10 ms·

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (ofte

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows. It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons, but I wish there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs like GPT-3 could sort of code enough for it to look like there was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up investment and a lot of promises made that weren't really viable with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and then in the end the 747. If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces. There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close engagement with the tools.

whatifnomoney 8mo ago
[dead]
arcxi 8mo ago
but annoying hype is exactly the issue with AI in my eyes. I get it's a useful tool in moderation and all, but I also experience that management values speed and quantity of delivery above all else, and hype-driven as they are I fear they will run this industry to the ground and we as users and customers will have to deal with the world where software is permanently broken as a giant pile of unmaintainable vibe code and no experienced junior developers to boot.
- acessoproibido 8mo ago
  >management values speed and quantity of delivery above all else I don't know about you but this has been the case for my entire career. Mgmt never gave a shit about beautiful code or tech debt or maintainability or how enlightened I felt writing code.
beoberha 8mo ago
Your sentiment resonates with me a lot. I wonder what we’ll consider the inflection point 10 years from now. It seemed like the zeitgeist was screaming about scaling limits and running out of training data, then we got Claude code, sonnet 4.5, then Opus 4.5 and no ones looked back since.
- libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  I wonder too. It might be that progress on the underlying models is going to plateau, or it might be that we haven't yet reached what in retrospect will be the biggest inflection point. Technological developments can seem to make sense in hindsight as a story of continuous progress when the dust has settled and we can write and tell the history, but when you go back and look at the full range of voices in the historical sources you realize just how deeply nothing was clear to anyone at all at the time it was happening because everyone was hurtling into the unknown future with a fog of war in front of them. In 1910 I'd say it would have been perfectly reasonable to predict airplanes would remain a terrifying curiosity reserved for daredevils only (and people did); or conversely, in the 1960s a lot of commentators thought that the future of passenger air travel in the 70s and 80s would be supersonic jets. I keep this in mind and don't really pay too much attention to over-confident predictions about the technological future.
Lich 8mo ago
Is there any reason to use Claude Code specifically over Codex or Gemini? I’ve found the both Codex and Gemini similar in results, but I never tried Claude because of I keep hearing usage runs out so fast on pro plans and there’s no free trial for the CLI.
- libraryofbabel 8mo ago
  I mostly mentioned Claude Code because it's what Mitchell first tried according to his post, and it's what I personally use. From what I hear Codex is pretty comparable; it has a lot of fans. There are definitely some differences and strengths and weaknesses of both the CLIs and the underlying LLMs that others who use more than one tool might want to weight in on, but they're all fairly comparable. (Although, we'll see how the new models released from Anthropic and OpenAI today stack up.) Codex and Gemini CLI are basically Claude Code clones with different LLMs behind them, after all.
- majormajor 8mo ago
  IME Gemini is pretty slow in comparison to Claude - but hey, it's super cheap at least. But that speed makes a pretty significant difference in experience. If you wait a couple minutes and then give the model a bunch of feedback about what you want done differently, and then have to wait again, it gets annoying fast. If the feedback loop is much tighter things feel much more engaging. Cursor is also good at this (investigate and plan using slower/pricier models, implement using fast+cheap ones).
keyle 8mo ago
Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted stack'. We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... The real issue this industry is facing, is the phenomenal speed of change. But what are we really doing? That's right, programming.
- allworms 8mo ago
  > We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... > When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplate (library of things) and (deterministic/intentional) automation. Vibe coding doesn't use either of those things. The LLM agents involved might use them, but the vibe coder doesn't. Vibe coding is delegation, which is a completely different class of shortcut or "tool" use. If an architect delegates all their work to interns, directs outcomes based on whims not principals, and doesn't actually know what the interns are delivering, yeah, I think it would be fair to call them a vibe architect. We didn't have that term before, so we usually just call those people "arrogant pricks" or "terrible bosses". I'm not super familiar but I feel like Steve Jobs was pretty famously that way - thus if he was an engineer, he was a vibe engineer. But don't let this last point detract from the message, which is that you're describing things which are not really even similar to vibe coding.
  - djhn 8mo ago
