skip.
- mgaunard 10mo ago
  As a technical manager the reason you accept things that are not quite what you had in mind is because you delegate the responsibility of the correctness to the employee who is gonna be owning that area, maintaining it and ensuring it works. There is no responsibility with AI. It doesn't care about getting it right or making sure the code delivers on what the company needs. It has nothing to prove, no incentive to supporting anything.
- bpavuk 10mo ago
  > Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when? vibe-coding the GTK-rs app with Codex, delegating ready Figma designs to Junie to implement in Jetpack Compose, improving a11y and perf on my personal website built in Svelte with Claude. (a friend threw $100 into that slot machine and shared access to Claude Code with me.) all in December 2025. all failed *horrendously*. Claude Sonnet 4.5 actually worsened the Lighthouse performance score on mobile from 95 down to 40!! though, it did a decent job on a11y. Codex CLI constantly used older versions of all sorts of crates, spat out deprecated code, outright refused to use Blueprints and Context7, but some time after, I could get a mockup of Superhuman-style email client. and Junie... well, it did best. it had Gemini 3 Flash picked as a model. despite Material 3 Expressive being beyond Gemini's knowledge cutoff, it actually used Context7 to fill the gap. though, it fumbled the bag with details, performance, and overabstractioning. > I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month. as I said, my friend already did. we both find it the worst spend of the decade. seriously, in yesteryear's Call of Duty we would at least have fun. being a purchase worse than Call of Duty is a floor so low, you have to break it deliberately. before you say "try again," do your research around food prices and salaries in Ukraine. (or delegate it to Claude Deep Research feature, you may love it.) to feed yourself well here, you have to spend measly by Western standards $300-600/mo. (that's without housing and utilities, presuming you live alone.) though, salaries outside dev jobs are just as measly, and then you have the overall job crisis in Ukraine overlaid on top of the worldwide IT job crisis. 4-8 months of Claude Max amount to the rumored price of Steam Machine. I would rather spend $800 to see the joy on my younger sister's face and familiarize her with true games, beyond what's on Google Play. > That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected. I would rather spend that time nursing a real open-source contributor or a junior colleague. I would have a real person with real willpower and real ideas in my network, and that would spread the joy of code.

margorczynski 10mo ago

Have you even tried it? I don't know anyone who has seriously used the latest models and stuff like CC and still said that with a straight face.

qsera 10mo ago
s/Code/Thinking/ and it might make better sense. For some people coding == thinking..

rolymath 10mo ago

Computers themselves are a fad.

sffddfsdsf 10mo ago
[dead]

retrac98 10mo ago

At this point, when people say this I just assume they’ve not used the latest models or haven’t invested time in learning how to use these tools properly. There’s slop out there, yes, but in the hands of an engineer who cares to use tools well, LLMs allow you to move much more quickly and increase the quality of your output dramatically.

mgaunard 10mo ago
Good software isn't about quantity but quality of the code. AI cannot produce better quality code than someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain. What I've seen AI be very good at is creating a lot of legacy code very quickly, which itself needs extensive use of AI just to maintain it. A decent approach to move quickly for PoC or prototypes, or to enable product managers to build things without a team. But obviously not something you can build a real company on.
- zo1 10mo ago
  Have you been in the same industry as the rest of us? 90% of all developers out there in the wild create "legacy code very quickly" anyways, they too create "slop" before we coined the term "AI slop". This mythical "someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain" you mention is maybe 5% of the entire software development ecosystem. If you work with only those developers, you're extremely privileged and lucky, but also in a very isolated bubble.
  - mgaunard 10mo ago
    If you work on meaningful tech projects, where tech is a real driver to the businesses and there are genuine challenges to overcome, then you can't afford slop. I say that, but then it's true I have seen businesses be successful despite low quality of software. It turned out that for those businesses, the value wasn't that much driven by tech after all.

barnacs 10mo ago

That's probably why a boundary (like MCP) is useful. Imagine maintaining the critical application logic the "old fashioned way" and exposing a MCP-like interface to the users so that they can have their LLM generate whatever UI they like, even realtime on the fly as they are engaging with the application. It's a win-win in my mind.

hahahahhaah 10mo ago

Absolutely. But not for the reason you are getting at. Because whem AI gets good enough there is no longer going to be code at all. Which makes me sad, as a luddite.

OutOfHere 10mo ago

The applications of MCP and tool-calling are vastly wider than just for coding, with tremendous diversity. Constraining it to the single application of coding doesn't make any sense.