    I think you are right in placing emphasis on delegation. There’s been a hypothesis floating around that I find appealing. Seemingly you can identify two distinct groups of experienced engineers. Manager, delegator, or team lead style senior engineers are broadly pro-AI. The craftsman, wizard, artist, IC style senior engineers are broadly anti-AI. But coming back to architects, or most professional services and academia to be honest, I do think the term vibe architect as you define it is exactly how the industry works. An underclass of underpaid interns and juniors do the work, hoping to climb higher and position themselves towards the top of the ponzi-like pyramid scheme.
majormajor 8mo ago
GPT-4 showed the potential but the automated workflows (context management, loops, test-running) and pure execution speed to handle all that "reasoning"/workflows (remember watching characters pop in slowly in GPT-4 streaming API response calls) are gamechangers. The workflow automation and better (and model-directed) context management are all obvious in retrospect but a lot of people (like myself) were instead focused on IDE integration and such vs `grep` and the like. Maybe multi-agent with task boards is the next thing, but it feels like that might also start to outrun the ability to sensibly design and test new features for non-greenfield/non-port projects. Who knows yet. I think it's still very valuable for someone to dig in to the underlying models periodically (insomuch as the APIs even expose the same level of raw stuff anymore) to get a feeling for what's reliable to one-shot vs what's easily correctable by a "ran the tests, saw it was wrong, fixed it" loop. If you don't have a good sense of that, it's easy to get overambitious and end up with something you don't like if you're the sort of person who cares at all about what the code looks like.
datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
I skimmed over it, and didn’t find any discussion of: - Pull requests - Merge requests - Code review I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Are SWE supposed to move away from code review, one of the core activities for the profession? Code review is as fundamental for SWE as double entry is for accounting. Yes, we know that functional code can get generated at incredible speeds. Yes, we know that apps and what not can be bootstrapped from nothing by “agentic coding”. We need to read this code, right? How can I deliver code to my company without security and reliability guarantees that, at their core, come from me knowing what I’m delivering line-by-line?
- tptacek 8mo ago
  So read the code.
  - datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
    Cool, code review continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in our org, with or without agentic AI pumping out 1k LOC per hour.
    - tptacek 8mo ago
      Ok? You still have to read the code.
      - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
        You're missing the point. The point is that reading the code is more time consuming than writing it, and has always been thus. Having a machine that can generate code 100x faster, but which you have to read carefully to make sure it hasn't gone off the rails, is not an asset. It is a liability.
        tptacek 8mo ago
        Tell that to Mitchell Hashimoto.
chrysoprace 8mo ago
I think for a lot of people the turn off is the constant churn and the hype cycle. For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA. Are we still using MCPs or are we using Skills now? Not long ago you had to know MCP or you'd be left behind and you definitely need to know MCP UI or you'll be left behind. I think. It just becomes really tiring, especially with all the FUD. I'm embracing LLMs but I think I've had to just pick a happy medium and stick with Claude Code with MCPs until somebody figures out a legitimate way to use the Claude subscription with open source tools like OpenCode, then I'll move over to that. Or if a company provides a model that's as good value that can be used with OpenCode.
- re-thc 8mo ago
  > For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA That hasn’t been tech for a long time. Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.
  - chrysoprace 8mo ago
    There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done. To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company. While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done. I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.
    - re-thc 8mo ago
      > There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind. > While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done. I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving. > To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.
zamadatix 8mo ago
Should AI tools use memory safe tabs or spaces for indentation? :) It is a shame it's become such a polarized topic. Things which actually work fine get immediately bashed by large crowds at the same time things that are really not there get voted to the moon by extremely eager folks. A few years from now I expect I'll be thinking "man, there was some really good stuff I missed out on because the discussions about it were so polarized at the time. I'm glad that has cleared up significantly!"
ianm218 8mo ago
Isn’t there something off about calling predictions about the future, that aren’t possible with current tech, hype? Like people predicted AI agents would be this huge change, they were called hype since earlier models were so unreliable, and now they are mostly right as ai agents work like a mid level engineer. And clearly super human in some areas.
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
  > ai agents work like a mid level engineer They do not. > And clearly super human in some areas. Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Lay off the hype pills.
  - ubercow13 8mo ago
    >Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Uh, yes they are? That's why they were revolutionary technologies! It's hard to see why a bike that isn't superhuman would even make sense? Being superhuman in at least some aspect really seems like the bare minimum for a technology to be worth adopting.
    - otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
      By "superhuman" the LLM cultists mean "the singularity", "brain in a chip", "eternal life via digitization" and the rest of the claptrap. Don't let them off the hook.
  - ianm218 8mo ago
    > They do not. Do you have anything to back this up? This seems like a shallow dismissal. Claude Code is mostly used to ship Claude Code and Claude Cowork - which are at multi billion ARR. I use Claude Code to ship technically deep dev tools for myself for example here https://github.com/ianm199/bubble-analysis https://github.com/ianm199/bubble-analysis. I am a decent engineer and I wouldn't have the time or expertise to ship that.
linuxrocks123 8mo ago
I'll try it out when it's something I can run locally. I do not pay for subscriptions for software; I do not pay for services as software substitutes; and, I do not rely on things that run on computers I don't control for anything important. Whether or not LLM coding AIs are useful, they certainly qualifies as "important," because adopting one is disruptive enough that getting rid of it after adopting it would be disruptive as well. I'm not signing on to that if I need to pay a recurring fee for it and/or need to rely on some company deciding to continue maintaining a cloud server running it in perpetuity.
svilen_dobrev 8mo ago
let me ask a stupid/still-ignorant question - about repeatability. If one asks this generator/assistant same request/thing, within same initial contexts, 10 times, would it generate same result ? in different sessions and all that. because.. if not, then it's for once-off things only..
- Robin_Message 8mo ago
  If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result? And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lins1909 8mo ago
    A pretty bad comparison. If I gave you the correct answer once, it's unlikely that I'll give you a wrong answer the next time. Also, aren't computers supposed to be more reliable than us? If I'm going to use a tool that behaves just like humans, why not just use my brain instead?
tmtvl 8mo ago
I will give Claude Code a trial run if I can run it locally without an internet connection. AI companies have procured so much training data through illegal means you have to be insane to trust them in even the smallest amount.
- wiether 8mo ago
  You can run OpenCode in a container restricted to local network only and communicating with local/self-hosted models. Claude Code is linked to Anthropic's hosted models so you can't achieve this.
- fullstackchris 8mo ago
  this is such a strawman argument. what are they going to take from you? your triple forloop? they literally own the weights for a neural net that scores 77% on SWE. they dont need, nor care, about your code
  - alternatex 8mo ago
    They are trained on our code. Perhaps not if you don't have any of it open sourced, but it's so jarring to see someone say they don't care about our code.
epolanski 8mo ago
> It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. Frankly I'm so tired of the usual "I don't find myself more productive", "It writes soup". Especially when some of the best software developers (and engineers) find many utility in those tools, there should be some doubt growing in that crowd. I have come to the conclusion that software developers, those only focusing on the craft of writing code are the naysayers. Software engineers immediately recognize the many automation/exploration/etc boosts, recognize the tools limits and work on improving them. Hell, AI is an insane boost to productivity, even if you don't have it write a single line of code ever. But people that focus on the craft (the kind of crowd that doesn't even process the concept of throwaway code or budgets or money) will keep laying in their "I don't see the benefits because X" forever, nonsensically confusing any tool use with vibe coding. I'm also convinced that since this crowd never had any notion of what engineering is (there is very little of it in our industry sadly, technology and code is the focus and rarely the business, budget and problems to solve) and confused it with architectural, technological or best practices they are genuinely insecure about their jobs because once their very valued craft and skills are diminished they pay the price of never having invested in understanding the business, the domain, processes or soft skills.
- drzaiusx11 8mo ago
  I've spent 2+ decades producing software across a number of domains and orgs and can fully agree that _disciplined use_ of LLM systems can significantly boost productivity, but the rules and guidance around their use within our industry writ large are still in flux and causing as many problems as they're solving today. As the most senior IC within my org, since the advent of (enforced) LLM adoption my code contribution/output has stalled as my focus has shifted to the reactionary work of sifting through the AI generated chaff following post mortems of projects that should have never have shipped in the first place. On a good day I end up rejecting several PRs that most certainly would have taken down our critical systems in production due to poor vetting and architectural flaws, and on the worst I'm in full on fire fighting mode to "fix" the same issues already taking down production (already too late.) These are not inherent technical problems in LLMs, these are organizational/processes problems induced by AI pushers promising 10x output without the necessary 10x requirements gathering and validation efforts that come with that. "Everyone with GenAI access is now a 10x SDE" is the expectation, when the reality is much more nuanced. The result I see today is massive incoming changesets that no one can properly vet given the new shortened delivery timelines and reduced human resourcing given to projects. We get test suite coverage inflation where "all tests pass" but undermine core businesses requirements and no one is being given the time or resources to properly confirm the business requirements are actually being met. Shit hits the fan, repeat ad nauseum. The focus within our industry needs to shift to education on the proper application and use of these tools, or we'll inevitably crash into the next AI winter; an increasingly likely future that would have been totally avoidable if everyone drinking the Koolaid stopped to observe what is actually happening. As you implied, code is cheap and most code is "throwaway" given even modest time horizons, but all new code comes with hidden costs not readily apparent to all the stakeholders attempting to create a new normal with GenAI. As you correctly point out, the biggest problems within our industry aren't strictly technical ones, they're interpersonal, communication and domain expertise problems, and AI use is simply exacerbating those issues. Maybe all the orgs "doing it wrong" (of which there are MANY) simply fail and the ones with actual engineering discipline "make it," but it'll be a reckoning we should not wish for. I have heard from a number of different industry players and they see the same patterns. Just look at the average linked in post about AI adoption to confirm. Maybe you observe different patterns and the issues aren't as systemic as I fear. I honestly hope so. Your implication that seniors like myself are "insecure about our jobs" is somewhat ironically correct, but not for the reasons you think.
bullshitsite 8mo ago
The Death of the "Stare": Why AI’s "Confident Stupidity" is a Threat to Human Genius OPINION | THE REALITY CHECK In the gleaming offices of Silicon Valley and the boardrooms of the Fortune 500, a new religion has taken hold. Its deity is the Large Language Model, and its disciples—the AI Evangelists—speak in a dialect of "disruption," "optimization," and "seamless integration." But outside the vacuum of the digital world, a dangerous friction is building between AI’s statistical hallucinations and the unyielding laws of physics. The danger of Artificial Intelligence isn't that it will become our overlord; the danger is that it is fundamentally, confidently, and authoritatively stupid. The Paradox of the Wind-Powered Car The divide between AI hype and reality is best illustrated by a recent technical "solution" suggested by a popular AI model: an electric vehicle equipped with wind generators on the front to recharge the battery while driving. To the AI, this was a brilliant synergy. It even claimed the added weight and wind resistance amounted to "zero." To any human who has ever held a wrench or understood the First Law of Thermodynamics, this is a joke—a perpetual motion fallacy that ignores the reality of drag and energy loss. But to the AI, it was just a series of words that sounded "correct" based on patterns. The machine doesn't know what wind is; it only knows how to predict the next syllable. The Erosion of the "Human Spark" The true threat lies in what we are sacrificing to adopt this "shortcut" culture. There is a specific human process—call it The Stare. It is that thirty-minute window where a person looks at a broken machine, a flawed blueprint, or a complex problem and simply observes. In that half-hour, the human brain runs millions of mental simulations. It feels the tension of the metal, the heat of the circuit, and the logic of the physical universe. It is a "Black Box" of consciousness that develops solutions from absolutely nothing—no forums, no books, and no Google. However, the new generation of AI-dependent thinkers views this "Stare" as an inefficiency. By outsourcing our thinking to models that cannot feel the consequences of being wrong, we are witnessing a form of evolutionary regression. We are trading hard-earned competence for a "Yes-Man" in a box. The Gaslighting of the Realist Perhaps most chilling is the social cost. Those who still rely on their intuition and physical experience are increasingly being marginalized. In a world where the screen is king, the person pointing out that "the Emperor has no clothes" is labeled as erratic, uneducated, or naive. When a master craftsman or a practical thinker challenges an AI’s "hallucination," they aren't met with logic; they are met with a robotic refusal to acknowledge reality. The "AI Evangelists" have begun to walk, talk, and act like the models they worship—confidently wrong, devoid of nuance, and completely detached from the ground beneath their feet. The High Cost of Being "Authoritatively Wrong" We are building a world on a foundation of digital sand. If we continue to trust AI to design our structures and manage our logic, we will eventually hit a wall that no "prompt" can fix. The human brain runs on 20 watts and can solve a problem by looking at it. The AI runs on megawatts and can’t understand why a wind-powered car won't run forever. If we lose the ability to tell the difference, we aren't just losing our jobs—we're losing our grip on reality itself.
a456463 8mo ago
It is perfectly valid that this issue is polarizing. on the one hand we have blind cargo culters and on the other hand we have "luddites". Being in one or the other "tribe" is cause for getting insulted or called out. Because the cargo culters want everyone to do what they are doing, just like the RTO crowd. The skeptics want to take a more reasonable pace. One side is we are done this is the future and the other side doesn't see the same results happening to them but the cargo culters think in absolutes and 100% only. It is all or nothing. All these other posts waxing and waning and insulting the skeptics are frankly insulting

whatifnomoney 8mo ago

[dead]

arcxi 8mo ago

but annoying hype is exactly the issue with AI in my eyes. I get it's a useful tool in moderation and all, but I also experience that management values speed and quantity of delivery above all else, and hype-driven as they are I fear they will run this industry to the ground and we as users and customers will have to deal with the world where software is permanently broken as a giant pile of unmaintainable vibe code and no experienced junior developers to boot.

acessoproibido 8mo ago
>management values speed and quantity of delivery above all else I don't know about you but this has been the case for my entire career. Mgmt never gave a shit about beautiful code or tech debt or maintainability or how enlightened I felt writing code.

beoberha 8mo ago

Your sentiment resonates with me a lot. I wonder what we’ll consider the inflection point 10 years from now. It seemed like the zeitgeist was screaming about scaling limits and running out of training data, then we got Claude code, sonnet 4.5, then Opus 4.5 and no ones looked back since.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I wonder too. It might be that progress on the underlying models is going to plateau, or it might be that we haven't yet reached what in retrospect will be the biggest inflection point. Technological developments can seem to make sense in hindsight as a story of continuous progress when the dust has settled and we can write and tell the history, but when you go back and look at the full range of voices in the historical sources you realize just how deeply nothing was clear to anyone at all at the time it was happening because everyone was hurtling into the unknown future with a fog of war in front of them. In 1910 I'd say it would have been perfectly reasonable to predict airplanes would remain a terrifying curiosity reserved for daredevils only (and people did); or conversely, in the 1960s a lot of commentators thought that the future of passenger air travel in the 70s and 80s would be supersonic jets. I keep this in mind and don't really pay too much attention to over-confident predictions about the technological future.

Lich 8mo ago

Is there any reason to use Claude Code specifically over Codex or Gemini? I’ve found the both Codex and Gemini similar in results, but I never tried Claude because of I keep hearing usage runs out so fast on pro plans and there’s no free trial for the CLI.

libraryofbabel 8mo ago
I mostly mentioned Claude Code because it's what Mitchell first tried according to his post, and it's what I personally use. From what I hear Codex is pretty comparable; it has a lot of fans. There are definitely some differences and strengths and weaknesses of both the CLIs and the underlying LLMs that others who use more than one tool might want to weight in on, but they're all fairly comparable. (Although, we'll see how the new models released from Anthropic and OpenAI today stack up.) Codex and Gemini CLI are basically Claude Code clones with different LLMs behind them, after all.
majormajor 8mo ago
IME Gemini is pretty slow in comparison to Claude - but hey, it's super cheap at least. But that speed makes a pretty significant difference in experience. If you wait a couple minutes and then give the model a bunch of feedback about what you want done differently, and then have to wait again, it gets annoying fast. If the feedback loop is much tighter things feel much more engaging. Cursor is also good at this (investigate and plan using slower/pricier models, implement using fast+cheap ones).

keyle 8mo ago

Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted stack'. We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? ... The real issue this industry is facing, is the phenomenal speed of change. But what are we really doing? That's right, programming.

allworms 8mo ago
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work! > We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel... > When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler? Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplate (library of things) and (deterministic/intentional) automation. Vibe coding doesn't use either of those things. The LLM agents involved might use them, but the vibe coder doesn't. Vibe coding is delegation, which is a completely different class of shortcut or "tool" use. If an architect delegates all their work to interns, directs outcomes based on whims not principals, and doesn't actually know what the interns are delivering, yeah, I think it would be fair to call them a vibe architect. We didn't have that term before, so we usually just call those people "arrogant pricks" or "terrible bosses". I'm not super familiar but I feel like Steve Jobs was pretty famously that way - thus if he was an engineer, he was a vibe engineer. But don't let this last point detract from the message, which is that you're describing things which are not really even similar to vibe coding.
- djhn 8mo ago
  I think you are right in placing emphasis on delegation. There’s been a hypothesis floating around that I find appealing. Seemingly you can identify two distinct groups of experienced engineers. Manager, delegator, or team lead style senior engineers are broadly pro-AI. The craftsman, wizard, artist, IC style senior engineers are broadly anti-AI. But coming back to architects, or most professional services and academia to be honest, I do think the term vibe architect as you define it is exactly how the industry works. An underclass of underpaid interns and juniors do the work, hoping to climb higher and position themselves towards the top of the ponzi-like pyramid scheme.

majormajor 8mo ago

GPT-4 showed the potential but the automated workflows (context management, loops, test-running) and pure execution speed to handle all that "reasoning"/workflows (remember watching characters pop in slowly in GPT-4 streaming API response calls) are gamechangers. The workflow automation and better (and model-directed) context management are all obvious in retrospect but a lot of people (like myself) were instead focused on IDE integration and such vs `grep` and the like. Maybe multi-agent with task boards is the next thing, but it feels like that might also start to outrun the ability to sensibly design and test new features for non-greenfield/non-port projects. Who knows yet. I think it's still very valuable for someone to dig in to the underlying models periodically (insomuch as the APIs even expose the same level of raw stuff anymore) to get a feeling for what's reliable to one-shot vs what's easily correctable by a "ran the tests, saw it was wrong, fixed it" loop. If you don't have a good sense of that, it's easy to get overambitious and end up with something you don't like if you're the sort of person who cares at all about what the code looks like.

datsci_est_2015 8mo ago

I skimmed over it, and didn’t find any discussion of: - Pull requests - Merge requests - Code review I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Are SWE supposed to move away from code review, one of the core activities for the profession? Code review is as fundamental for SWE as double entry is for accounting. Yes, we know that functional code can get generated at incredible speeds. Yes, we know that apps and what not can be bootstrapped from nothing by “agentic coding”. We need to read this code, right? How can I deliver code to my company without security and reliability guarantees that, at their core, come from me knowing what I’m delivering line-by-line?

tptacek 8mo ago
So read the code.
- datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
  Cool, code review continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in our org, with or without agentic AI pumping out 1k LOC per hour.
  - tptacek 8mo ago
    Ok? You still have to read the code.
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      You're missing the point. The point is that reading the code is more time consuming than writing it, and has always been thus. Having a machine that can generate code 100x faster, but which you have to read carefully to make sure it hasn't gone off the rails, is not an asset. It is a liability.
      - tptacek 8mo ago
        Tell that to Mitchell Hashimoto.

chrysoprace 8mo ago

I think for a lot of people the turn off is the constant churn and the hype cycle. For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA. Are we still using MCPs or are we using Skills now? Not long ago you had to know MCP or you'd be left behind and you definitely need to know MCP UI or you'll be left behind. I think. It just becomes really tiring, especially with all the FUD. I'm embracing LLMs but I think I've had to just pick a happy medium and stick with Claude Code with MCPs until somebody figures out a legitimate way to use the Claude subscription with open source tools like OpenCode, then I'll move over to that. Or if a company provides a model that's as good value that can be used with OpenCode.

re-thc 8mo ago
> For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA That hasn’t been tech for a long time. Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.
- chrysoprace 8mo ago
  There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done. To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company. While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done. I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.
  - re-thc 8mo ago
    > There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind. > While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done. I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving. > To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.

zamadatix 8mo ago

Should AI tools use memory safe tabs or spaces for indentation? :) It is a shame it's become such a polarized topic. Things which actually work fine get immediately bashed by large crowds at the same time things that are really not there get voted to the moon by extremely eager folks. A few years from now I expect I'll be thinking "man, there was some really good stuff I missed out on because the discussions about it were so polarized at the time. I'm glad that has cleared up significantly!"

ianm218 8mo ago

Isn’t there something off about calling predictions about the future, that aren’t possible with current tech, hype? Like people predicted AI agents would be this huge change, they were called hype since earlier models were so unreliable, and now they are mostly right as ai agents work like a mid level engineer. And clearly super human in some areas.

otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
> ai agents work like a mid level engineer They do not. > And clearly super human in some areas. Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Lay off the hype pills.
- ubercow13 8mo ago
  >Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Uh, yes they are? That's why they were revolutionary technologies! It's hard to see why a bike that isn't superhuman would even make sense? Being superhuman in at least some aspect really seems like the bare minimum for a technology to be worth adopting.
  - otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
    By "superhuman" the LLM cultists mean "the singularity", "brain in a chip", "eternal life via digitization" and the rest of the claptrap. Don't let them off the hook.
- ianm218 8mo ago
  > They do not. Do you have anything to back this up? This seems like a shallow dismissal. Claude Code is mostly used to ship Claude Code and Claude Cowork - which are at multi billion ARR. I use Claude Code to ship technically deep dev tools for myself for example here https://github.com/ianm199/bubble-analysis https://github.com/ianm199/bubble-analysis. I am a decent engineer and I wouldn't have the time or expertise to ship that.

linuxrocks123 8mo ago

I'll try it out when it's something I can run locally. I do not pay for subscriptions for software; I do not pay for services as software substitutes; and, I do not rely on things that run on computers I don't control for anything important. Whether or not LLM coding AIs are useful, they certainly qualifies as "important," because adopting one is disruptive enough that getting rid of it after adopting it would be disruptive as well. I'm not signing on to that if I need to pay a recurring fee for it and/or need to rely on some company deciding to continue maintaining a cloud server running it in perpetuity.

svilen_dobrev 8mo ago

let me ask a stupid/still-ignorant question - about repeatability. If one asks this generator/assistant same request/thing, within same initial contexts, 10 times, would it generate same result ? in different sessions and all that. because.. if not, then it's for once-off things only..

Robin_Message 8mo ago
If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result? And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- lins1909 8mo ago
  A pretty bad comparison. If I gave you the correct answer once, it's unlikely that I'll give you a wrong answer the next time. Also, aren't computers supposed to be more reliable than us? If I'm going to use a tool that behaves just like humans, why not just use my brain instead?

tmtvl 8mo ago

I will give Claude Code a trial run if I can run it locally without an internet connection. AI companies have procured so much training data through illegal means you have to be insane to trust them in even the smallest amount.

wiether 8mo ago
You can run OpenCode in a container restricted to local network only and communicating with local/self-hosted models. Claude Code is linked to Anthropic's hosted models so you can't achieve this.
fullstackchris 8mo ago
this is such a strawman argument. what are they going to take from you? your triple forloop? they literally own the weights for a neural net that scores 77% on SWE. they dont need, nor care, about your code
- alternatex 8mo ago
  They are trained on our code. Perhaps not if you don't have any of it open sourced, but it's so jarring to see someone say they don't care about our code.

epolanski 8mo ago

> It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. Frankly I'm so tired of the usual "I don't find myself more productive", "It writes soup". Especially when some of the best software developers (and engineers) find many utility in those tools, there should be some doubt growing in that crowd. I have come to the conclusion that software developers, those only focusing on the craft of writing code are the naysayers. Software engineers immediately recognize the many automation/exploration/etc boosts, recognize the tools limits and work on improving them. Hell, AI is an insane boost to productivity, even if you don't have it write a single line of code ever. But people that focus on the craft (the kind of crowd that doesn't even process the concept of throwaway code or budgets or money) will keep laying in their "I don't see the benefits because X" forever, nonsensically confusing any tool use with vibe coding. I'm also convinced that since this crowd never had any notion of what engineering is (there is very little of it in our industry sadly, technology and code is the focus and rarely the business, budget and problems to solve) and confused it with architectural, technological or best practices they are genuinely insecure about their jobs because once their very valued craft and skills are diminished they pay the price of never having invested in understanding the business, the domain, processes or soft skills.

drzaiusx11 8mo ago
I've spent 2+ decades producing software across a number of domains and orgs and can fully agree that _disciplined use_ of LLM systems can significantly boost productivity, but the rules and guidance around their use within our industry writ large are still in flux and causing as many problems as they're solving today. As the most senior IC within my org, since the advent of (enforced) LLM adoption my code contribution/output has stalled as my focus has shifted to the reactionary work of sifting through the AI generated chaff following post mortems of projects that should have never have shipped in the first place. On a good day I end up rejecting several PRs that most certainly would have taken down our critical systems in production due to poor vetting and architectural flaws, and on the worst I'm in full on fire fighting mode to "fix" the same issues already taking down production (already too late.) These are not inherent technical problems in LLMs, these are organizational/processes problems induced by AI pushers promising 10x output without the necessary 10x requirements gathering and validation efforts that come with that. "Everyone with GenAI access is now a 10x SDE" is the expectation, when the reality is much more nuanced. The result I see today is massive incoming changesets that no one can properly vet given the new shortened delivery timelines and reduced human resourcing given to projects. We get test suite coverage inflation where "all tests pass" but undermine core businesses requirements and no one is being given the time or resources to properly confirm the business requirements are actually being met. Shit hits the fan, repeat ad nauseum. The focus within our industry needs to shift to education on the proper application and use of these tools, or we'll inevitably crash into the next AI winter; an increasingly likely future that would have been totally avoidable if everyone drinking the Koolaid stopped to observe what is actually happening. As you implied, code is cheap and most code is "throwaway" given even modest time horizons, but all new code comes with hidden costs not readily apparent to all the stakeholders attempting to create a new normal with GenAI. As you correctly point out, the biggest problems within our industry aren't strictly technical ones, they're interpersonal, communication and domain expertise problems, and AI use is simply exacerbating those issues. Maybe all the orgs "doing it wrong" (of which there are MANY) simply fail and the ones with actual engineering discipline "make it," but it'll be a reckoning we should not wish for. I have heard from a number of different industry players and they see the same patterns. Just look at the average linked in post about AI adoption to confirm. Maybe you observe different patterns and the issues aren't as systemic as I fear. I honestly hope so. Your implication that seniors like myself are "insecure about our jobs" is somewhat ironically correct, but not for the reasons you think.

bullshitsite 8mo ago

The Death of the "Stare": Why AI’s "Confident Stupidity" is a Threat to Human Genius OPINION | THE REALITY CHECK In the gleaming offices of Silicon Valley and the boardrooms of the Fortune 500, a new religion has taken hold. Its deity is the Large Language Model, and its disciples—the AI Evangelists—speak in a dialect of "disruption," "optimization," and "seamless integration." But outside the vacuum of the digital world, a dangerous friction is building between AI’s statistical hallucinations and the unyielding laws of physics. The danger of Artificial Intelligence isn't that it will become our overlord; the danger is that it is fundamentally, confidently, and authoritatively stupid. The Paradox of the Wind-Powered Car The divide between AI hype and reality is best illustrated by a recent technical "solution" suggested by a popular AI model: an electric vehicle equipped with wind generators on the front to recharge the battery while driving. To the AI, this was a brilliant synergy. It even claimed the added weight and wind resistance amounted to "zero." To any human who has ever held a wrench or understood the First Law of Thermodynamics, this is a joke—a perpetual motion fallacy that ignores the reality of drag and energy loss. But to the AI, it was just a series of words that sounded "correct" based on patterns. The machine doesn't know what wind is; it only knows how to predict the next syllable. The Erosion of the "Human Spark" The true threat lies in what we are sacrificing to adopt this "shortcut" culture. There is a specific human process—call it The Stare. It is that thirty-minute window where a person looks at a broken machine, a flawed blueprint, or a complex problem and simply observes. In that half-hour, the human brain runs millions of mental simulations. It feels the tension of the metal, the heat of the circuit, and the logic of the physical universe. It is a "Black Box" of consciousness that develops solutions from absolutely nothing—no forums, no books, and no Google. However, the new generation of AI-dependent thinkers views this "Stare" as an inefficiency. By outsourcing our thinking to models that cannot feel the consequences of being wrong, we are witnessing a form of evolutionary regression. We are trading hard-earned competence for a "Yes-Man" in a box. The Gaslighting of the Realist Perhaps most chilling is the social cost. Those who still rely on their intuition and physical experience are increasingly being marginalized. In a world where the screen is king, the person pointing out that "the Emperor has no clothes" is labeled as erratic, uneducated, or naive. When a master craftsman or a practical thinker challenges an AI’s "hallucination," they aren't met with logic; they are met with a robotic refusal to acknowledge reality. The "AI Evangelists" have begun to walk, talk, and act like the models they worship—confidently wrong, devoid of nuance, and completely detached from the ground beneath their feet. The High Cost of Being "Authoritatively Wrong" We are building a world on a foundation of digital sand. If we continue to trust AI to design our structures and manage our logic, we will eventually hit a wall that no "prompt" can fix. The human brain runs on 20 watts and can solve a problem by looking at it. The AI runs on megawatts and can’t understand why a wind-powered car won't run forever. If we lose the ability to tell the difference, we aren't just losing our jobs—we're losing our grip on reality itself.

a456463 8mo ago

It is perfectly valid that this issue is polarizing. on the one hand we have blind cargo culters and on the other hand we have "luddites". Being in one or the other "tribe" is cause for getting insulted or called out. Because the cargo culters want everyone to do what they are doing, just like the RTO crowd. The skeptics want to take a more reasonable pace. One side is we are done this is the future and the other side doesn't see the same results happening to them but the cargo culters think in absolutes and 100% only. It is all or nothing. All these other posts waxing and waning and insulting the skeptics are frankly insulting